Times have changed so much and so fast with technology since 2008, it is hard to even comprehend. First, we had the birth of the internet back in the early 90’s, then came email, then shortly after, the .com bubble and the rise of social media.
Along with that huge surge in technology over the last two decades, came the innovation from large tech companies that lead the way in the social media market today. One of those being Facebook.
Interesting Facebook Facts:
- Say what you want to say about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, the FACTS are that Facebook is the world’s leading social media website for users. Around 1.47 billion people log in to use Facebook daily.
- A quarter of the world’s population uses Facebook over the span of a full month. Just based on knowing this, don’t you think if you have a business it would be wise to get involved with Facebook to some degree for marketing purposes?
Do you think maybe creating a business page and creating a following for your company or brand would help just a bit with reaching new customers online?
The power of utilizing Facebook is simple in concept. The site helps your company or brand reach new audiences it may not otherwise be able to reach. It may not guarantee that your revenue to your company skyrockets overnight but then again…. you would never know if you never try.
With that in mind let us touch on another aspect of Facebook that is still rather new to most folks. We’re going to tackle Facebook advertising in this post and give you more insight into what the tool does and how to get started using it.
Why use Facebook for advertising?
Facebook officially launched to the public in February of 2004 and the advertising aspect of Facebook began to show up in April of 2004. Facebook advertising is not what we would consider NEW but how to use Facebook ads effectively, is a rather NEW concept to a lot of us.
Facebook ADS is a tool that anyone can use to market and promote an idea, business or product. It’s similar to Google Ads regarding what Facebook is trying to accomplish. The goal, to become the very best at targeting audiences and OFFER the best marketing tool to do that.
After learning what we did, sitting in on webinars taught by professional marketers, Facebook advertising has some great advantages over its competition in social media.
- The PRICE for what you are getting is way UNDERVALUED still.
- You have an audience of roughly a quarter of the world’s population to choose from to target for marketing purposes.
- With the price of advertising on Facebook being undervalued, the RISK is LOW, and the REWARD is high.
These 3 things meet our criteria for what we look at as a great investment for promoting a business or product.
The only challenge, is learning how to properly use Facebook ADS and get good at targeting audiences. So, you might be asking, “where do you start with using Facebook ADS?”
Getting Started with Facebook ads
First and foremost, if you don’t have a personal account, create one NOW. If you already have a personal Facebook page, then our next recommendation is to create either a fan page or business page for whatever it is you want to promote with an AD.
Importance of creating a fan page or business page:
- When you do this, and you start promoting a product through an AD, it just comes off more professional and NOT as SPAMMY.
- Helps build your BRAND in your company or fan page.
The next step is to go to Facebook.com/ads. From there it will take you to your Facebook ADS manager page where you have control of all sorts of widgets and tools to use with your AD creations.
The power of targeting an Audience
Targeting Audiences is so crucial in creating a good AD. You wouldn’t want to try and promote an AD around shoes to people who are only interested in energy drinks would you? Of course NOT, you would be lucky if you get one person to look at your AD on shoes if you did that.
Instead you want to promote an AD around shoes, to people who are interested in shoes and narrow it down from there.
This is the BREAD and BUTTER to running a successful AD. You must target the right audience first. If you can do this, then you have a fighting chance at getting traffic and getting your AD in front of the right people.
Here is a list of PROS to Targeting the right audience below:
- leads to higher conversion rates and conversions eventually equate to sales.
- Saves you wasted time and money promoting to the wrong audiences.
- Keeps people from hating your BRAND because your annoying them with stuff they aren’t interested in.
- Keeps you from getting your future ADS blocked by Facebook because you don’t know what you are doing.
To better understand targeting audiences let’s look at some of the basic things you can do to target an audience by creating an AD campaign.
Creating an AD campaign
When you create an AD campaign, the first step is to create a targeted audience list from the Facebook ADS manager page. How do you do this? Simply follow the process listed out below:
- From your browser type in facebook.com/ads
- From Facebook Ads manager page CLICK on the upper left hand 3 bars and select (Audience Insights.)
3. Once you are on this page it will ask you if you want to select everyone on Facebook or People Connected to your page as seen in the image below.
