How to get Started with Facebook Ads
/Where to start?
How much should you spend on paid ads with Meta?
How long should I run my paid Meta ads?
How do you measure the performance of paid Meta ads?
Where to start?
How much should you spend on paid ads with Meta?
How long should I run my paid Meta ads?
How do you measure the performance of paid Meta ads?
I want to share some insight into who has been ‘sliding into our clients DMs’ over the past few weeks…. shady scammers!
Online scams, as you would all be aware, are becoming the norm of our online world, some quite trivial and others more serious.
Some messages require immediate attention and action as Business Owners and/or Marketing Managers.
Read MoreLeveraging content simply means that you are finding multiple ways to share your message, across different formats and platforms. This will position you as an authority in your industry, ensure that your efforts are maximised, reach new audiences, and make your content more accessible.
In this blog, we also unpack exactly how to leverage one piece of content using this blog as the example.
Read MoreOctober is Mental Health Month. Here’s how we are prioritising mental health in our business so that I and my team can be well:
Firstly, good mental health practices are embedded within our values.
Turn off all notifications (if you can), and set your phone to focus mode.
With so many different communication channels available today, it can be overwhelming to know where to start with your marketing. Not to mention it's very noisy for the customer who is bombarded daily with companies trying to sell them the next best thing.
How do you cut through the clutter? How do you connect with your audience? How do you reduce the endless list of things to do, especially when you are also wearing the hats of financial controller, customer service team, and product development manager?
Let’s unpack the three ways to simplify your marketing.
Read More2022 was a darn exciting year at Cake.
No, I don’t mean the usual you hear from every second infomercial on social: ‘I turned $24 into a $24m business in 12 months’...wouldn’t that be nice. Ha!
Instead, 2022 was the year that we invested behind the scenes…
Read MoreAt the start of any new year, I am asked what can we expect to see in social media? Are there new social media trends we need to be mindful of? What should we be focusing on? What changes are coming? In reality, it's not until now that we realise the year is well and truly underway and it's time to put our learnings into action.
When it comes to Instagram specifically, everyone wants to know…do we have to do a video?
Here are the five latest social media trends in 2023 and how you can leverage your Insta for your business…or not…
Read MoreOctober is Mental Health Month and I know that having your own business and working social media can add stressors to already busy lives. It means you are 'on' 24/7...plus 2020 and a pandemic has made this one heck of a year! Here are my five tips for maintaining good mental health.
Read MoreInstagram has done it again purging itself by deleting over 30 meme accounts, totalling over 33 million followers! It’s a timely reminder that we are only renting space on social media. Here are three ways to protect your business from changes to social media.
Read More
Many businesses utilise the functionalities of Facebook and Instagram very effectively. Some businesses are even built entirely around and through the platform. However, the question should be asked - what would I do if this platform experienced an outage, or if my page was unexpectedly shut down?
Read MoreVideo is an essential component for successful digital marketing strategies. The low cost of equipment and software has made video content highly affordable for businesses and has maximum impact. Social Media Today reports that 90 per cent of consumers say videos help them make a purchasing decision. Here are 6 tips on how to use video for your business.
Read MoreConsumers’ attention is being stretched and people are becoming more decisive about what they pay attention to, with some reports stating people’s average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to less than eight seconds today.
As marketers this means we need to create meaningful authentic content that audiences and consumers can trust and relate to, while also serving a meaningful purpose in their lives. And we only have a couple of seconds to create that connection and impact. Facebook Live, IGTV, Snapchat, YouTube…video is the answer.
Read MoreFor brands it’s important to know that 60 per cent of users say that they have learned about a product or service on the platform.
Read MoreINSTAGRAM is a small but mighty force for local business boasting 800 million monthly active users and stronger conversion rates than any other social media platform. Here are five ways to harness its power for your brand:
Read MoreThe first step when you start to run paid social media ads with Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is to select your objective.
There are six objectives you can choose from:
SALES: with this objective, you are targeting people who are likely to buy your product. You would use this for campaigns that you want to result in conversions, catalogue sales, and messages,
LEADS: using leads as an objective is ideal for gathering data on your audience via instant forms, messages, calls, and sign-ups.
ENGAGEMENT: with engagement as your objective you want to generate video views, page likes, or event responses. This objective is good for messages, video views, and post engagement,
TRAFFIC: the purpose of this objective is to drive people to your website or app, drive link clicks, and have landing page views,
AWARENESS: just as it sounds, this objective is for brand awareness and video views,
APP INSTALLATION: ads with this objective are designed to find new people to install your app and continue using it.
For most service-based brands who haven’t done paid ads before you will want to start with awareness as your objective, so you are investing in paid ads that create brand awareness, reach new audiences, or clock up video views.
