Tag: facebook

It’s never been easier for brands to pay to get advertising messages out on Facebook (or any other online platform). Facebook ad campaigns are simple to set up, relatively inexpensive and increasingly user-friendly.

The good news here is that pretty much anyone can manage a Facebook ad campaign. The bad news is that pretty much every marketing agency will say they can manage your brand’s Facebook campaigns. But just because someone can launch a campaign on Facebook, doesn’t mean they can run it well.

I’ve seen this play out plenty of times. At Mindstream Media Group, we’ve had multiple brand partners come to us with concerns about their Facebook campaigns run by other agencies. One of the common issues we run into is that brands aren’t sure of exactly what to look for to find out if their campaigns are set up correctly.

To help you make sure your Facebook ad campaigns are set up for success, we put together the questions below for you to consider as you audit your account. Ideally, the answer to each question will be a resounding “yes.” If you find yourself answering “no” too often, it may be time to change up your strategy (or the people running it).

Related content – Three Sure-fire Reasons Why Multi-unit Brands Need Facebook Advertising

Facebook ad campaign strategy

Does your agency have a clearly-defined strategy?

Think about the results you want your Facebook campaigns to achieve. Do you want to build awareness, drive consideration, generate leads? Whatever you’re looking to accomplish, make sure your ads align with your business goals and advertising objectives.

To illustrate this point, here are a few advertising objectives matched with Facebook ad types or settings that help accomplish them.

Whatever you have in mind, make sure your agency understands your goals and has a clearly defined strategy to achieve the right results.

Are you using ad scheduling?

With Facebook ad campaigns, you can optimize the timing of your ads based on your audience’s behavior or business operations. Optimizing your schedule will help prevent you from wasting money by serving ads when your target audiences won’t see them or when you’re closed.

Have you optimized for ad frequency?

Finding the right ad frequency (i.e., the number of times a Facebook user sees your ad) is a delicate balancing act. You want users to see your ads enough times to become aware of your brand and interact with the message, but not so much that ad fatigue sets in. This is critical because if engagement goes down, so can your ad relevancy score which means your costs will increase.

Facebook ad campaigns – targeting settings

Are you using location targeting?

This is an especially important targeting setting for multi-location brands and small businesses. If your brand mainly serves consumers near one of your locations, you don’t want to waste money serving ads outside your target markets.

Also, make sure your agency appreciates the difference between “People who live in this location” vs. “People recently in this location.” If you’re trying to only reach homeowners, using the latter setting might be a waste of money.

Are your Facebook ad campaigns segmented by audience type?

Within your account, you can run different Facebook ad campaigns targeted towards different audiences and based on different goals. Make sure your agency is segmenting these campaigns properly so your different audiences only receive ads with messaging geared for them.

For example, here are two audiences you’ll want to segment into different campaigns:

Are you using Custom Audiences from customer lists?

One type of audience we didn’t mention above is existing customers. If you’re looking to use Facebook ad campaigns to drive repeat sales, make sure your agency is uploading your existing customer lists. Creating segmented campaigns and ad sets that target these customers is important because you want to make sure they’re seeing ads geared for them.

These Custom Audience lists will also help you build lookalike audiences, which brings us to our next question…

Are you using Lookalike Audiences?

Lookalike Audiences are an effective way to reach users who are likely interested in your business because they are similar to your existing customers. And, if you’re already using Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences are easy to set up. Simply upload your Custom Audience list and select the Lookalike audience setting in Facebook’s ad center.

An important setting on Lookalike Audiences is the audience size range (see graphic below). For lead generation campaigns, you typically want this setting to be very low; for prospecting campaigns, you may want to open it up a little bit.

Are you using audience suppression?

Audience suppression allows you to exclude specific Facebook users from seeing your ads. When used correctly and ethically, this tactic is an effective way to make sure you’re only serving ads to the most relevant users. Here are just a few ways you should be using audience suppression in your Facebook ad campaigns:

• Suppressing existing customers in new customer acquisition campaigns
• Suppressing prospecting audiences in retargeting campaigns and vice-versa
• Suppressing Facebook users that aren’t likely to take profitable actions on your ads (e.g., your employees or consumers outside your target markets)

Facebook ad creative

Are your campaigns using the right ad formats for your business goals?

Facebook offers a variety of different ad formats you can use. You just need to choose the right formats for your business goals and advertising objectives. Here’s a quick overview of a few of the more popular Facebook ad formats to help you decide if you’re running the right ads:

Also, make sure your ads display properly on all devices, especially if they’re running on Instagram! Ads built for the Facebook News Feed can show very differently on Instagram and may improperly represent your brand or the substance and intent of your original ad creative.

Are you running video ads?

On Facebook and all over the internet, consumers are watching more video every year. Cisco predicts that by 2020, more than 75 percent of mobile data traffic will be from video.

According to Facebook’s research, users are drawn to mobile video on Facebook and Instagram because it connects them to a community, offers relevant content and makes them feel excited and engaged. If your brand is advertising on Facebook, give consumers the content they want by creating video ads featuring your products and services.

Do you regularly rotate out your ad creative?

While it may take multiple instances of seeing your ad for a consumer to take action, seeing the same message too many times can be offputting. To make sure you’re exposing audiences to fresh messaging, find out if your agency is rotating your ad creative on a regular basis. Also, find out how many ads you have in your rotation.

Do your ads have high relevancy scores?

Facebook grades the relevancy of your ads on a 1-10 scale based on how audiences respond to your ads. When audiences take positive actions like watching a video or completing a conversion, your score increases. The higher your score, the less you have to pay to serve ads.

