Online Advertising
Social networks will have an increasingly important place in web marketing in the coming years and it is essential for SMEs to adopt a strategy regarding social networks. According to eMarketer, 16% of paid advertising will come from social networks in 2017 as more and more companies are investing in advertising on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to increase their visibility. This is explained largely due to the lower “reach” of publications generated by community management.
Investing in advertising is an important choice for any business. Therefore, it is inevitable to deal thoughtfully with any online paid advertising.
With more than a billion users on Facebook, the platform is a great way to give visibility to your business. Such audience volume however should not make you lose sight of your main objective: get an excellent return on investment.
Therefore, it is essential to target a specific audience when creating a Facebook advertising campaign. Unlike Google AdWords, which has launched advertising via the search keywords on the search network, Facebook distributes its advertisements to selected audiences. Specific audiences, custom audience or similar audience can be created on the platform.
Target a specific audience with your Facebook advertising strategy
One of the main attractions of Facebook is to target their ads to specific audiences. Multiple targeting options are available on Facebook: location, age, gender, language, interests, behaviors and connections.
This may seem obvious, but determining these basic criteria on Facebook is essential and must be done according to your target audience. If you have a women’s hair salon and want to advertise to women between 18 and 35, you will need and target women to this age group, whereas a web agency will target SMEs for example.
Targeting an audience this way lets you determine the potential reach of your Facebook advertising campaign. The potential reach is the number of active people on Facebook each month that match the audience you have decided to target.
It is important to pay attention to your potential reach. If you are an SME and you are new to Facebook advertising, we recommend targeting between 10,000 to about 40,000 people. This will allow you to show your ads to specific potential customers and spend your budget much slower (and especially more efficiently). You will be able to test on specific audiences to determine which profile converts best.
To limit the potential reach, interests, behaviors and connections can be selected.
Interest and behaviors categories are interesting targeting methods that enable advertisers to broadcast their advertisements to persons showing a particular interest in their product.
Moreover, it may be easier to encourage people to visit your website and buy your products when the friends of your Facebook fans are already familiar with your brand. Indeed, the platform allows you to target the friends of people who like your page.
All such targeting methods are basic to broadcast your Facebook ads to a particular audience. However, Facebook also offers other interesting features in terms of audiences.
Custom audiences
Custom audiences enable businesses to reach people who know them already. Using the full potential of custom audiences is a strategy that can pay off as only 2% of Internet users convert after a first visit to a website. Target your own potential customers and increase the chances that people come back to your website to make a purchase.
Your current fans
If you have a large number of fans on your Facebook page, we advise you to use your popularity because it is a real asset. Even if users have liked your page, it does not mean that they have made a purchase on your website. With targeting methods listed in the first part of this article, you can reach people who may have shown a real interest in your products.
If 10,000 people have liked your page, you can attempt to target your audience in order to highlight a potential range of 1,000 people. So your Facebook ads will target 1,000 people instead of 10,000, which will allow you to spend your budget more efficiently by having chances to have an excellent return on investment.
Visitors to your website
Since users convert very little during their first visit to a website, visitors should be encouraged to return. This targeting method available on Facebook allows to target people who visited your website in the last 30 days or more.
So people see your Facebook advertising when browsing the platform, which offers an important visibility to these people.
This feature is particularly useful if you have heavy traffic to your website.
Use of email addresses
If you have an ecommerce site, it is likely that you have a list of emails addresses of potential customers and customers who have made a purchase on your site. Using this list (at least 20 persons) offers another way to reach people with knowledge of your products.
Nevertheless, it is advisable to use email addresses if you have a large list because users do not always use the same email address on Facebook and e-commerce site. In the end, only 50% of your addresses would be used to broadcast your Facebook Ads.
Similar audiences
With the creation of custom audiences, it is also possible to create similar audiences to reach new potential customers. These similar audiences are created based on the characteristics of different custom audiences: website visitors, fans of the Facebook page…
Similar audiences may be substantial in size with more than one million people for example. Therefore, it is advisable to segment these similar audiences to ensure that you will reach potential customers. Indeed, these lists are created automatically by Facebook and it’s worth checking these audiences out once more before using them for your ads.
Conclusion
Facebook advertising can seem complex at first glance, but choosing the right audience is a great start. If you have a small database (few email addresses, few Facebook fans…), we advise you to start with your target customers based on demographics and interests.
However, be sure to restrict your potential reach to 40,000 people at most to start so as not to unnecessarily spend your budget.
Finally, if you have significant traffic to your website and a list of email addresses (acquired legally and with the consent of users), please use the potential custom audiences on Facebook.
Do not hesitate to contact us at 514 572 7758 or via our contact form if you would like to talk to an expert who will answer all your questions.
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