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Posts Tagged ‘Facebook Ads’

Valuable Lessons for How (Not) to Market on Facebook

October 05th, 2012

Ever since its initial public offering in May, Facebook’s life as a public company has been scrutinized, analyzed and commented on by the hour. During the lead up to their public debut, everything seemed rosy for the social media bandleader.

Even General Motors pulling out of their $10 million ad campaign the week before the campaign didn’t do much to slow the company’s initial roll up to $38 a share. Unfortunately, the gaping problem that GM pointed out hasn’t gone away. Facebook’s sidebar ads suffer from a dismal click-through rate. Although the internet average is just .1 percent, Facebook’s click rate settles around a pathetic 0.051 percent.

So is marketing on Facebook worth it? Of course! But not in the manner you might have previously thought.

Social media is all about engaging. The point is to start a dialogue with customers. Just like your blog, the posts on your Facebook wall, Twitter feed, or Google+ page should be insightful, thought-provoking, and most of all, useful.

Whether you’ve had success or failure in the past with social media (or you’re just getting started), remember these integral lessons whenever you’re launching or updating your campaign:

Don’t Be a Broken Record Player

Although tools that allow businesses to aggregate all their social media accounts in one place are useful, recycling a post across different platforms, this isn’t always the wisest approach. If a consumer likes your post on Facebook enough to follow your Twitter account as well, they might soon unfollow you if they’re bombarded with the same messages from multiple outlets.

Of course, some outreach is best shouted from the rooftops. In general, however, treat each platform as its own.

Make Each Post Unique

The broken record player analogy works individually within an individual outlet like Facebook, as well. A week-long sale shouldn’t be touted in the same way each day (3 more days! 2 more days!). Try to think of a witty or relevant post to highlight the sale each day. If you’re a shoe store, post a photograph of yourself in a favorite pair and solicit follower feedback. Or, if you own a spa, reward followers with a Facebook-only giveaway for users that ‘Like’ your post that day.

Don’t Over-Market

Facebook recently launched ‘promoted posts,’ allowing business pages to pay a small fee in order to maximize the number of their existing followers they reach with a status update. Although this tweak can be highly useful when you’re hosting an event or a major sale, it doesn’t change the rules about what you post. If your update is a blatant and boring marketing pitch, it won’t convert the extra views into further sales. Use your website to promote your products directly, and use Facebook to talk about them.

This spring, Facebook even launched a paid post beta program for regular users in New Zealand, allowing posters to make their updates ‘stickier’ on their friends’ news feeds for an extra dollar or two. If these become a regular option around the world, it could change the way our news feeds work, increasing the pressure even more for marketing content to be of a high quality that stands on its own, sales pitch aside.

Stay Engaged

Many businesses make the mistake of devoting themselves to a social media marketing plan and committing to a certain number of posts each day or week. But is it better to post three posts each day that get zero comments, or one post that results in a long stream of back-and-forth between followers?

Ask questions in your posts and invite followers to ask questions in return. Be quick to reply when they post, helping to foster a conversation that will promote you as an expert in your field, building trust that translates into sales. Not to mention, the more comments and ‘Likes’ a post receives, the higher it ranks within Facebook’s news feed algorithm.

Sometimes You Say it Best When You Say Nothing At All

Are you totally unmotivated to post to your Facebook account today? If you simply can’t think of anything good to say, keep your mouth shut. The last thing you want is to lose followers due to boring posts or updates that shamelessly try to sell product. If you’ve got a case of ‘poster’s block,’ just log out and don’t post anything. Something good will come to you later.

With Facebok struggling to further monetize and convince investors that it’s worth more than $20 a share (where it’s been hovering for most of August), there’s no telling what changes may be in store. Whatever alterations Facebook does make to its marketing options for businesses, the rules offered here are universal — with social media, start a conversation, establish yourself as an expert, and trust that the sales will follow.

Blog Post Courtesy of: Senior executive Anita Brady is the President of 123Print.com.   They are a leading resource for high quality customizable items like business cards, letterhead and other materials for small businesses and solo practitioners.

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How to Create Unique and Encouraging Facebook Ads

June 02nd, 2012

Hi All!

The following Guest Blog post is courtesy of Craig Robinson, Editor for Qwaya, a Facebook campaign tool that’s run through a web interface. If you’re a small business owner who currently runs ads on Facebook, or plan to, you do NOT want to miss the incredibly useful tips and strategies he, as a Facebook Advertising Expert, outlines to make your online ads much more effective!

So…let’s jump in to Craig’s article!

With so many different software options out there for you to choose from, you can realistically churn out ads by the hundreds every single day if you wanted to. You’re only limited by your imagination and the speed of your software. However, as most advertisers ultimately learn when dealing with Facebook, quantity never bests quality. One original, inspiring ad from one source can get 10 times the conversions of an entire army of shoddy ads.

People left places like MySpace for Facebook because Facebook was of superior quality. No jumbled mess of advertising for porn and dating sites and other garbage. So, to make the most out of this social media giant, you need to post high-quality ads. Below, we will go over a few great ways in which you can hone your ad-making skills.

