The secrets behind a great Facebook ad campaign

wondered why you’re seeing it? Do you scroll straight past an ad or do they sometimes catch your eye?

Whatever you think of Facebook, you can’t deny their advertising platform is very powerful.

What many people don’t know is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money on Facebook Ads to get results.

What’s is important is knowing how to runs ads properly, so you don’t waste your money.

Choose the relevant campaign objective: Facebook advertising is so much more than ‘boosting posts’.

Think about what you want someone to do when they see your ad and choose the appropriate marketing objective in Facebook.

If you just want to create some brand recognition in a new market, you can start with ‘awareness’ ads.

To build engagement, run ‘engagement ads’, consider ‘video views’ ads to… you guessed it… get more people to watch your video. And finally, use ‘conversions’ or ‘catalogue sales’ ads to get people to buy stuff!

Map out your customer journey with different audiences: Let me give you a simple example of three audiences who are at various stages of their customer journey with your business.

Audience A = a brand new audience based on location, age, gender and interests.

A ‘video views’ campaign could be a great way to let them know about who you are and what you do.

Audience B = a custom audience based on people who viewed your video.

A ‘traffic’ campaign could lead them to some great, value-adding content on your website.

Audience C = a web visitors audience (yes, people who have visited your website).

A ‘conversions’ campaign could retarget them with a sales-focused product ad if they viewed that item on your website.

By splitting your audiences and campaigns this way, you won’t waste money trying to sell to people who haven’t heard of you before - a strategy that rarely works.

Test with different images, videos and text: When you’re familiar with the Ads platform, try experimenting. Create a number of ads with various images and videos and different text and see what resonates with your audience.

You can learn a lot about what works from testing creatives. Use the data that Facebook gives you to learn from each campaign.

So don’t make the mistake of just ‘boosting posts’ to your page fans and then being disappointed when you don’t sell anything.

Take time to learn the platform and make your money go further.

Kerry Watkins is leading a Brighton Chamber Bite-sized Learning: Creating a successful Facebook ads campaign on March 21.

For more information about Brighton Chamber networking and training events visit www.businessinbrighton.org.uk