Navigating digital advertising platforms can be confusing and expensive. You might end up spending a lot of money and getting very few results in return. But online advertising also offers a huge opportunity to reach a specific audience with relevant messages and offers. For member organizations, that means discovering more potential members and event attendees. We recommend Facebook as the place to start for affordable online advertising that gets results.
Follow these five steps to ensure you see ROI on your Facebook marketing dollars.
1. You need a strategy.
Launching an ad and hoping you get overwhelmed with responses sounds great, but it’s unlikely to happen without a comprehensive marketing strategy. As with any good campaign, start by establishing the objective. What do you want to happen as a result of your efforts?
When it comes to digital advertising, consider one of these outcomes:
- event attendance or membership
- clicks to website or video views
- conversions on your site
- page post engagement
- likes
- app installs
- brand awareness
- local awareness
- offers claimed
- product sales
- lead generation
Be specific and quantify your objective. How many more clicks do you want? How many new members do you need to sign up?
The next stage of your strategy is to select your ad set. We recommend using Facebook’s Power Editor over its Ads Manger for this step as well as the rest of your campaign. Here you’ll decide whom to target, how much you will spend, the timing of your campaign, where the ads will appear, and how they will be optimized. You can always make adjustments to these settings later on based on campaign performance.
Only after you’ve established your strategy, objective, and ad set should you proceed with creating visuals and messaging for the ads people will see.
2. Use segmented custom audiences
An especially useful feature of Facebook advertising is the ability to target individuals who are already on your contact list in addition to new prospects. To take advantage of this option, you will first need to install the Facebook Pixel on your website and upload your segmented email lists. This allows you to retarget ads to your site visitors as well as the people on your email lists. You can even create a custom audience for every page of your website.
Throughout the entire process you have the ability to customize ad sets based on budget, placement, timing, and optimization. You can also tailor your ad images and messaging based on your audience segments. All this adds up to precisely targeting known users and prospects with highly relevant content based on their actual interests and online behaviors.
3. Use custom conversions.
Facebook’s custom conversions help you target visitors to your website who ended up converting (filling out a form, registering for your event, making an inbound inquiry or purchase, etc). To use custom conversions, it is best to have a landing page directly on your site. Here’s an example:
If a user wants to sign up for your newsletter, they visit www.yoursite.com/newsletter. Once they submit their email address, they are redirected to another landing page saying, “Thanks for signing up.” That might be www.yoursite.com/newsletterthankyou. Because Facebook Pixel is already on your site, Facebook can optimize for this conversion when running your ads. It will target these users who have already interacted with your brand (and who we know are more likely to convert again in the future).
4. Don’t forget to test.
One of the great advantages of digital advertising is that you can make changes instantly based on performance. A good strategy is to A/B test images, video, and copy to dial in a winning combination. You can pause or revise ads that are underperforming or increase your budget on ads doing especially well.
Facebook has a range of features, such as image carousel or Canvas, that you can test to optimize your campaigns. For the best results, test only one item at a time. For example, use the same copy with two different images to see which image performs better. After a week, turn off the ad with less activity.
5. Review your stats.
Facebook advertising is not a “set it and forget it” tactic. It’s important to monitor your campaign statistics from BOTH Ads Manger and Power Editor. Ads Manager allows you to see key insights on performance, demographics, and placement. Power Editor provides more specific info on your click-though rates, or CTR, and the average cost per thousand impressions, or CPM. Once you evaluate campaigns using multiple data sets, you can make informed adjustments to boost performance going forward.
Why Facebook?
Compared to web retargeting, Facebook offers more affordable solutions and better results for associations to reach their audiences and convert users to members and attendees. Contact Rottman Creative today to get started using this platform.
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