Facebook Ads for Business: Taking Your Social Strategy to the Next Level

Part 10 of The Social Media Strategy Series

Facebook Ads have changed the game for small businesses. With the right strategy, you can get a huge awareness boost for your product or service. And with Facebook’s finely-tuned targeting capabilities, you can get in front of the right audience – without spending a ton of money.

Of course, just because you’re running an ad doesn’t mean that you abandon the principles of content marketing. It remains an opportunity to build trust. These are new prospective customers, and you want to treat them really well. It’s your first meeting, and might it be your only chance to make a good impression.

Running an ad serves only one purpose – awareness. People can’t take the next step with your business if they’re not aware of it. There are a number of ways to create awareness, but using an ad as a part of your overall content strategy can give you a chance to accelerate the process a little.

Awareness doesn’t guarantee attention, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that someone’s going to care about what you do. That’s where the principles of content marketing come in – providing real value to real people, over and over again, until they come to trust you enough to do business with you.

Listen to the complete episode for how to do this, including some starter strategies if you’re new to Facebook Ads. I cover:

• The two key components to any Facebook Ad for business purposes.
• What’s the difference between boosting posts and running ads?
• Why I strongly recommend against the “Promote Your Page” strategy.
• Targeting the right audience segments with Facebook Ads for business
• Why you should treat Facebook “likes” as an outcome, not the goal.
• Budgeting strategies for when you are just getting started.
• How to make sure the content of your ads are optimized for click-through.
• Considerations for running Facebook Ads concurrently with Instagram Ads.

Listen right here or subscribe in iTunes.

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Show Notes

• In order to run ads on both Facebook and Instagram, you need a Facebook “Business Manager Account,” which you can set up here: https://business.facebook.com.
• There’s a great how-to guide produced by Buffer about how to set up and run Facebook Ads, called “The Complete, Always-Updated Guide to Facebook Advertising,” which should give you everything you need to get up and running.
• In talking about the difference in demographics between Facebook and Instagram, I quoted from this ebook by Curalate called “Winning Strategies for Facebook and Instagram Ads.”
• “If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.” I love this quote from Dan Taylor on The Next Web.