Friday, January 3, 2014

Facebook Advertising

By Joe Burke


Leveraging your following on Facebook is a great way to advertise your products or services. Taking it to the next level, you might consider placing Facebook ads which is a great way to generate addition money and prospects for your business.

Many people start in the paid advertising arena by placing ads on Google, via Adwords. If you have, then you know the power of direct advertising to your target market. It's likely that you received a number of visitors who were searching for your particular keyword or phrase and may have obtained a list of qualified buyers, or even customers as a result.

Before you Put Ads on FaceBook

Understand your Target Market

FaceBook's demographic information is in some aspects better than that of Google Adsense. With FaceBook you can really drill down to exactly who your target audience is: location, age, sex, education, etc. These are known as demographic bins, and there are thousands of them. Take your time researching and use FaceBook Insight to help, as you progress.

If you have a very good idea who your target audience is, you might want to employ automated bid software that's been designed specifically for helping FaceBook advertisers. More research will find the one that will work best for you.

Create your FaceBook Ads

A lot of research has gone into creating effective advertisements. What words work, and what words don't work are all well documented in books like, "Words That Sell". But the truth is, creating a winning ad is as much an art as it is a science.

If your not experienced in the marketing industry, or ad creation niche, it's a great idea to hire a pro. Don't risk losing your marketing dollars to a poorly written ad. A professional image, and ad, will speak a great deal about the professionalism of your company.

Having a number of ads to choose from is good. Even if they all say the same thing, but in different ways. Circulate your ad displays through your ad variations, so they are not constantly exposed to the same ad and grow "blind eyes" from a lack of contrast. Effective advertisements have the ability to shake people out of apathy.

Click through rates (CTR) are relatively low on FaceBook - you have to break through the clutter if you want to be effective.

If your ad isn't juicy enough to eat, no one will want to click on it! So make it sensational.

Once Your Advertisement is LIVE on FaceBook

Monitoring

You should have already planned to spend about 30 minutes a day answering comments and creating new content for your FaceBook page. Part of that time should involve monitoring - and you can learn a lot.

Perhaps you thought you knew your target market intimately, but by looking carefully at the data you may discover there are other demographics visiting your page. This information will help you adjust and perhaps broaden the reach of your ads on FaceBook.

The other vital part of monitoring is to know how many leads you're getting, their quality and conversion rate, or how much product is selling and what your campaign is costing per sale.

Friends of Connections

The average FaceBook account has a little over 130 friends. If your one of those people with 130 followers, that's approximately 17,000 people that you can potentially expose your message to. This is a "shot gun" look, because your ad will cross the eyes of people that may, or may not match your target demographic.

If your running ads on Facebook for the very first time, do not use the CPM option, but rather use cost per click (CPC).




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