With this objective, you can build a rapport with the audience, known as the ‘know, like, and trust’ factor. In doing so, you are warming up an audience who is unfamiliar with your brand (cold audience) so they are more likely to be receptive to becoming long-term, loyal customers.
Through punchy captions and strong creatives, your audience will begin to understand who you are as a brand, what you do/offer, and your position in the market, and trust you as a brand, thereby trusting what you are sharing be it a product, service, or advice.
If your messages resonate with the audience, they will likely engage with your paid ad in some way, such as liking or saving the ad, sharing it with a friend, or clicking through to your website. All of which are positive indications that your paid ad is achieving its objective.
We love awareness ads as an entry point for brands who haven’t run paid ads before. They are typically a low-cost way to gain valuable information about your ads and audience.
With awareness as your paid ads objective, you can test the visuals, captions, and formats (such as video, still images, and carousels), so you can determine if they are effectively generating the desired outcomes.
Once you know they are achieving your objective, and to what extent, you can invest more in your paid ads before switching to a different objective such as sales, which is best suited to a ‘warm’ audience; an audience that is familiar with your brand and has a positive association towards it.
The cost of Meta paid ads can vary depending on several factors. Your objective, audience, industry, competitor advertising, as well as the location, days, and times you want to advertise, all play their part. The format of your ads, your bidding strategy, and how well your organic and paid content work together, are factors that will impact the cost of your paid ads.
For example, leading up to key sales events such as the annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales there is a high level of competition from brands running sales campaigns, subsequently increasing advertising costs.
Having never run ads before, you won’t have historical data to look to for setting your budget. Industry benchmarks are a great starting point, but keep in mind that many of them are specific to the United States of America, which may not be relevant to your brand.
When starting paid ads campaigns, spending as little as $10 a day, can provide you with valuable insights and a better understanding of your audience so that future campaigns will continue to serve you and your customers. Then when the time comes for a larger campaign, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, you have strong data to create a successful paid ads campaign.
For those of you who are new to paid Meta ads, start with one month of paid advertising. Meta needs time to run your ads, serve them more than once to your ideal audience, and allow time for accurate data to be gathered so you can properly assess their performance.
With a starting budget of $10 a day, your first month would cost a minimum of $300. Plus any additional costs for designing your ads, and management fees if you are using an agency, which can start at $1000 a month.
Before you set out to measure your ad performance, you need to keep in mind the objective you set. Too often, brands are disappointed that their paid ad campaign didn’t generate enough sales, meanwhile, their objective was awareness. With the awareness objective in mind, the advertising campaign provided a strong return on investment.
When your paid ads are running, you will need to monitor them regularly, rather than set and forget. Ongoing reviews of active campaigns in the market ensure that you can make adjustments if needed in real time. For example, over a week into your month-long campaign, you notice that the still image ad has less than 25% of the reach compared to the other formats. You may decide to turn off that ad and reinvest the remaining budget into the remaining two formats as the audience is responding to them well.
Learning, optimising, and trialing, over time, will ensure that you create strong-performing ads.
Ads are also a place for engagement, with your audience tagging friends, asking questions, or leaving comments. Monitoring your ads allows you to engage directly with people online, find out more about what they want due to the questions or comments they post, and build brand loyalty and momentum for the paid ad.
YOUR PIXEL
Before you commence paid Meta ads, you should have the Meta Pixel (formerly a Facebook pixel) set up on your website. You place the pixel code in the header and footer of your website template and it will automatically be included on every page of your website. Learn how to set up your pixel here
With this in place, if a potential customer clicks on your ad, you will collect data which you can use later in your paid advertising strategy by retargeting ads to the people who have shown interest in your brand/product.
If you are running a paid Meta advertising campaign with a different objective to awareness, such as sales (conversions), you will need both this pixel set up, as well as a conversion pixel. The conversion pixel should be embedded on the checkout/thank you page when someone purchases on your website.
YOUR ORGANIC CONTENT
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of running ads online, but it's no reason to neglect your organic content. Rather, paid and unpaid, social media should work together to achieve your business objectives from building your brand to driving sales.
If you are looking for an organic social media scheduling tool to free up your time, we recommend SKED
Organic content has two main purposes in relation to paid ads; firstly, you can repurpose your best-performing organic content as paid ads.
If the content has performed well with your followers, without any money behind it, then it’s likely that it will capture the interest and attention of audiences when you invest money to share it with them.
Secondly, because of your paid advertising, audiences are likely to visit your social media pages to have a deeper understanding of your business. As such, it's vital your organic content has been posted over time on an ongoing basis and is consistent with your paid advertising in terms of aesthetics and messaging.
If you are looking for an organic social media scheduling tool to free up your time, we recommend SKED