In the last few years, businesses large and small have seen a big push towards social media for advertising purposes over traditional media. Although having a social presence is a key factor to having a successful marketing strategy, just posting content regularly may no longer be enough. Advertising on social networks can push social success to new heights by ensuring both current and existing customers are seeing the content that you are already posting. With recent Facebook updates, it is becoming more and more difficult to reach customers organically unless they are very active on your current social pages. Twitter and LinkedIn are also good social avenues for paid social advertising, depending on the audience you are looking to target. In this article, we are going to take an in-depth look at advertising on Facebook, as this has been our most successful avenue for our clients.
STEP 1: Choosing an Objective for Your Campaign
The first step in setting up a new campaign is choosing an objective. Your advertising objective should always match your advertising goal. Think about what your ideal outcome would be for your ad, and then look at each campaign objective to see if it can help you meet your goal. For example, if your goal is to increase your page likes, your objective will be “Promote your Page” or if your goal is to increase engagement, liking, and sharing of your wall post then you would select the “Boost your Posts” objective. The image below gives you a visual representation of the objective options currently offered on Facebook.
STEP 2: CHOOSING A TARGET AUDIENCE
Determining who to target can be tricky. Based on the goals and objectives of your ad campaign, along with the social network you are using, you can help narrow down your targeting options.
TARGETING BY INTERESTS
One of the first ways to target your customers is based on their interests. You can target people who have expressed interest in or like pages related to another page or topic. If you choose this targeting option, there are thousands of interests to target, located in the interests’ section of your ad settings.
TARGETING BY CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
If you want to target based on consumers’ behavior, this is also an option, as our online behavior tells different platforms a lot about our buying intentions. By sifting through different sources, Facebook is able to tell who is in the market for a specific product, giving marketers the ability to target people based on what they have been searching online.
TARGETING BY DEMOGRAPHIC
Demographic targeting is also a common and successful method for reaching your intended audience. Instead of simply targeting by demographic area, you can also add in age groups, gender and zip code targeting to the mix. This is all information initially collected when a person’s Facebook profile is created.
If you take the time to test some different options for targeting, you can determine what is going to give you the best results. Facebook goes as in depth as offering targeting based on financial resources, home ownership status, level of education, ethnic affinities, generation, and much more.
How Can Go Local Help?
Go Local Interactive provides Social Media advertisement services, custom tailored to your individual business. Our team will put together. a suggested advertising budget based on your company’s goals and the results you are looking to gain from running the advertising campaign.We will then take a look at your business’ target demographic to determine how we will structure the ad targeting. At the end of each month, our team provides reporting, which will detail the results of the ad performance and campaign metrics.
Want to learn more about social media advertising and how we can help? Contact us today!