If I told you that, as a small business advertising on Facebook, you'd be able to run a campaign with a 4.5% Click-Through-Rate at just $0.15 Cost-Per-Click, would you believe me? Probably not. As a small business Facebook marketer, even I would give you a twisted response if you told me that you could drive targeted traffic to my website for only $0.15 Per Click. What if I told you that the industry average for the specific ad in question is only 0.43%, and we ran within the industry at 4.5%? The truth of the matter is that you can successfully achieve these numbers with Facebook Advertising, driving high-converting traffic and stretching your small business budget for maximum ROI.
Define Your Audience
As I always say, you absolutely must understand your audience before launching any ad or marketing campaign. And I don't mean simply where they live, how old they are and whether your targeting men or women, although you will need to know all of that. What I mean by know your audience is truly appreciate their interests, what drives them, what pulls them in certain directions, and ultimately what problems they have that you, or your client, can solve.
Case Study: We are currently running an Ad campaign for a local med spa who is offering an innovative new weight loss procedure. Of course, being a local small business, this client has a limited ad budget and it's our job as Social Media Marketers to stretch that budget while giving the client the greatest ROI. We understand that the audience for these ads will be incredibly specific to those wanting to lose their love handles, and so we design an add appropriately. What other things might this demographic be interested in? Check out our targeting solutions below:
Define your audience by the following for Facebook Ads:
- Location - be very specific, including exact cities and the radius around those cities.
- Age and Sex - once again, be very specific. It is my suggestion to run one ad specifically for males and one specifically for females, this way you can target the text and image separately for higher CTR.
- Relationship Status, Education - these will greatly depend on the product your selling and the audience you wish to reach.
Broad Categories, Interests and Partner Categories
Here is where the real fun begins. After you know who your target audience is, you'll want to target them by determining what their interested in. As shown above, a Facebook campaign selling a med spa weight loss procedure would most likely appeal to women who just had a baby and are looking to lose baby fat, as well as individuals who are interested in day spa, liposuction, chemical peel, weight loss, dermabrasion, and the like.
A few months back Facebook teamed up with Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon to provide Facebook Advertisers with a multitude of options for targeting ads. While these new options are incredibly interesting and do allow you to target by such things as type of car, how likely an individual is to buy a car or purchase a house, and many other intrusive options, I have personally not found it as useful as it appears to be.
Facebook Precise Interests, however, has been proven to be incredibly effective at increasing ROI by allowing hyper-targeting of specific demographics.
Choose the Best Image
The perfect Facebook ad image will lower CPC and increase CTR simply because it gets noticed. Now, there are hundreds of blogs out there advising you on how to select the perfect photo, but in reality none of that matters if you haven't successfully completed our first step. You need to choose an image not based on what you think looks good, but what your target audience is going to think looks good. It needs to be completely relevant to both the topic within the ad as well as to your brand message and audience. It has to be cohesive with everything, and yet completely stand out.
Case Study: For our med spa client, we simply took two photos and ran them for the two ads under one campaign. One male photo and one female photo. The photos are clean, perfectly sized to fit within Facebook ad parameters, and tell a story without words. They are intuitive to exactly what the target audience wants, and so they pull that target audience in.
The Perfect Words
In my opinion, forming the perfect words is the toughest part of creating the perfect Facebook ad, and I'm a writer. The content within the ad needs to be short and sweet, and yet convey everything the audience needs to know while leaving them wanting to know more. In many cases, we will go so far as to literally ask the audience to "Like" this page for more information. It works.
Case Study: In this ad you'll see few words, straight to the point, and a Call to Action. That's all you need. If you're targeting the right audience with the right photo, the words will be seen secondary.
So, let's recap - the perfect Facebook post involves these three things:
- Define Your Audience
- Select The Best Image
- Craft Your Words Wisely
That's it! If you can do those three things exceptionally, you will have low Cost-Per-click and high Click-Through-Rates. The case study shown in this article runs at $0.15 Per Click and has a CTR of 4.5%. Good luck!