So what happens when you’ve exhausted the reach of your online target market through organic growth and grassroots campaigns?
It might be time to run a Facebook ad.
I know that sounds scary for two reasons:
- You don’t want to spend any money and
- You have no idea how to create one or what it’s all about.
Fear not – you won’t spend that much money (not any more than you decide to) AND it’s actually pretty easy and quite effective. Let’s do this together.
The thing about taking out a traditional ad in a newspaper or magazine is that you’re essentially just rolling the dice. Sure, ad reps can give you estimates of how many people will see it, but they can’t tell you how many people will notice or pay attention to it. Furthermore, the people who see your ad might never be in need of your services. That’s quite a gamble for a pricey print ad.
Facebook ads are a great way to measure actual impact: you can see how many people saw your ad on their sidebar, but most importantly, you only pay for each time someone clicks your ad.
You can also set specific guidelines for who you’d like to see your ad – this is why Facebook ads are the best way to really target your specific or niche market. For example, let’s say you’re the editor of Silicon Bayou News and you want to bump up your readership of entrepreneurs in their late 20’s and early 30’s living in New Orleans who like tech-based news sources.
You might want to target your ad this way:
Gender: Males and Females
Ages: 25-35
Living in: New Orleans
Interests: Mashable, TechCrunch
Only those who fit the bill will see your ad and you only pay a set amount for each one that clicks your page. (Usually around .75/click)
Here’s how you can get started with your own targeted Facebook ad:
While logged into your personal Facebook account (yes, you have to have one in order to create an ad), click here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/
Select your destination: this can be your FB fan page or your website. If you want to link out to your own site, select “External URL” (It’s a bit pricier to link out of FB to your own site).
Select “Facebook Ads” under Type and then enter a title and a body for your ad and upload a photo. Note: write something that makes your target client want to click, and use an attention-grabbing photo.
Target your demographic (follow prompts).
Create your campaign and decide if you’d like to pay per impression or pay per click. The difference is that paying per impressions means you pay x amount per y number of eyes that could possibly see your ad. Paying per click means you only pay for people who actually click on your ad. I suggest the latter.
You can also decide if you’d like your ad to run for a set amount of days or until you hit a set dollar amount. For new ads, I usually like to set a budget of $150 and see how long it takes to hit that number. Really effective ads will hit your budget more quickly. If it takes weeks to do this then you should re-evaluate your message and/or ad photo.
Input credit card or paypal information and then hit “Place Order.”
Congrats on your first Facebook ad!