How to Perform a SWOT Analysis for SEO
This article was originally published in Search Engine Journal on February 18, 2021. Marketers considering an SEO initiative have a seemingly [...]
What Is Social Media Advertising?
Social media advertising is ads served to targeted accounts through social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and to whom the ads are served is dependent on the specified target market of the brand. Phew, that was a mouth full. But really, why is social media advertising a go to for businesses?
For starters, there is no limit on how big and how far your brand’s ads can reach. What’s more, with social media ads, your business does not need to worry about choosing the best keywords and waiting for potential customers to search and come across your business. Rather, with ads running through Facebook and Instagram, your business can reach more than 50,000 accounts within your target market in one day. Placing your business, your brand in front of thousands who may not have even known your business exists.
Now before you go and jump on to Facebook Business Manager to start running ads, we strongly suggest you finish reading through this piece, as we will be going into details as to what types of ads there are available, and what they are used for!
Facebook & Instagram, How Does It Work?
To start running any ads on either platform through the Facebook Business Manager, your business will need to have a public Facebook page, and if you wish to promote on Instagram, you will also need a public Instagram account. Once your business has established a public Facebook page and a public Instagram account, you can then go ahead and link both pages. Once your pages are set up, create a Facebook Business Manager and add the pages you wish to promote through. From the Facebook Business platform, you can then proceed to create ad campaigns for both platforms, or depending on your research you may decide to run ads only on one of the platforms (either Facebook or Instagram). What’s more, with Facebook and Instagram, the stronger the budget (the more money you put towards the ad campaigns) the more the algorithm will love you for it and push to show your posts.
Both platforms have three main parts to setting up ad campaigns; you start with setting up the ad, determining the target market (can be done through personas), setting up the market you wish to target on the campaign, and finally setting up retargeting.
You’re just my type
Facebook and Instagram offer a variety of different ad types. There are Awareness Ads, Consideration Ads, and Conversions Ads.
Awareness Ads
With Facebook hosting over 1.5 billion users on one hand, and Instagram hosting over 1 billion active users on the other hand, you have over 2 billion active users out there, scrolling through their phones on the daily, many of whom are without a clue in the world that your brand, your business, exists. This is where Awareness Ads are highly beneficial. These simple to set and launch ad campaigns allow for your brand to be placed in front of thousands of users, raising “awareness” for your brand, its existence, what it provides, and where to find and purchase.
With Awareness Ads, there are three types to keep in mind. The first one is Brand Awareness ads. These are ads with visual creatives and a message about your brand. The goal is to encourage accounts to become more aware of your business and its online presence.
Secondly, there are the Reach Awareness Ads, where the goal is to show the ad to the maximum number of people out there. This is to encourage page growth and engagement, keeping your account lively and active on the algorithm.
Thirdly, there are the local awareness ads, where the business aims to raise awareness of the brand within its local area. Some examples applicable to all three types of Awareness ads can include 15-30 second videos, asking a question and even infographics. As a business owner or any page owner looking to establish their brand on social platforms, you should look into investing in professional photos and videos that you can use for these types of ads. This is recommended since it is the visual aspect that will attract a user’s attention and encourage them to follow your page.
A trick we will do is show a friend or family member, or even someone on the team the graphic we wish to share, (so long as they fall into our ideal market of course), we then wait for about 1-2 hrs and go back to ask them if they can describe what we showed them from memory. If they can, YAY, success. If not, well, back to the drawing board it is.
Consideration Ads
These types of ads are a great way to get into people’s heads and start them thinking of your business and what it can do for them. Typically, these ads come after the awareness stage. By this stage, the viewers have been made aware of the brand, its mission, the services or products it provides as well as the added value it brings, and are now considering whether or not they would like to be associated with this brand, in other words, if they want to spend money on your brand or even if they want to just engage with it online. This is why the consideration ads focus on redirecting viewers to more specific locations such as the website, a purchase landing page, lead magnets, the social page itself and in some campaigns, lobby for page likes and engagement.
To help these ads prosper, your business should focus on producing high-quality content of high value on the website and across all platforms. These pieces should be set as focal points for visitors to see.
Conversion Ads
By now, the prospective viewer has become aware of your brand, and has been taking into consideration the content popping up all around them. Now, they are starting to consider their options.
What to choose… what to choose.. decisions… decisions…
These ads are meant to give the interested viewers a nudge towards making the “right decision”, which for you is purchasing from your business. These ads can be ads redirecting viewers to a specific page directly or in some cases straight to the checkout page.
With conversion ads, there are two main types to consider. The first conversion ad is aimed at driving website traffic up.The second is the sales conversion ads, aimed at increasing sales for your business.
For these ads to work, they target the viewers at the bottom of the sales funnel, with the ultimate goal of making the business, your business, money. It will come with a hefty price though! While yes, the results from these ads will be easy to measure and bring in sales and conversions, these ads will also tend to cost more than the other two types of ads BECAUSE it knows it’s going to be making your business money.
These ads run off information coming in from a pixel code provided by Facebook and added to your website. This pixel code will not only track a visitor’s behaviour on your website but will also allow for the ads to follow visitors around on both Facebook and Instagram, collecting data and learning more about your brand’s ideal audience.
A tip we will leave with you is, when starting your first Conversion ad campaign let your audience be broad and let Facebook do the work! The algorithm will keep track and build valuable data on which users are most likely to convert. The benefit is for the campaigns which follow, they can be more specific and tailored towards the results from the previous campaign.
What Does All This Mean?
Now that we have had a chance to cover the three main types of ads available, you must be wondering “Ok… but what does it all mean, should I or should I not invest in Facebook and Instagram ads?” The simple answer, YES! Look into investing in social media ads. With the number of ad types you can be putting out there (from video ads, to photo, carousel and more) there are an endless amount of ways to keep your audience engaged. The amount of reach these ads get, and in return the amount of data a business can collect to help them better understand their audience, YOUR audience, is too valuable an opportunity to give up!
