Facebook Advertising for Small Businesses
Anyone reading this will know starting a new business is no easy task. Once you finally have your product or service ready to go, the website is online and now you just need to find some customers. Online marketing can be a huge benefit to your business if you get it right, or a total waste of money if you’re not careful. Luckily for us, Facebook offer a great, easy to use Advert Manager that anyone can get the hang of.
Facebook Advertising
Being able to start small is a great benefit of Facebook advertising. If you’re just starting out you don’t want to go and spend thousands of dollars on marketing without knowing which form of marketing is going to work best for you. Facebook allows you to run advert campaigns for as little as $1 a day but to get good test results throughout the entire day I would recommend at least $20 a day to engage enough people and churn out some decent data.
Campaign 1
Create 2 or more adverts. Change the image, alter the text, or create a different deal. This gives you two different advert campaigns to trial and keeps your content fresh. We don’t want a single advert running for weeks with people seeing the same advert over and over.
Create Ad Sets
Different ad sets depend on the type of ads you are running and what exactly you are trying to get out of your Facebook Advertising.
Biosphere Nutrition have provided a couple of sample adverts for their Astaxanthin campaign.
The first campaign offers a buy 1 get on 1 free deal on their 3 products, Heart Health, Eye Health and Joint Health. If you only have a single product or service that’s no problem, you’ll just have 1 or 2 adverts here if you are able to reword the ad text.
Facebook advertising is great how it offers age targeted adverts. To find out exactly who these three adverts appeal too. Biosphere has created 3 Ad Sets within their campaign, each containing these 3 Adverts above.
Ad Set #1 = Ages (28-35)
Ad Set #2 = Ages (36-45)
Ad Set #3 = Ages (46+)
Once you have created your target audience, guess the age range of people potential interested in your product or service, and then break this down into 2 or 3 age groups containing a similar number of people. Even though the age brackets vary, they all contain roughly 200,000 people due to the number of people on Facebook heavily leaning towards the younger side.
Run the adverts for at least a week, ideally spending about $20 or more a day. This will include the variation in spending and time spent on Facebook that varies through the week and weekend.
Facebook offers great insights into your ad results which you can look into once your campaign has finished. Look how each age group responded to your adverts, discover which ad set worked best.
Campaign 2
Now run your second campaign which may be a different deal or different ad picture to your first campaign but with the same age differentiated ad sets now containing your new ads. In Biosphere’s example they used a different style of advert, alerting to a real life problem and offering a solution with their Heart, Eye and Joint products.
After running this second campaign for a week they now have two different versions of their ads to compare.
Biosphere is able to find out that they are getting very little engagement from the 28-35 ad set group so they are able to cut them out and then focus on people aged 35+
They can discover that those aged 46+ actually responded better to the second ad campaign than the buy one get one free and can now advertise campaign 1 to those age 36-45 and campaign 2 to those aged 46+
Facebook Marketing is all about trial and error. Keep running test campaigns, until you find your best responding target market.
Thanks to Biosphere Nutrition for the Advert samples.