When it comes to advertising on Facebook, you have many options for the best strategies for your business. These strategic options depend on who your target audience is and how you want to reach them. You also want to ensure that these choices are in line with a robust digital marketing strategy.
The first decision you will have to make when advertising on Facebook is the type of promotions you want to use. You'll need to decide if you need to use boosted posts or create ads in the Facebook Ad Center. While both of these options create what are considered advertisements, they offer very different customization options and have different capabilities for reaching your target audiences.
Below, we go over the different options for boosting posts and Facebook Ad Center ads, and we throw in some tips of the trade while we’re at it.
A boosted post is a regular post on your timeline that you put money behind to reach your chosen audience. These boosted posts are still considered ads, but they don’t have all of the same customizations that are available in the Ads Manager.
A good strategy for boosting a post is to select a post with good engagement that can drive traffic to your website. You also want to make sure to put some thought into the strategy behind the other steps required to complete a boosted post:
Boosting a post allows you to reach a wider audience and optimize for page likes, comments, and shares. However, if you want to focus your Facebook advertising strategy on things like app installs, website conversions, video views, and shop orders, the advanced customization options in the Facebook Ad center are going to suit your needs better.
Facebook makes advertising on its social media platform fairly easy with the Ads Manager. The instructions for creating an ad on Facebook for Business boast that their “advertising solutions are for every level of expertise.” If you have the time to create and run an ad campaign on your own, the Facebook Ad Center has plenty of easy-to-use tools and reporting.
Let’s take a look at the different steps for creating a Facebook Ad with some added tips for success:
The main differences between a boosted post and an ad are the options you have for how the ad is presented (carousel, static, video) and the advanced targeting options available in the Ad Center.
Before you place your order, make sure that your advertisement adheres to Facebook’s advertising policies. These policies cover everything from inappropriate content to the amount of text you can have on a graphic.
One of the policies a lot of people miss is calling out “personal attributes” of the people you are targeting. Many people mistake this to mean that you can’t use the word “you” in an ad, but the truth is that you don’t want to make any assertions about a person who might see your ad - it can be creepy if an ad seems to target you too much on a personal level.
While Facebook Business Manager states that creating ads is easy enough for just about anyone to give it a try, a lot more goes into creating an effective ad for achieving your desired outcomes. You will need time and dedication to plan out a strong strategy that will align with the rest of your digital campaign. Luckily, Facebook provides a ton of resources for you to read through and research so that you can have a better understanding of what you can accomplish with your ads.
If you don’t have the time or willpower to take all of this on yourself, don’t give up on your social advertising strategy just yet! Agencies like Zeekee’s parent company, Bell Media, have the expertise to create a digital marketing campaign that includes a robust social media strategy.
Bell Media helps companies with social media advertising services to reach the right target market with the right message. The social media advertising channels of choice for Bell Media include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat platforms. Contact Bell Media today if you are interested in taking your social media advertising to the next level.