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Kim SothFounderThe Soth Group |
There is much talk in social-media circles about how to build your audience organically and that, for the most part, it is the best way to build an audience. It is certainly a good way, but it shouldn’t be your only strategy. We suggest that if you are a new company or are launching a product, you can do a great job of building fans with Facebook ads, which offer a great alternative to your marketing strategy. What’s more, Facebook ads are not nearly as complex as Google AdWords—but don’t let the simplicity fool you. For our campaigns we’ve found that Facebook ads, on average, deliver a higher click-through rate than Google AdWords.
For example, we were brought in to help promote a senatorial race. After a month of struggling to gain fans on Facebook, we eventually doubled the candidate’s fans in a week by running ads: We picked up 1,500 fans for a total cost of around $1,000.
So if you think this strategy might be for you, here are five tips that will help you make Facebook ads work for your campaigns.
1. It’s about testing. Always run multiple ads targeting the same “Likes and Interests,” and keep your Likes and Interests the same while testing different ad copy, headlines, or images. What needs to remain the same as your control for a general test is your Likes and Interests keywords. You can test many controls, but the simplest is Likes and Interests. Facebook targets audiences off of two variables: Users and Likes and Interests: If you change these in two different ads, then you don’t have an apples-to-apples test.
2. Likes and Interests matter. Likes and Interests are essentially keywords you are targeting for your campaign based on what shows up for a user. You don’t want to use random Likes and Interests keywords. To make Likes and Interests work for you, it’s important to target based on what is associated with that individual in some way—associations they belong to, things they like, where they work, what they are fans of, or what they’ve written on their walls.
It’s is important not to get carried away and add a hundred Likes and Interests keywords just because it’s cool to see the numbers of possible audience continue to rise. It would seem that big numbers of audience is a good idea, but it’s actually counterintuitive. You want to choose highly targeted Likes and Interests keywords that are tightly associated with your ad copy. Don’t choose a keyword just because of its audience reach. You want to make sure it matches everything you know about the ad copy. Just because someone rides a motorcycle doesn’t mean he is interested in a Harley. One person might buy sports bikes, another might buy BMW motorcycles, while another might be really into Harleys. So it does no good to blast all of them with a message about Harley gear.
3. Demographics can sink you—if ignored. Age, gender, and location are all extremely important. You wouldn’t target ads for car tire chains to someone living in Florida. Though they might travel north and have to drive in the snow, they wouldn’t be your primary audience.
Another example: If you are selling something specific to women, you wouldn’t want men receiving the ads. If you are selling bikinis, then men probably wouldn’t be your primary audience, and neither would women past a certain age. Know your primary audience’s gender and age. Location won’t matter as much if you’re selling something nationally, but if you are selling bikinis and believe Florida would be the best for your campaign, then have one ad set up just for Florida. How could you test that? Create duplicate ads for all 50 states and then eliminate each state that underperforms.
It sounds like a lot of work, but you can easily duplicate an ad and just change the state. This would be better than just trying to target the entire country. But make sure all of your keywords and ad copy are the same when testing how much a certain state clicks through to an ad. If you want to test different keywords, ages, or ad copy, then let your main ads be your control and create variations. But you should make those 50 state ads the same and create variations off those.
