Social media is a driving force in advertising in the modern digital era. Many companies, whether they are multi-billion dollar companies or local Mom and Pop shops, have found success in advertising on Facebook. All it takes is a little bit of marketing know-how and an optimized budget.
My partner and I run our law firm, Denmon & Denmon Trial Lawyers, out of three office locations in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. Using Facebook has been a major asset for our business - with the highly customizable features and options Facebook Ads offers, we are able to reach our exact audience with the most effective message. As trial lawyers, our business is a bit of a niche market, and it can be tricky to reach our potential clients. Facebook’s ad platform allows you to target specific demographics with tailored messages, so you can make sure your marketing strategy is as precise as possible.
However, business owners don’t know how to take advantage of the many features that Facebook ads have to offer. They can often miss the mark by sending out tired ad campaigns that the consumer has already seen time and time before. To reach your audience, follow these five tips to boost your ROI on Facebook!
Find the Right Audience Size
Since the early days of “The Facebook,” the social media giant has grown from being a side-project in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room to the global powerhouse that it is today. Facebook is the second most viewed website on the internet, trailing only Google, with 1.44 billion monthly active users and 936 million active daily users.
Today, everyone from your high school math teacher to your 13 year old cousin has a Facebook page. As a business owner you’ll want to reach the largest number of people possible, you’ll also want to make sure you’re hitting the right demographics. Think about the clients you currently have, and those who might seek out your services. With Facebook’s precise targeting metrics, you can narrow down your audience to people within a geographic radius, who live in a zip code or who buy similar products.
Target Overlapping Interests
Your advertisements could have the ideal messaging to bring new clients through the door, but if you don’t use Facebook’s targeting options to your advantage, you could miss out on quality leads. When you are defining your target audience by their interests, be specific and efficient. If your audience base is too broad, you can end up spending ad dollars on irrelevant users.
Let’s say you are using Facebook ads to encourage audiences to download your PDF handbook on estate planning. You know that a good client demographic is local people in the upper-income bracket who are over the age of 55. You might target users who like more expensive brands like Nordstroms. But to zoom in on your exact audience, you can add additional, seemingly unrelated interests, like the local football team, and publications that senior populations read, such as Reader’s Digest.
Through layered interest targeting, you can choose your exact audience so your ad dollars are used more efficiently, and people get to see content that is relevant and interesting to them.
Engage Users through Content Marketing
We all know how important the hard sales pitch is. That’s what finally convinces users to click the ‘buy’ button, or pick up the phone in the moment. While this may be true, content marketing is what drives your brand image and customer loyalty. Make it a common practice to push out content that is both relevant to your product and useful to the audience.
In the example above, we mentioned making an ad to download a PDF handbook on estate planning. That’s actually something we do! Offer free information from your field of expertise, and engage with the audience in a meaningful and genuine way.
If you own a sweets shop, you might make an ad featuring your top three fall cupcake recipes. Not only does this convince the user to click on the content or Like your page, this also brings your brand to the forefront of their memory. It’s a value proposition. You build credibility for your company (“Rachel’s Desserts sure knows their cupcakes!”) and the next time they’re craving a dessert, they will think of your shop.
Simplify the Visuals and the Text
The one thing that many businesses lack in their ad campaigns is the ability to visually stand out. When you’re selecting the colors and font type for your ad, make sure it looks simple, visually appealing, and aligns with your branding. Don’t overwhelm one image with an entire palette of colors; pick the ones central to your brand and make your text succinct and bold. You will be restricted to 20% of your image as text, so carefully consider where you place your text, how big it is, and how much information really needs to be on the picture.
On Facebook’s ad platform, you will also be restricted to a surprisingly small number of characters on the actual ad copy that accompanies your image. Facebook restricts text length intentionally, because if users see a wall of text on an ad, they’ll just scroll right by. Focus on a snappy ad copy, a call-to-action title, and get the pertinent information across in as few words as possible.
Run A vs. B Tests
A/B tests are the understated champions of the digital marketing world. By producing multiple ads with just one slight difference in each variant, you can easily determine which version is performing the best and use that insight for future ad replications. If you have two stellar pictures from a photoshoot and you want to decide which one to use, run both on a decreased budget, using the exact same targeting and ad copy. Even after just a few days, you may see that one is already outperforming the other!
You can do A/B tests on nearly every aspect of your online ads. Not sure if audiences respond better to one tagline over the other? Keep the photo and targeting identical, and change up the title tag. Do fans of the Tampa Spartans respond to an ad better than Buccaneers fans? Change just that one interest in your demographic targeting, and keep all else the same.
A/B testing is a cost-efficient, data-proven way to determine what variant of an ad works best. Through Facebook’s highly customizable ad platform, it’s easy to build your own A/B test, and to see the data within a few short days.