Facebook is one of the most powerful platforms for any marketer to master and if you only ever invest your time and effort into one single social media platform, it should probably be Facebook. The impressive stats surrounding Facebook are by now old news but they are still worth repeating. Facebook is nothing short of the second biggest website on the net – right behind Google. If Facebook were a country, then it would be one of the largest in the world.
Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly active users, at least 72% of Facebook users check in every month and every day about 936 million people will check in. 65% use it daily. Among those users, the average time spent on the site per visit is 21 minutes.
In total there are 1,310,000,000 people who use Facebook regularly, which includes 680,000,000 daily users. Every 20 minutes, there are one million links shared, two million friends requested and three million messages sent.
All of this is really academic though – statistics like this are changing all the time.
All you need to know is that Facebook is big in terms of numbers. And what’s more, is that those users are not just active on Facebook – they are engaging and taking part and they are sitting on the site for long periods of time.
In other words: this is pretty much the perfect storm for marketers looking for somewhere to access a large number of people.
And Facebook isn’t just a big site full of lots of highly engaged users – it’s also perfect in terms of the tools and features that it provides marketers. You have a gigantic number of people you can reach and Facebook gives you all the tools you could possibly need to reach the most useful members of that audience in a highly targeted way – this is powerful stuff!
A big part of this of course is Facebook advertising. Of course this is the paid option for reaching your Facebook audience and that makes it the ‘premium’ choice in many ways.
If you want the very most powerful tools for reaching people on Facebook, you need to pay for PPC advertising.
Don’t let that put you off though – if you get this right then it will entirely pay for itself and you will make all of your investment back. We’re going to look into how you should go about using Facebook marketing and advertising in depth in this e-book and in the process you will gain all the skills you could possibly need to start making the most of this incredible tool and resource.
Facebook advertising is actually incredibly nuanced with a ton of different elements. This is something that very few people will probably understand before they get involved
so read on to learn all about it so that you can jump in with the kind of knowledge most advertisers are lacking! By the end, you’ll know more about Facebook marketing than 90% of those using the platform…
Advertising In Facebook
So how does Facebook advertising work?
The basic principle to understand here is PPC. If you’re at all familiar with internet marketing, then you will have heard the term. If you have mostly handled your advertising offline until now though, then you might not have.
PPC stands for ‘Pay Per Click’. What this means, is that as an advertiser, you will only have to pay when someone actually clicks on one of your adverts. In turn, this means that you will never need to pay for an ad that’s ‘unsuccessful’. If no one clicks on your adverts, then you don’t pay a cent – and you’ll still have gained exposure for your brand from it!
Understanding Bidding
The other great thing about PPC from your point of view as an advertiser is that it actually doesn’t cost you all that much each time someone clicks either. Generally in fact, you will probably only pay a few cent and up to about three dollars for clicks. This means that you have a fair margin for error when it comes to ROI – if you’re trying to make money from a product you’re selling on your site and you make about $30 per purchase, that means you only need a very small percentage of your clicks to actually result in a purchase and you’ll still be able to make profit.
Another great advantage when it comes to PPC marketing like this, is that there’s no set cost for your clicks and the minimum spend is tiny. This means that a huge company like Amazon can afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their Facebook advertising – while smaller businesses and entrepreneurs can also afford to pay for some ads and to experience with them. It’s highly adaptable and this is a gigantic advantage when you have a limited budget or when you’re just starting out.
So if there’s no set budget then, how precisely is it calculated how much you’re going to pay?
Essentially, this works on a bidding system whereby you will set your CPC (cost per click) and this will end up defining how often your ad shows.
Facebook wants to earn as much money as possible – as everyone does – and so the ads that they show will be dictated by who is bidding the most. Each time there’s a ‘slot’ for an ad, all the relevant ones will be compared and the ones that bid highest will be shown most often.
So if you’re willing to bid $2 for each click, chances are that your ad will be seen a lot but it will also cost you a lot. Pay just 5cents for each click and your ad will be shown far more rarely – but at the same time your overheads will be much lower each time someone does click on one.