A Five-Step Guide for Creative Ad-Making:

1: Emulation is Not Theft

You can think of emulation like trend-watching in this context. The idea isn’t to steal ideas from anyone; and it’s definitely not to outright steal ads. But you need to keep up with trends. As you’re operating a business, it’s difficult to know what groups of people are liking on Facebook these days. You might decide a humorous Rage Comic ad would create a social context buzz, but you may be two years late for that if you’re not keeping up with the trends. So when we speak of emulation here, what we’re really speaking of is keeping an eye on the competition to make sure that you’re not missing the ball.

2: Text and Context are Different Things

You can’t always type your way to social context and high conversions, so remember that leaning on text too heavily isn’t how you create an original ad. You want your text to be very specific to the purpose and to provide a call of action without making bold promises and guarantees that cannot be matched. But you don’t want to only rely on the text for a creative ad. For example, a press release style of ad is good, but it’s even better with an image(s). Trying to type your way to popularity isn’t nearly as efficient as going with a blended approach.

3: Target a Complete Niche

A lot of advertisers make the mistake of not targeting a large enough niche. Did you know that women over 50 years of age click at higher rates than anyone? Yeah; it’s true. You don’t want to only cater to 18-35 or whatever popular demographic you read about. You want to cater to all inside of the niche. Expand on your main keyword (for instance: stereo equipment) and think of every instance in which it can be used, regardless of age and even of location. Expand, expand, expand!

4: Visualizing the Goal

Optical illusions and humorous images and the like are all big draws for people. Remember, the Facebook expert advertises in the realm of social context. The amateur advertises dry business slogans to a narrow niche. Be very visual with your ads and entice attention by causing people to actually focus on what they’re looking at. Your main goal is conversion, but that’s not your only goal. Popular, enticing ads will catch on.

5: Always Test Your Ads

The best part about advertising is that you’re never going to rely on one ad and you’re never going to leave an ad out there that doesn’t perform well. As long as you’re testing, you will know which areas of the ad to tweak and how to proceed with a successful campaign. You always need to test what you’re doing.

It’s not a complicated thing to advertise with Facebook. Just make sure that you’re always adapting and are always looking to be creative.

Thanks, Craig, for those helpful, quick-hit tips for improving your branding and sales using Facebook advertising!

Cheers & Happy Marketing!

Lisa

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5 Key Strategies for Effective Facebook Advertising Campaigns

April 24th, 2012

Hi All!

I came across this extremely helpful article written by Melinda Emerson, The Small Biz Lady. Melinda always provides great content and info so you should follower her on Twitter @SmallBizLady and read her blog posts.

Many clients come to me either confused about Facebook Advertising, or have never even considered running Facebook Ads. And I typically find most of them think Facebook Ads are probably really expensive. But, that’s NOT true!

Not only can you choose the exact audience you want your ad to appear on the pages of, BUT you can also control how long it runs and how much you spend. Also, ads are great for promoting your events! You can run a Facebook Ad campaign leading up to your event and then stop the campaign once it’s over. Cool stuff! Again, you’re in total control of your campaigns and budget.

For more info on all the general stuff about “how” to run ads, visit the Facebook Ads page.

Okay…back to the purpose of this article! I’d like to share 5 tips Melinda offers once you’ve decided to run ads.

“5 Areas to Focus on When Setting Up Facebook Ads” by Melinda Emerson. Please note this is just an excerpt from the entire article she wrote, so click here to read the whole thing!

User Destination: Figure out where you want to send the users that click on your ad. There is a strong benefit to sending people to a Facebook Business Page, as well as sending them to a company website. It all depends on the marketing goal you are hoping to achieve. Costs per click will also vary based on where you direct people to go. A CPC landing page can make or break an ad campaign, but the landing page doesn’t necessarily need to be offsite. Facebook Business Pages allow for creative opportunities for landing pages including a contact form or a Facebook store among other options.

Ad Type: Determining which ad type to choose can directly impact the success of a campaign. Facebook Ads are a common ad type that is structured most similarly to traditional CPC ads. Sponsored stories, event, post, and application ads can also be successful for brands but focus on more specific content. There is a strong social advantage for running ads that highlight a brand’s status update or event because they show “likes” and shares associated with that post. These ad types often see increased click through rates because of the social association.

Targeting: You not only have the opportunity to target your current demographic, but can also connect with an audience that you would like to target as customers. Facebook allows you to target users based on every profile feature that they enter. Likes and interests are a feature that businesses need to take advantage of. If a business sells fitness products they have the opportunity to show their ads to anyone that “likes” fitness, health, working out, yoga, etc. The specific targeting allows for leads from a very qualified user group, which makes the Facebook Ad conversion rates much higher than traditional CPC campaigns.

Reporting: In addition to the basic reporting that Facebook offers, there are other ways to track your user’s activity after they click on your ad. You can setup goals and conversion tracking in Google Analytics that can assist in determining the success of the ad campaign.

Optimization: Continuously managing your ad campaign is vital to its success but knowing how to optimize it is what can really drive results. Knowing which ads are performing and why is what you’ll need to know to carry that success to the other ad campaigns.

I hope her tips take some of the mystery out of Facebook Ad campaigns for you! Regardless of whether you’re a small business owner, coach, consultant, entertainer, book author or speaker, Facebook Ads are a great way to generate traffic to your Fan Page (Business Page), website, events, products and BRAND…and it’s highly targeted and cost-effective for lead generation!

Cheers & Happy Marketing!

Lisa

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