Social media is constantly evolving. And what would work on Pinterest or Twitter may or may not work on Facebook. And we won’t even talk about the continual learning curve and tools that promise to help.

But these three tips will help you improve your Facebook ad campaign and get the best return on your investment of time and money.

Always Be Advertising

Facebook ads have been lauded for their ability to microtarget an audience. Today more then ever, these ads provide exceptional value as Facebook continues to evolve and they’re relying on their ad system to get posts in front of people. It is pay to play.

So if you want to reach your target audience…even if they already like your page….you need to advertise.

Find the Happy Medium

What’s your magic number? Posting six times a day or four times a week? Whether you’re posting blogs, text, images, videos, or Facebook Live, there is a golden ratio for your audience.
You should always be testing the engagement of your fans. Famous people like Mike Rowe could probably post five times a day and get huge engagement. Still he only posts about four times a week. This ensures that he has a hungry audience waiting for it.
So find the right mix of media and the right schedule to keep your audience engaged and sharing.

Find Your Peak Times

Review your Facebook analytics to identify when your peak activity occurs. You should remember that the organic reach only applies to a small percentage. You should also not completely eliminate off peak times as it may bring in new audiences. This is also impacted by your ideal audience and where they’re located.

If your ideal audience works in an office, your peak times will be when they have coffee breaks and lunches.  If they’re stay-at-home moms, it will be during nap time. This goes back to always be testing and expanding your audience.

Facebook makes it really easy to create an ad, but how easy it it to create a profitable one? Guess what? It’s not that difficult if you know what the experts do.

Scale Your Audience Up

Promote your post in a way that gives it a longer life in the feeds of your fans and reaching the friends of your fans. And then there’s your potential customers who aren’t yet your fans Promoting is key to encourage these people to get to know you and your business.

• Facebook Search – “pages liked by people who like xyz”
• Facebook Audience Insights – Built in goldmine
• Similarweb.com – Discover tons of information about your competitors
• Follow.net – A free ad spying tool showing what ad creative your competitors are using and what sites they’re advertising on
• Adbeat and WhatRunsWhere – both are paid spying tools giving more complete data
• Amazon – Research what products and services are doing well in your market. And the reviews are fantastic for finding out what fears, frustrations and passions your target audience has.

Image is Everything

Many people are surfing through Facebook on their smartphones. You want your image to capture their attention so they pause and click on it. You may have the best headline in the world. They won’t click unless something grabs their focus, and that is the image.

It’s a fine line when it comes to choosing an image. You don’t want it to be too polished. If it looks less professional, your ideal client may think it’s a regular posting instead of an ad.

And Facebook has some strict guidelines about images and ad content. It can’t be shocking or upsetting, and it can’t imply something negative.

So test 3 images at a time. And think about the platform. Since Facebook is social, try to find images that people will want to share.

Always Be Testing

Don’t forget to take the time to split test your ads. I’ve gone on about this a bunch; however it’s worth repeating. Split testing is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. You can test copy, headlines and images. After 100 clicks, each ad will drop off. Then you can review the highest CTR winners and create some new tests.

Stick to Your Budget

Set a daily budget for your Facebook ad campaign. If you do nothing else, set your maximum for the day so you don’t get a big surprise at the end of the month. (It can happen. Just saying.)

Bid a few cents over the lowest recommended bid and overtime continue to improve your ads, keywords, target audience and then you’ll see a big improvement in your click through rate (CTR)

Make Your Facebook Advertising More Effective

You’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot of different type of Facebook ads. There are those on the right sidebar. There’s some that are videos. And there’s some that look like regular posts in the main feed.

Some are excellent and some are painfully bad.

So it’s important to understand campaigns well before diving in. Facebook makes it relatively easy to just click and load, but the reality is you could waste a lot of money if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Here’s four tips to help guide you to success.

You need to define the main purpose of your Facebook Ad Campaign

What are you trying to do? Have users become familiar with a brand? Generate likes? Create sales? What you are doing defines how you run your ads. For example, if you want to generate sales, the cost per click advertising is probably your best option, but if you want to create brand recognition, then cost per impression is what you should choose.

Use the ad space well

You’re allowed 25 characters in your title, 135 characters for your body and an image where text can take up no more than 20%. That mean you need to write tight ad copy. Take your time and always be testing.

Monitor your performance regularly

Too many people put up their ads and then never look at them again. The problem is that if your ad isn’t performing well, then you’re wasting your marketing gbudget. A better approach is to utilize Facebook Ads Manager and FAcebook Reports. These two tools can tell you how many individuals have looked at your ads, how many have clicked on your ads, your click through rate, demographics and more. This information is invaluable in helping yoiu make smarter decisions about which ads to continue to run, when to run them and who to show them to.

Read the Help Section

Did you know there’s a Facebook Advertising blog? They’re pretty good at letting you know best practices and answering questions.  It’s not perfect, but overall it’s pretty good. I was trying to remember how to set up an ad account so I could tell you, and the help area is blank.  Hashtag annoying.

Which of these tips resonates the most with you?

Crafting a Solid Facebook Ad Campaign

Your Facebook Ad needs to work hand in hand with your landing page with the ultimate goal of getting that person into your sales funnel.

Cliffhanger ads can work very well. However, you need to be certain that you deliver on the promise when they hit the landing page or else you’ll have a high bounce rate. Plus it’s possible that Facebook won’t approve the ad.

You need to have similar messaging and branding. Avoid clickbait which is when there’s a headline like “Celebrity X is shocked that people found out she’s using this.” And then when you click through, it’s trying to sell you encyclopedias.

The image at the top of your page should match the image in your ad. Facebook may not approve the ad if it doesn’t.

Plus, it has to make sense. Always be sure you deliver on your promise. So that means you need to have a clear goal for your ad. Where are you sending people? What do you want them to do next?

Landing pages are often set up as squeeze pages. A squeeze page is where you squeeze an email address out of someone in exchange for something of value that will solve the problem from your ad.

Ideas for Landing Page Gifts

• Email training
• Ebook
• Video training
• Free samples
• 10 minute phone call
• First two chapters of a book
• Worksheets
• Audio meditation
• Webinar
• Infographics

What do you offer your potential clients to get into your funnel? I usually offer an ebook or special report.

Are Facebook Ads Useful?

Let’s take a step back and ask ourselves why would we want to use Facebook Ads. How useful are they compared to the search engines. Shouldn’t we just use Google Ads since everyone is searching on Google and YouTube?

And the answer is no.  Why? Facebook ads are extremely well targeted and inexpensive. They’re also a great way of testing out new targets. You may find a segment that you didn’t think about all because you were testing with look-alike audiences.

Quick Example

Let’s say you’re targeting people who love Christmas. You can learn what demographic likes your page. You then can move on to research their interests and set up ads targeting those in order to pull in new potential customers into your sales funnel. It’s called a look-alike audience.

Plan Your Goal

Generally you want to build up a Facebook page full of engaged people. Then you can start driving people to your landing page on your website to sign up for your newsletter in exchange for something special. Most often, people are offering a special report or ebook. Other people have offered a ten minute call, a video course, or email training.

Using ads speeds up this process. You can pay to have more people learn about your Facebook page. Then hopefully they will like it. Once you’ve built up to a certain size, you can advertise to encourage them to go to your website.  It’s a great way to fill up your sales funnel.

The best part is that it’s very easy to limit the amount you spend per day as well as the entire campaign. You can spend $20 to test a simple ad for four days, make adjustments, and then try again. Even the smallest of businesses can afford that.