On the flip side of that coin, lower scores could mean higher costs. If your campaigns are running ads with scores under five, you may be losing out on inventory and paying too much to deliver your ads.

Do you have a creative testing strategy?

Finding the best messages to engage your target audience can be demanding. You need to test various images and video, ad copy and calls-to-action to find the right combination of components that inspire people to take action.

Find out what strategy your agency uses to test your creative. If they haven’t come up with a plan, it may be time to find a partner who can.

Measuring performance

Is your agency able to match revenue and actual sales data to your campaigns?

Vanity metrics like clicks and video views can be insightful for brand awareness campaigns. But, if your goal is to generate leads and drive sales, your agency needs to be able to track bottom-of-the-funnel conversions properly.

At the most basic level, this means being able to track post conversion activity and actual sales data. Going a step further, it means being able to track which campaigns, ads and tactics drove the most profitable conversions to optimize your efforts in the future. Make sure to ask your agency if they have a process in place to match back this data.

Have you set up appropriate conversion windows?

Facebook’s Ad Manager is able to attribute actions that users take away from one of your ads (e.g., making a purchase on your website), even if that action didn’t happen right away. This is a valuable way to track your ads’ impact on future and indirect sales.

By default, Facebook attributes these actions to an ad for one day after it’s viewed and 28 days after an ad is clicked. To find out which settings work best for your campaigns and advertising objectives, answer a few questions like:

• Is this consistent with the conversion windows from other channels in your overall marketing strategy?
• Does it make sense to count a view-based conversion for your business goals or campaign objectives?

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So, how did you do? If you found yourself answering “No” to too many of the questions above, call in the pros at Mindstream Media Group. One of our social media advertising specialists would be happy to look under the hood and provide recommendations to amplify your Facebook ad campaigns.

The takeaway: Facebook advertising campaigns offer multi-location brands plenty of opportunities to reach the right local customers. If you’re not currently advertising on Facebook, read this post to find out what you’re missing.

According to the company’s internal data, Facebook has more than 2.3 billion monthly active users. I think we can all agree, that’s a lot of people. But if you’re a multi-location brand marketer who is decidedly underwhelmed by that figure, then this article is for you.

Multi-location businesses like restaurants, retail stores and healthcare brands don’t need massive audiences. Your marketing efforts (and dollars) are best spent on campaigns geared toward hyper-targeted audiences – i.e., consumers who are both interested in your products and near one of your locations.

But that doesn’t mean Facebook advertising campaigns aren’t right for multi-location brands. As globally popular as Facebook is, it’s still very effective at reaching specific audiences and driving conversions at the local level – when it’s done right. To prove this point, here are three reasons why advertising on Facebook is an excellent choice for multi-location brands.

No. 1: Facebook advertising offers sophisticated location targeting

Facebook advertising campaigns make it easy for multi-location brands to target local audiences for hundreds or thousands of different markets. With Facebook’s location targeting, you can hone in on users by country, state, city, ZIP code and more. You can also upload locations to target in bulk, which is especially handy for multi-location brands.

On top of that location targeting, you can also target different types of local consumers based on their behavior (e.g., whether they live in your designated areas or are just visiting). Here are the settings available in Facebook advertising campaigns to target different users based on their location.

No. 2: Facebook advertising drives local leads

It’s not just the targeting options that make Facebook advertising campaigns a valuable tool for multi-location brands. Facebook offers several ad types and objectives designed to reach nearby consumers and drive local leads.

Here’s an example of an ad type you can use to drive local leads for your multi-location brand:

Facebook Offer Ads

Facebook Offer Ads help multi-location brands and local businesses drive both online and offline sales by promoting special offers to target audiences. Consumers can claim these promotions with a click of a button and redeem the offer in a variety of ways:

• Bookmark the offer on Facebook
• Receive an email copy of the offer
• Get notified when they’re near one of your locations or when the offer is about to expire

Here’s an example of this ad type at work for a multi-location brand we work with. Recently, we implemented Facebook offer ads for GoWireless – a Verizon Wireless authorized retailer with more than 700 stores across the United States.

The results were impressive. During the two-month campaign, the campaign led to more than 45,000 offers claimed and reduced cost per in-store sale (CPIS) figures by 65 percent compared to standard Facebook link ads.

Related Case Study – How Mindstream Used Facebook Offer Ads to Boost In-store Sales for GoWireless

No. 3: A decline in organic reach is driving brands to Facebook advertising

In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major update to the platform’s mandate.

“The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook Post. “As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands and media.”

Translation: More posts from friends and families (because who doesn’t want to know more about your uncle’s thoughts on politics, right?) and less content from businesses and publishers.

We wrote about this update to Facebook’s News Feed at the time and the trend continues. This drop in organic reach means brands and publishers need to go beyond organic social posts to reach Facebook users – i.e., paying to promote content (almost makes you wonder if there was an ulterior motive behind Facebook’s decision).

While ad spending on the platform has plateaued, brands are still dishing out plenty of dollars to reach Facebook users. Which means that even if you’re not currently advertising on Facebook, chances are your competitors are.

Facebook advertising revenue in the United States

So, if you don’t have any Facebook advertising campaigns running, you have some catching up to do. If you’re interested in bridging that gap, contact Mindstream Media Group and we can help you put together a Facebook advertising strategy that will drive local leads for your brand.

If you’re already advertising on Facebook, we can also help you improve your existing campaigns. Contact us today to find out more, or check out our next post on how to audit your Facebook ad campaigns.