Being a social media marketing company Austin comes with the responsibility of keeping up with trends in the world of online marketing. Our latest research has found 58% of the entire adult population, or 81% of internet users (according to USA today), uses Facebook. It’s a great place for catching up with friends, sharing photos, messaging, or, possibly more importantly, generating buzz for your business. Facebook is the second largest leader in digital spending, falling right behind google, and this makes sense. With all millions of people spending time on Facebook every day, why wouldn’t you want to be promoting your business there?
Promoting your business online is like choosing a party. You want to be where the people are, but you also want to be where the people who will like you are. Therefore, it’s imperative to use ad targeting, a key feature of Facebook pages, and the Facebook ad center. Ad targeting allows you to create a specific audience for your ad based on many demographics, such as location age, gender, languages, interests, and connections, such as what apps they’re using or what pages they like. This can get very specific. With location targeting you can make it as specific as “people traveling in Houston” or “everyone within 25 miles of Dallas.” You can make your audience so specific that you can even say “I don’t want people that like Harry Potter to like my page.” The possibilities really are endless. This means that if you only want 30-35 year olds that live in Austin and like Batman to see your ad, then you got it!
Why is this helpful? Why would you only want 30-35 year old Austinites who like Batman to see your ad? Well, imagine if you were an Austin-based comic store having a sale on vintage Batman comics. These 30-35 year old Batman fans would see your ad, remember the comics from their childhood, and possibly come to your store to pick up a comic book and reminisce. Ad targeting goes both ways. It helps make sure your target audience sees your ad, but it also helps make sure your money isn’t being wasted putting your comic book store ad in front of, let’s say a 60 year old woman that only likes cooking videos. She won’t care about your comic store, and without ad targeting you just spent money to show this ad to someone that will never be a customer. This is where the party metaphor comes back into play. If you love comic books, you want to be at a party with comic book lovers, just like how if you’re a comic book business you want comic book lovers to see your ads.
If you’re planning on promoting yourself very frequently via Facebook ads, which is a great idea, Facebook allows you to save the audience you’ve created and use it again later. There’s no need to worry about typing all the specifics in every time you put out an ad, just do a great job the first time and you’ll be set!
With creating a Facebook ad, it’s important to remember that an ad from a single page won’t be shown to someone more than four times a day. It’s likely that someone won’t even see your ad more than once, so it’s vital to make your ad memorable. Get creative! Use fun images. You want people to remember you. It’s also important to make sure that your audience isn’t too narrow. It’s a good rule of thumb that if you can’t think of at least five people you know that would fit into your chosen targeted audience, then it might be a bit too small.
Facebook ads are a great use of your marketing dollars if you use them right. It’s the classic “work smarter not harder,” in that if you put in the work to target the right people, a smaller budget will work just as well as a larger one to bring people to your business.
Here at Eye See You Now our social media marketing Austin team can help you with Facebook ads from targeting, to content, to creative graphics. Contact us today for a free consultation.