Facebook Marketing Tips: Advertising

Once you have a good profile, and a Facebook group and / or page created for your marketing campaign, it is time to start your Facebook advertising campaign.

What do you want to Advertise on Facebook?

The next step is to figure out what you want to advertise. Facebook gives you a few different options. You can advertise a Facebook Page, Group, Event, or a Listing. You can also advertise an external website.

Depending on your goals, any of these can be a good choice. Initially, when setting up a Facebook profile / group / page it can be very beneficial to try to keep people on Facebook and try to build a community. The reason for this is obvious - once you have them in a group you can build a relationship with them. If you send them off to your website, chances are they will wander away before making an action.

Later, as your Facebook marketing campaign reaches a more mature state, you might want to have multiple ads - some that send people to your site, and others that recruit new people to your group, or your group may be growing organically and you won't need to advertise to grow the group and you can focus entirely on driving people to your website.

Now that you have decided where you want to send your traffic, it is time to figure out who you want to reach.

Who do you Want to Target?

If you are reading this, you are probably already familiar with the concept of contextual advertising where you bid on certain words that are found in a website or a search engine query and then you hope that the person reading that page is wanting the products that you are trying to promote to them. Facebook ads are similar to this, but instead of another party creating the content, the user is.

Even more exciting is the fact that the information is probably accurate and up-to-date!

Also, a Facebook profile contains much more information that just interests. You can also advertise to people in a specific company, marital status, age, sexuality, gender and location ... right down to the city!

This makes it the ideal way to target a specific group of people and it also gives local businesses a great opportunity to reach local customers - whether you are an auto dealer, a coffee shop, or a yoga instructor.

Additionally, because you know so much about your target you can actually craft specific ads to reach those individuals.

Lets take the example of an auto dealer that wants to reach a fairly broad audience and is probably already familiar with tv and radio advertising where you hit a huge mass market, but have to create a generic message that will work with men as well as women.

Market to Extreme Niches!

In Facebook advertising you can advertise the spaciousness and safety of the new Chevy Equinox to married women aged 30-45 in Chicago, but also advertise the sportyness of the Corvette to men aged 45-55, and you can even reach people who say they are interested in "working on cars" and promote the fact that the HHR is a great car for modding.

Now that you have figured out who you want to reach, it is time to create the actual Facebook ad!

Creating the Facebook Advertisement:

This is pretty simple, and unlike most advertising systems, there is a lot of freedom and it is a combination of graphics and text.

Tips for creating a Great Ad:

• Use a graphic that is eye catching an easy to recognize.
• Use a short headline that calls the user to make an action.
• Target that headline to your specific market.
• Use supporting text to describe the action you want the user to make, but don't be too wordy. Keep it simple!

Attaching Social Actions:

Perhaps the most powerful feature on Facebook is a function called social actions. This will be a very important tool for creating your community online.

Ads displaying Social Actions will show a friend of the user who might have already joined your community and this may motivate your target. This means that not-only will your target see that there is a Chevy dealer advertising a car, but that the customer's friend also just joined the dealer's Chicago corvette fan club. Chances are that the user will want to at least check the group out if his friend already has and this means that you will have made an impression on the user, if not actually captured his attention.

Social Action Ads can display anything from the fact that the user added your application, or joined a group, or other actions that you declare that Facebook can recognize.

Pricing the Campaign:

Facebook lets you decide if you want a per-click pricing, or a per-impression based campaign and this can really depend on what your goals are. If you want to build a community, it might be better to use PPC, but if you are just looking to promote a brand or product and build awareness you might want to go with the impressions since you will probably reach a wider crowd, but perhaps less actual clicks.

Average click cost is usually somewhere between 50-80 cents and since only one ad is shown per page, it might be better to be towards the top of the range so you can be sure that your ads will be shown. Again though, each campaign is different in this regard so testing is your friend here!

That's It!

Now that you have setup your campaign, it is time to watch for results and tweak your advertisement, just like you would for any other campaign.