As of Q2 2016, Facebook has 1.71 billion monthly active users and 50 million active small business pages, of which only 2.5 million pay to be ‘active advertisers’, where they are channelling money into their advertising consistently. Standing out from this slightly scary statistic can be tough when you’re a small business and just starting out in the social media marketing world; below are a few tips that can help.
Start by making sure your Facebook Page is optimized
Your Facebook Page
The most important place to start is with your business’ Facebook page. It needs to be fully functioning for when the leads come flooding in. Make sure your call to actions are up to date and as clear as they can be on your page, as adding a CTA button can lift click-through-rate by 2.85 times. Make sure you’re actively managing your page as you want to keep it as active and full of content as possible for your audiences and customers. Facebook takes up 22% of the internet time spent on mobile devices, compared with 11% on Google search and YouTube combined so make sure your Facebook page is something worth looking at.
Target your adverts to people who will be interested in your product/service
Target Audience
The great thing about Facebook advertising, is that you can tailor your adverts to the exact audience you want, whether that be niche or generic. You can target your audience based on a number of variables such as location, age, income level, interests, marital status, and more. Narrow down or widening your targeted audience is crucial in gaining the results you want in terms of impressions and reactions.
Fine tune your advert to increase the results
Your Advertising objectives
Choosing the right ad type is the key to your advertising success. Make sure you have a clear understanding of the result you want your ad to have – do you want people to contact you or buy your products/services? You can then follow on with the type of advert you want to go for: a promoted image, engagement advert or even a poll.
You can be creative with the type of advert you go for. The average advert click through rate on Facebook is 0.9%, so you want your advert to stand out to be a part of that statistic. Keep the text to under 20%; Facebook advertising rules dictate that image-based Facebook ads will not get approved otherwise. And audiences won’t react as well to a long stream of text compared to a quick punchy advert image.
Make the images stand out, this is what catches your audience’s eye, but don’t forget to keep it relevant. Everybody loves the viral cat photos, but not when they’re trying to learn more about your business. Good Quality images are essential, they always relates back to the quality of your business.
Track and measure the results of your adverts
Track everything to help your business evolve
It’s easy to see the results on the surface by the number of likes your posts or images may get, but there is much more to see behind the scenes. Look into your analytics to see how many clicks certain ads get, as some members of your audiences may click without liking your posts. By doing this, you’ll be able to see exactly what works and what isn’t as much of a success and therefore structure your social media strategy for the future.
I know a lot of great things in life are free, but good advertising is not one of those free things. To get the promising and worthy leads you’ll need to put a bit of money behind your advertising. With 75% of brands now paying to promote posts, Facebook is a great place to start because you have so much control over the adverts and your targeted audience. 40% of users currently don’t like any brand pages, so are paid adverts the only way to reach them?
If you want to find out more how digital services can help improve your business please contact us.
