Facebook Ad Tips Every Small Business Needs to Know
Are you ready to advertise on Facebook? Here’s what you need to know.
If you’re starting or running a small business, you’re probably trying to wrap your head around how to market your brand. Sure, having a digital presence is great, but just posting updates on Twitter or cool visuals on Instagram isn’t going to cut it. A recent report showed that organic posts only reach 6.4% of a page’s followers. You’ll need to do at least some paid media to stay afloat and grow your business. Google Ads are effective, but not right for every business or product. To really get your business off the ground and out there, you’ll need to learn how to advertise on Facebook.
Before you click away, hear me out! Facebook Ads can seem complicated and daunting if you’ve never tried it before, but we’re here to help with 5 tips to get your ads up and running and leading to sales for your small business.
1. Start Small
You may think that to succeed with Facebook advertising, you’ll need lots of resources or a huge budget. Fact Check: False! Anyone can utilize Facebook Ads to grow their business, whether you can spend $5 a day or $500. As a matter of fact, most companies spend between $200-$800 a month on Facebook ads, which equates to just $6-$25 a day.
Even if you do have the budget to drop thousands of dollars a month on these ads, it’s important to remember to start small and build your way up. Much of Facebook advertising is about testing; imagine yourself as a mad scientist in a lab mixing and matching visuals, text, and audiences to find the perfect formula. Figuring out the right combinations on a small budget will save you money before you start to up your spending on the best ads.
2. Stay Organized
To really get the most out of advertising on Facebook, you’ll need multiple copies of each ad with unique text, headlines, and audiences. When you’re first starting out, it’s imperative that you stay organized and take the time to tweak and improve each ad. This isn’t something you can set and forget; you’ll need to check on the ads constantly to make sure everything is running smoothly.
Pinch stays organized with our clients’ ad campaigns by creating a spreadsheet with everything we need. We map out a calendar each month to figure out which ads we will run, for how long, and with how much of our budget. We then have another sheet with the ad text itself, like this:
We even include Facebook’s suggested character length for headlines, primary text, and link descriptions. Keeping a sheet like this will help when you’re cranking out dozens of great ads!
3. Use Video!
This point is so important we’ve written not one, but TWO blog posts about it already. Video is important for all digital platforms, but for Facebook especially. Creating a short, fun video ad will make people stop and engage; they’ll scroll past boring image after boring image before pausing to see what you have to say. Users are 27x more likely to click on a video advertisement as opposed to a still image.
4. Find the Right Audience to Target
As a small business, you don’t need to reach a million people at a time. Luckily for you, Facebook’s audience features can help you target exactly who you want. For example, let’s say you own a small pet store in your town. You can choose to target by location, demographics, or interests. You could target only people in your town or county, interested in dogs, cats, or other pets. No matter how specific you want to get, Facebook can deliver your ads to the right people.
5. Retarget…but don’t spam!
Even with an engaging video, captivating text, and great targeting, not everyone will remember your business after the first time they see it. But what if you showed ads to them 2 or 3 times? That’s exactly what retargeting does. Retargeting can lead to a 726% increase in site visits over a 4 week period.
While it’s great to reach people more than once, you need to make sure you’re not spamming them by showing them the same ad 5 or 10 times. This will have the opposite effect and will repel them from your business. For many of our clients, we create a schedule where we post 3 ads: creating a custom audience for the first one and then retargeting viewers of that ad for the next two. This allows you to stay in people’s minds while giving them more and more information about the brand.
Do Facebook Ads still seem daunting? Let Pinch handle them for you! We combine our video production skills and creativity with some excellent social media strategy to plan, develop, and execute Facebook video ads for our clients.