Facebook Advertising – to boost or not to boost!

A normal week here at Piece of Cake Marketing involves a great deal of content creation for Facebook. This type of content is known as organic. We create this content to gain free exposure for the business and to encourage customer engagement.

Facebook advertising can be scary if you haven’t tried it before. Over the last few years, we have run hundreds of Facebook advertising campaigns for business owners. These campaigns have all had very different goals, but the main areas covered are:

Brand awareness, Increase page likes, Product sales via the website, Email data collection, Event promotion and Inbox messaging.

All social media platforms have an advertising facility however Facebook’s stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of features, insights and audience. We’ve seen companies achieve some fantastic results on some relatively small budgets. We’ve even seen businesses with no website achieve direct sales/business. Now let’s not get carried away, it isn’t always that easy. Over the years we have worked hard to fully understand the platform and have experimented with lots of different campaigns. This has allowed us to figure out what works and what doesn’t ensuring a successful result for the businesses that we work with.

Our top tips for Facebook advertising are:

• Know what you’re dealing with. When I train on Facebook advertising I describe the tools available in 2 levels:
  Beginner – Boost Posts
  Intermediate / Advanced – Facebook Ads Manager
• Think about your strategy and your goal. Why are you running the Facebook advert? What do you hope to achieve as a result of the campaign?
• If you would like to get more engagement on a Facebook post then boosting may be a good option. Facebook boosts are optimised to get likes, comments and shares on that post. If you are looking to drive people to your website then we would suggest a Website click or Website conversion advert within the Ads Manager.
• If you are looking to split test images and different copy to see which performs the best then again we would suggest using either Ads Manager.
• Facebook collects tons of data about everyone. This means that targeting for advertisers is very useful. You can target customers based on their age, sex, location, interests. You can even target people on your email list, those that visit your website and those that have interacted with your Facebook page in the last year. This is useful as these leads may be warmer than an audience who doesn’t know anything about your business.

Has your business plateaued?
Has your business reached a crossroads and you’re not sure which direction to take?
Are you looking for a cohesive marketing strategy that looks at both online and offline marketing?

We can help.

Have you got a creative block? Do you need someone to help with content creation for your social media? Our social media content creation prices start from £99 per platform. Complete social media management services are available on request. Facebook Advertising details are here.

If you are looking to plan your social media more effectively and you would like more ideas. Take a look at our downloads and templates package.

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