Another important factor to consider when making this decision is your overall budget. You can set a maximum budget with most forms of PPC – including Facebook advertising – and this allows you to set a cut-off point and a cap on how much you’re going to spend. This way, if someone were to click on your ad 100 times, costing you
$100 that day, your ad would stop showing.
How do you calculate a good amount to set for your PPC and for your budget? We’ll get to all that in a bit! What you basically need to know though is that this is a highly flexible system and that gives you the control you need to test the market and find the perfect price point for your ads.
Targeting Your Audience Strategically
There is another huge benefit of Facebook advertising too – and that’s the ability to target your audience strategically and very carefully.
Basically, Facebook advertising has the huge advantage of giving you access to huge amounts of information about each member. Users on Facebook will usually share details such as their age, their profession, their hobbies and interests, their marital status, their location and much more…
All this in turn gives you the very powerful ability to pick who you want to see your adverts. Would you rather that your ads were seen by teenagers? Or would you rather they were seen by women based locally who were in a relationship?
If you’re wondering why this matters, then of course the answer is that it allows you to target your precise audience for your product or service. So say you have a shop selling wedding dresses; that is when you would probably want to target women in relationships (probably ‘engaged’) and living locally.
Meanwhile, if you were selling computer games from an eCommerce store, you’d want to broaden your ads to target everyone in the country (assuming you deliver that far) and you would want to target mostly males in their teens and twenties who listed ‘gaming’ as one of their hobbies.
This way, you drastically reduce the amount of people clicking on your ads who aren’t likely to buy and you ensure that all your money is being spent on worthwhile and useful advertising.
There are many more options to explore when choose who to target your advertising campaigns at and we’ll look at all those in more detail when we get to the ‘creating your Facebook ad’ section.
Advertising Your Objective
These are just some of the benefits and features available to you when you start advertising with Facebook. There are more and we’ll look at them all in depth later on.
But to demonstrate the potential power of Facebook ads, let’s give one example of how you might use them.
One potential goal would be to get direct conversions. In internet marketing lingo, a ‘conversion’ counts as someone going through with the action you want them to. In this case, we’re going to say that that is clicking on your ‘Buy Now’ link and buying your $30 e-book on fitness.
The reason this is a brilliant strategy, is that you can sell $30 e-books with barely any overheads. Digital products like e-books cost nothing to print or deliver, so your only costs will be hosting and advertising. That means that if you can increase the percentage of people who actually buy your product after clicking on your ad, you can start generating a steady and stable ROI from your advertising.
So you’d want to create an e-book and probably you’d target people who were in their 20s-30s who would be most likely to want such a book and perhaps who listed ‘the gym’
or ‘fitness’ as a hobby (though perhaps not, depending on the precise angle of your book).
Then you’d create an ad that would show either in the sidebar, or on their home feed. In this ad, you would broadcast very clearly what it was you were selling and how much for.
This is where Facebook advertising can be a little different from other forms of advertising in terms of approach.
In the past, you might have learned that you save the price until right at the end – when you’ve already convinced the person to learn all about your product and to buy. This is the ‘AIDA’ approach (awareness, interest, desire, action).
In PPC marketing though, you are trying to avoid clicks just as much as you are trying to encourage them. In other words, you don’t want people clicking on your ads unless there is some chance that they might actually be willing to buy. This is very important, as otherwise you are going to lose your ROI.
So now you will make your advert into a banner that very clearly says:
‘BUY GROUNDBREAKING FITNESS E-BOOK FOR $30’
This technique will work because anyone who wouldn’t want to pay $30 won’t click. This means you can now afford to increase your CPC and have your ad seen more often. That means you increase your chances of being seen by someone who does want to pay $30 for your e-book potentially – and that in turn will increase the percentage of clicks that result in an action.
The objectives of your Facebook advertising then are going to impact heavily on the approach you use and will be intertwined with everything from your CPC to your maximum budget and ad design.
What we’ll also see later is that there are also different types of Facebook ad – and which one you pick is very likely to depend on your objective too.
Now here comes the good bit: Facebook actually lets you ‘set’ your goals right from the start and the options they give you are fairly wide-ranging and comprehensive.
