Without a seed of doubt, Facebook has been the top social media platform for several years now. Even though Facebook started as a pure social media networking platform to help people connect with friends and family, it was only a matter of time before it emerged as an effective medium for promoting brands and marketing businesses.

It is a supremely powerful tool for marketing your business and you should make plans for it in your marketing budget. Facebook has so much data on consumers likes and dislikes that you are able to highly target your audience and get the most out of your marketing budget. Facebook has a lot of different ways you can reach your ideal consumer. The audience building tool is second to none. There is no other marketing option that can deliver a more highly targeted and engaged audience. We are going to review some of the best ways to maximize your ROI and set up some great ads.

Business Profile Update

The first step is making sure your business page is up to date. Make sure that you have filled out all the information fields to tell about your business. This is the time to make sure all your links work and that the customizable buttons go where they are supposed to.  Posting content regularly is important because when your potential clients land on your page, they should be able to scroll your wall and get a sense of your brands identity. If you are selling a product, you do not want to blast it over and over on your wall, post some informative and funny posts to add value to your clients before you ask them to make a purchase. Take the time to make sure that your tabs are in order and that you have the relevant ones selected. If you have products, you will want to setup your Facebook store. This is a fast way for consumers to shop your store without leaving the Facebook platform. They can even check out right there and pay. This is also a great way to feature your products in carousel ads, which we will get into

Facebook Pixel

Before you begin running ads, it is important to set up your Facebook Pixel. You can find this by going to your ad’s manager. You will get a script that you will set up in your website’s theme code that will track visitors and actions taken on your website. This Pixel will give Facebook and you the information needed to optimize your ads. If you are selling products or services on your site, you must have this to set up the proper funnel. For instance, in the beginning stages, your conversion action might just be clicks to website. Later, you will advance to adds to cart and completed check out. Once you have enough data at each level, Facebook can target consumers or that are most like the consumers that took this action on your site. This will cause your cost to dramatically lower and enable you to scale a successful ad.

Promoting or Boosting Posts

It’s not enough to just post to your audience on Facebook anymore. With an ever-changing algorithm, it is nearly impossible to get as many eyes on an organic post as we used to. To maximize these results, we can promote or boost a Facebook post. When you boost a post, you have the option of promoting just to people who like your page all the way up to creating a custom audience based on their likes and preferences. You can set your overall budget and select the duration of time you want the ad to run for. Once Facebook has enough data, they will give you powerful insights such as who is responding to your ad, so you can adjust the audience to lower your cost per action.

Facebook Ads

Classic Facebook Ads can show on the side bar on the desktop version, scrolling right in the normal feed, in stories, or even on Instagram. You can select your ad placement and adjust your images and ad copy depending on where the ad is shown. There are a variety of different approaches to launching your first Facebook ad campaign. Many people opt for a scroll ad, or carousel ad. This is a great way to tell your brand story in a visual and fast way. The client can then click on the picture that sparks their interest, taking them right to the landing page to hopefully complete your goal. Another great ad type is an explainer ad or short video explaining your service or showcasing your product. Video response is typically higher because when scrolling your feed most people’s settings are automatically set to begin viewing the video. Make sure the first 2-3 seconds of your video are impressive, so you can hook them into watching the rest or clicking through to your website for more information.

Facebook Retargeting

Once you have been using Facebook Ads to drive traffic to your website, you must set up a dynamic retargeting campaign. These campaigns perform very well and for a low cost. This is the perfect way to remind people of what they looked at and bring them back to your website to complete the action. For example, if you are selling products on your website, you can set this ad up as a carousel ad to show the products they looked at or added to their cart. Each product picture will have a shop now button that will take them back to the product page for a second look, and hopefully to complete purchase. You get a much higher ROI on this type of ad because it is showing to an already engaged audience.

Sponsored Stories

When Instagram and Facebook rolled out their story feature, it blew up fast. Stories are quickly becoming the go to place for you to check out what your friends and the pages you like are up to. This is a great place to showcase your business. You can use sponsored stories to get more likes for your business page. It is much easier to reach people in a story when they can see that several of their friends like your page. This makes it easier for them to take an action. If you are selling a product, you can use this to show how many of their friends claimed this offer, which should increase your click through rate.

Conclusion

Facebook needs to be an important part of your marketing plan. Once you have begun running Facebook Ads, you will see how easy it is to optimize them to lower your ad spend. This is the easiest way to begin a paid ad campaign and quickly and efficiently reach the audience you need to. It is amazing all the information that Facebook has regarding user preferences. You can create custom audience based on your current email list, or let Facebook pick you audience based on preferences. The easiest way to dip your toe in the water is by boosting your posts. You can start this for as low as $5, so what are you waiting for?