Brighton Chamber: Top tips for Facebook advertising

But whilst it’s relatively cheap and easy to boost a post, there are a whole range of advertising campaigns that will each help to achieve a different objective.

A paid strategy is key to spending your money wisely and effectively.

Here are my top 10 tips for successful Facebook Advertising

- Create a system for clearly naming your campaigns, ad sets and adverts so that you can find them easily in Ads Manager - you don’t want to look at a screen full of data where each campaign is called ‘Traffic’

- Install Facebook pixel on your website so you can track conversions and run retargeting ads to your website visitors.

- Save audiences that you intend to use regularly as this will save you time. Create custom and lookalike audiences based on your current customers as well as new audiences based on demographics, interests or behaviours.

- Run A/B tests for a few days at the start of a campaign before committing to large budgets. Learn from the results so you run more cost effective campaigns each time.

- Use video or strong visuals in your ads. The visual element needs to be eye catching and stop your target audience scrolling past.

- Write compelling copy in your post text, headlines and link descriptions. Your copy should engage the reader and encourage them to engage or click through.

- Add captions to videos that contain speech with a SRT file - most people watch Facebook video with the sound off.

- Monitor comments on Facebook and Instagram if your advert is not also published on your page - the post will still generate engagement that you should be aware of.

- Take control of your budget. Monitor campaign performance at regular intervals and consider logging interim key metrics - remember you can pause and edit or stop the advert if it is not performing well.

- Measure and learn at the end of each campaign. A particular audience segment may generate a better cost per click or a certain photo may have achieved a better click through rate… Analyse your data and learn from it to improve your next campaign.

Kerry Watkins is a social media consultant and trainer who founded Social Brighton. She led a Chamber Bite-sized Learning session in September on Facebook advertising. For more information on upcoming Brighton Chamber Bite-sized Learning or to find out more about the Chamber, visit: www.businessinbrighton.org.uk/events