How to Drive Brand Engagement through Facebook Ads
Facebook is becoming too big to ignore. The social media giant trumps all other social channels with more than 1.65 billion active users each month. Over 66 percent of these users log into Facebook on a daily basis. Each user spends an average of 21 minutes on Facebook each day.
What does this mean for you and your marketing team? Facebook is the new marketplace for growing companies— It is a prominent outlet for business branding, a thriving field of potential customers, and a strong driver of customer loyalty.
You may be here because you’ve had trouble making an impression and reaching your customers in the past. It is no wonder why. This is a crowded landscape for advertisers. According to Facebook, about 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared on the platform each day. Not only this, but the majority of marketers see Facebook as a crucial asset to their business and bottom line. With millions of business pages existing on the platform, odds are high that your competition is already leveraging social media for business engagement. It seems that in today’s digital age, you can’t afford to give up or sit out. Instead, you must stand out.
Competition isn’t the only challenge for businesses on Facebook today. Recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm have made it so that commercial users will have a harder time of reaching their audiences organically. In January 2015, for example, Facebook lowered the organic reach capability for business brand pages in efforts to limit the amount of promotional content appearing on users’ Newsfeeds. With this change, Facebook encouraged business owners to leverage paid post promotions.
Facebook advertising offers several ways for businesses to achieve specific objectives, such as driving brand awareness/credibility, in-store sales, or mobile app downloads. If you are new to Facebook ads, the platform’s “Boost Post” option is a great place to start your social marketing efforts.
“Boosting” is a fast and simple solution to increase the number of viewers who see your Facebook post. And from a budget standpoint, the boosting option is one of the cheapest ways to get the most user engagement out of your posts. Rather than only reaching users in your current network, boosted posts allow you to reach new followers and potential customers. You can do this by carefully curating an optimal target audience and boosting the right posts at the right times. Here’s how:
Ad Targeting:
Of the billion people scrolling through their Newsfeeds each day, how do you reach the users that are most likely to engage with your brand? Facebook’s extensive ad targeting feature allows you to do just this. In just a few clicks, you can choose the demographics that your boosted post will reach: age, gender, location, education, and interests are just some of the many targeting options. You can set your audience as broad as all females in the United States, aged 16-30, who are using a mobile device, or as granular as all married females in New England who are interested in marathoning and have graduated with a college degree in Nutrition.
If you are a B2B company and want to target decision-makers at specific organizations, you can narrow your audience down by a user’s job title, workplace, and name of employer. You can even target certain ‘Buyer Profiles’ such as “gadget enthusiasts” or Facebook users who have recently purchased software for their business. You can also exclude customers of particular demographics.
Facebook also has an ad targeting feature called “Lookalike Audiences” that allows you to reach new users who behave similarly or have the same interests as your current customers and followers.
Facebook ad targeting best practices: Refine, refine, refine. Narrow audiences tend to be the most successful, so it is important to be very specific about who you want to reach. Use Facebook’s Interest categories to target individuals who you feel will be most interested in your brand, and therefore more likely to engage with your posts. Use the Work Demographic category to target specific companies or company sizes that would qualify a potential lead for your business.
Type of Content to Boost:
You may be asking, “Which content will drive the most results?” or “What type of content do users want to read?” In my last blog post on Business Blogging Trends, I discussed the importance of high-quality content. This holds true for Facebook ads best practices, as well. Good content matters. Users want solutions or to read something novel. They want to be entertained or engaged.
From experience, we have seen that personalized posts such as testimonials or first-hand customer stories have proven to be successful on Facebook— Especially when photos, videos, or other media are incorporated. We recently boosted a testimonial for a client and created a specific audience tailored to their target market. Over its lifespan, that post reached over 144k Facebook users, achieved over 1,800 likes and 300 shares. During that same timeframe, referral traffic to their website doubled.
With the right type of content, you can send qualified visitors to your site, get people talking about your brand, and become a trusted thought-leader in your industry. And by tying those boosted posts directly or indirectly to downloadable assets, you can generate significant leads for your business.
When to Boost:
There is such thing as strategic posting and boosting on Facebook, and a lot of that strategy lies in timing. Studies have shown that the highest Facebook traffic occurs mid-week, between 1pm and 4pm. The absolute peak of this traffic typically occurs on Wednesdays at 3pm. These are the times that have shown the best click-through and share rates, providing you with an optimal window to reach more consumers and drive more traffic to your website. If you plan on posting later in the week, you may consider boosting on Thursdays and Fridays, when Facebook engagement rates are 18 percent higher.
Facebook’s “Boost Your Posts” advertising option is a tool for businesses looking to boost engagement and credibility and attract new customers. And if you still aren’t convinced, consider this: 41 percent of B2B companies and 62 percent of B2C companies that use Facebook have acquired customers because of it.
If you’d like to learn more about how Synapse SEM can help you improve your social media strategy, please complete our contact form or call us at 781-591-0752.