4. Select Everyone on Facebook.
5. From the left-hand side of the screen you can change the demographics, gender and age settings so that you can get data that is collected from all users on Facebook as seen in the picture below.
From here you can configure the settings to your liking and create a targeted audience which you would then apply to an AD that you create after you have created your Audience list.
If you are wanting more details on this process I would highly recommend signing up for the Wealthy Affiliate platform for a month or two and become a member. Test it out first and see if it’s something you might like as a training resource for you as you build your business.
Inside the platform they have training videos on Facebook, Pinterest and many other social media techniques you can use to market a website or Blog for your business.
I am a member and have been there for a little over 2 months and was a member back in 2012 – 2013 when I first got started learning about internet marketing.
I can tell you from experience, you won’t be disappointed once you become a member. You will also get access to a community of a few hundred thousand other members that can share their tips and tricks with you as well or answer any questions you may have on Facebook ADS.
I just wanted to give you that little piece of information before we move on here because there is a lot of misinformation being promoted on marketing. What you get in the video training at Wealthy Affiliate is taught by professionals who are getting results.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to the results.
Our results using Facebook ADS.
Just to show you that these ADS do reach people and they do get you traffic to your post, landing page or website, we have posted our results to our first Facebook AD that we ran just last week under our company name Lion’s Den Investments LLC. (See the pic below.)
These results could be a lot better than what we got however, we weren’t going for sales and our goal wasn’t to track advanced metrics for our first attempt with Facebook Ads.
The goal was to drive traffic to our website with a simple AD that ran for 3 days and we did get some traffic and reached our targeted audience. Conversions were abysmal to say the least but that could be because we set up too broad of audience.
NOTE: According to multiple sources that run Facebook ADS, if you are running ADS for a blog or Affiliate type ADS, you will not get very good results. Facebook is NOT very friendly to affiliate link type ADS or bloggers in general.
Another wards if you post an AD and it is a direct Affiliate link that takes the user straight to Amazon for example, Facebook will penalize you for this or ban your AD all together. This is coming from other marketers out there on the internet saying this, so it’s not our opinion, it’s just something to keep in mind.
If you run Facebook ADS, you will get better results if you run an AD for a product that you have created yourself or for a legitimate service like Blue Host web hosting for example. Next, you would put your affiliate link in a post from your website or landing page.
Advertise the post or landing page as an AD on Facebook instead.
Final Thoughts
We believe that Facebook is a good way to reach people however, a lot of your success will depend on what it is that you are marketing and what specific audience you decide to target.
As for our results, we can only say that this is our first AD we have run for our company so far. The results we received were positive but…. for the amount of money we paid to receive clicks on links, it really wasn’t worth the effort.
Allow me to explain why… We had 6-landing page views, 16 engagements with our post and 12 link clicks from an Audience reach of 1,981 people. Total cost was around 2.00 for each click on our link.
So, the take away was that if you’re looking for sales from an AD, you want to make sure you have a larger amount of money geared towards the campaign and make sure the AD is set up for sales instead of web traffic.
A good ballpark figure for a good beginner’s budget on an AD just based on our first experience would probably be around $50.00 to $100.00.
We ran our first AD with 15.00 and scheduled it to run for just 3 days. This was initially a strategy we used for just getting started. Our recommendation to beginners here, is to start with a LOW amount of money to test the waters and scale up as you get better.
For that reason, I believe the results are predicated on the budget and the targeted audience for Facebook ADS. If you want better results and more POTENTIAL to increase sales, throw more money at the campaign and tweak your AD settings towards sales.
We will have just keep trying to improve our skill sets with running ADS for better future results. We will focus more on targeting audiences and creating filters for our Targeted audiences based on specific criteria that we feel would be beneficial for our conversions.
Our conclusion is that if you are looking for RESULTS and not just an ego boost because your AD gets some likes and views, then you must know what to look for. Focus on things such as conversions, relevance with your AD compared to the audience you target etc.
Again, there is a lot to cover here and we could literally keep talking about what and what not to do, don’t take it from just us…. go sign up for the Wealthy Affiliate membership for a month or 2 and find out more in detail how to use Facebook AD manager and set up AD campaigns. It’s affordable and the information you will get is SOLID.