Advertising on Facebook: The Do’s and the Don’ts

Advertising on Facebook can be rewarding

Advertising on Facebook can be extremely rewarding, however there are also some pitfalls that are seen way too often.

The below list I regard as the “biggies” to keep in mind when advertising on Facebook.

Do know your customer

Who are you aiming for? What is their age range? Are they male, female or both? What are their pain points? What are they visually attracted to? Will a discounts get them in the mood or beautiful styling?

All of these questions and more you should be asking. A mind map is very useful for imagining your customer types.

Don\’t go wide

By wide I mean, do not target everyone in the country for all age ranges and interests at once. If your product or service has a wide stretching audience, break them up into segments and modify your text, pitch and images to suit.

Do have a landing page optimised for conversion

I see too many who have had poor results because they have sent them to a page on their website that is unclear or a buzz kill. Sending leads to a contact page is lazy. What is incentivizing them at that point to hand over their information? Sending a customer to a front page of a webstore and having them search for the product that they saw that made them click on the ad is worse still.

If you are spending money on Facebook Advertising you need to ensure that the process from ad to sale or ad to lead is as smooth and as obvious as possible.

NEVER make them hunt or assume that they’ll find it.

Don\’t be afraid to spend more to get quality

The key to getting a quality lead is to be harsh with who you exclude. It is nice getting good numbers through to your website that aren’t quite ready to buy, but in the end that is costing you money.

You can do this in Facebook by using behaviors, demographics and intenders. It will give you a smaller audience, but an audience that is more likely to be in the perfect position to buy.

Being direct with your language and exclusionary in your targeting approach may not get you more clicks, but it will get you a better quality lead.

Do install a pixel

See the ad option to increase conversions? A conversion is a term used to describe an online customer that has gone through the process from clicking on the ad to the completed objective. That objective might be an email contact or a sale.

A Facebook Conversion pixel will ensure you are not flying blind with your ads, or if you are more technologically inclined, will tell you with a click if it\’s working, instead of doing the math between the emails/results.

A pixel can be used to measure many things on your website, as well as collect information. But that is something we will get into another time.

Don\’t dump and run

Facebook gives you a lot of space and freedom to enter in quality text. 99% of the time, Facebook will not render the text on your link, into the ad perfectly.

When advertising on Facebook, do not dump a link and leave it at that. Play with the text areas, use all of them wisely.

Do keep trying, don\’t give up

If at first you don\’t succeed try again. I have had ads not go well for no reason other than it was a sunny day outside and no one was on Facebook. There are times when we are off on the pitch and the targeting, but there is one thing Facebook gives us that is a gold. Near instant feedback.

Use the feedback to your advantage, to learn more about your customers and more about your business. Don\’t be stubborn and arrogant about it. Open the mind and be receptive.