These cover:
- Improving engagements of a post
- Getting more likes for your Facebook page
- Getting more clicks or leads for your website
- Getting more installs for a mobile or Facebook app
- Promoting your event offer
If you’re trying to promote an external page, then it makes sense to select the ‘Website Conversions’ goal rather than ‘Website Clicks’. The reason for that, is that website conversions means that you’re looking at actual sales or sign-ups for your newsletter rather than just getting people to your site.
The only reason you would prefer website clicks would be if you were making money from advertising – but there’s a good chance this wouldn’t be enough money ‘per visitor’ to make direct PPC advertising a viable way to grow your income.
Facebook Advertising vs Google AdWords
If you’re interested in Facebook advertising, then you might also be considering other PPC models for your ads. There are numerous other options here from Bing, to Twitter, to LinkedIn and AdSense.
The biggest competition for Facebook advertising though has got to come from Google AdWords. Google AdWords is a type of PPC advertising from Google that places your ads on the SERPs (which stands for ‘Search Engine Results Pages’).
The idea here is that you choose a keyword you want to target. That means you’ll be targeting a search term that people will use in Google when they’re looking for something specific. If you sell hats for instance, then you might choose a keyword/phrase such as ‘buy hats online’.
Now, your advert is going to appear above all the natural listings when someone searches for that term – with the caveat that it will have a yellow box saying ‘Ad’ next to it. Your ad might also appear on the right hand side next to the organic results.
Otherwise Google AdWords works very similarly to Facebook ads – this is PPC and all the rules are similar from the fact that you bid for your ads, to the fact that you only pay when someone clicks.
But there are some features that you benefit from in Facebook only and some that only Google AdWords can offer you.
For instance, Google AdWords does not offer you the same precise targeting of your audience. In other words, you can’t target only people who have listed themselves as ‘in a relationship’ and you can’t target people who have listed ‘football’ as a hobby (though Google is closing this gap in numerous ways).
At the same time though, Google AdWords has the advantage of showing your ad to people who are actively looking for your services.
In other words: when someone searches for ‘buy hats online’, you know there’s a pretty good chance that they want to buy a hat. This means that they will be less offended by your advert appearing and offering them said hat and it means that they will be more ‘susceptible’ meaning that in that moment, they are more likely to buy. You should know that in advertising it is not only about who you target but also when you target them.
On the other hand though, Facebook advertising allows you to reach out to people who maybe aren’t looking for what you’re selling and this too can be very useful. For
instance, it means that you can increase awareness of your product or brand even among people who otherwise may never have discovered it. This means you can broaden your potential market and that has a lot of advantages too.
Google AdWords also has some other nifty features though too. For instance, it allows you to combine your account with your Google Analytics account and that lets you measure how many ad clicks are actually resulting in buys – you can even work out your ‘CPA’ or ‘Cost Per Action’. Google also lets you do things like ‘remarketing’ and using ‘negative keywords’.
But then Facebook comes right back with more nifty features of its own – such as the ability to combine your advertising with a ‘page’ for your brand.
So which is better? That will entirely depend on your niche, your business, your product and your model. In 90% of cases though, the best approach will be one that applies multiple strategies and promotes synergy between them.
More Big Benefits of Facebook Ads and Your General Objective
To really make the very most from Facebook, it’s important to consider its individual strengths over something like Google.
We’ve already seen how Facebook lets you target users in a more precise manner and of course the way it lets you ad images and video and promote your page is good too.
But the real benefit of Facebook advertising is that it’s advertising on a social network – and with a ton of powerful features that let you leverage this network.
One of the goals you can choose when creating an ad for instance is ‘engagement’. Why would you be interested in increasing engagement? Simple: because if someone likes, shares or comments on your post, that not only means you’re likely winning them over as a fan – it also means that that post will then be seen by everyone in their personal network.
What’s more, the fact that they like your post/page will also be seen by all of their connections. And to those people, this might then seem almost as though they are advocating your brand. This is the ‘social influence’ factor and if you see that your friend has liked a brand, you will become much more likely to like that brand yourself, or to potentially trust them in future when you need their services.
And because liked and shared posts get seen by more people, that means that they can potentially go viral if they are creative enough and well enough designed. Your objective then is to recognize all this potential and to leverage it through smart ad designs.
