The year is 2017 and it’s no secret that Facebook has become one of the most powerful tools for reaching large groups of people.
When we want our friends to know what we thought of last night’s game, where “bae and I” are going to dinner tonight, or our opinion regarding the latest news (or of what Kim Kardashian is wearing), we can share it all instantly on Facebook.
It’s no different when we want to tell the world how great our business content is. Whether your business is big or small, old-timer or a newcomer – Facebook can help you put the word out there; and when you do it right, it can have a big impact.
To help you get it right, we put together what we consider to be the three essential factors of Facebook advertising.
1. The Right Content
First and foremost, you need to make sure that you are advertising the right content. This means understanding your audience, what they’re looking for, and the message you want to send.
Every publisher and brand has a different target audience they want to reach. If you are an entertainment publication, it wouldn’t make sense to pay to promote articles about President Trump’s latest piece of legislation to your media consumers who are interested in what their favorite celebrity is wearing.
Even within a single publication, you may have audiences that are interested in different verticals. For example, a newspaper may have a politics audience, a business audience, and an international news audience. At Keywee, we help advertisers find unique audiences for every article, but even a basic understanding of what your readers are looking for, can help you push more relevant content.
From our work with over 300 of the world’s largest publishers and brands, we realized that the onsite content can also affect the performance of the campaign, depending on the final goals.
For example, even if you gathered all the cutest puppies pictures you could find in one article, your audience might not go through all 47 slides. When you think about your content, you should think about the depth of session you’re hoping to get from your audience and make adjustments to the content accordingly. Having a significant amount of text generally keeps consumers on the page longer and leads to more in-depth sessions.
Content with more text is also important for advertising purposes. Facebook checks every piece of content before it’s uploaded and sent to your audience’s feeds, and may limit the reach if the article doesn’t contain enough text (with the exception of video campaigns). Low reach can be dangerous for paid promotions, as it generally will increase the price of the campaign while decreasing performance. For our slideshow of 47 cute puppies, adding a text description to each photo will help make sure the reach is not limited by Facebook.
2. The Right Optimization Model
What are you trying to achieve from advertising on Facebook? Do you want a greater reach for your content? More subscribers for your weekly newsletter? Higher quality of leads? More people to purchase your product?
Before launching an advertising campaign on Facebook, it is important to understand the real objective of your campaign. This will be essential when you create your advertising strategy.
Your strategy should include A/B testing with sufficient budget and time for experimentation and solidified goals for all relevant metrics (not just for price).
Your goals will be used to assess the campaign’s performance and help make important decisions faster and better. Things may not go as planned right away, so it is important to have a testing period where you can optimize your campaign according to the goals you’ve set. At the end of the day, you will uncover one tactic that works best that you can continue to use for the future.
Here at Keywee, we’ve found that each campaign sees better results with a customized optimization model. In other words, we optimize for the right event, conversion rate, or even the right audience. We’ve found that the real goal for a campaign can often be obscured behind a smoke screen of metrics, past goals and irregular user behavior. As a result we have seen many campaigns that were sub-optimized in their targeting, content usage, and creative decisions. Often, we’re able to increase the efficiency of a campaign just by re-aligning goals and making strategy decisions accordingly.
3. The Right Targeting
Now you have the right content and optimization model. You’re almost ready to launch your campaign! There’s just one more thing to take care of — the targeting.
You’ve heard us say this before, but when launching a campaign, you really need to know your audience. This will not only help you choose the right content, but also conduct better, more efficient targeting. Your targeting preferences can vary from reaching as many people as possible, to a small niche audience.
We’ve seen some publishers and brands that think that unlimited reach will translate to better results. But that only works for a very specific type of campaign with the right content and optimization model. For most campaigns, a targeted audience will yield significantly better results.
Start with understanding your scope. Do you want your content to reach audiences in specific countries, or all around the world? Have you found that people in specific age ranges engage better with your content or does it speak to all ages? Is your content relevant to one gender, or all? You should know who will be most interested in consuming your content, and use that to determine the demographic goals for your campaigns.
For example, if you wish to advertise content about women’s fashion, you may want to focus on a female audience. If your content is all about football, you should probably choose to target the United States. And if you want to post about retirement, you likely want to target older audiences.
It can be hard to knowingly limit your audience, but without clear targeting your content will end up in the wrong people’s feeds and drive bad results. When it comes to audiences, sometimes less truly is more.
We know how complicated advertising on Facebook can become. So, when we launch a new campaign, we follow our Keywee Keys: choose the right content for your audience, optimize for the real goals of your campaign, and target according to your content.
