Long gone are the days when you could just rely on organic posts on your business page to yield any results. Facebook, which also owns Instagram and Whatsapp, now prioritises paid ads ahead of organic posts. In fact, the more followers you have the less reach you will get. So if you want your business to stand out and generate sales, then you will need to invest in social advertising.

Advertising on Facebook is relatively low cost compared to other forms of marketing, and with such granular options for defining your audience, you can ensure that you get a much better return on investment. But, you need to know what you’re doing…

There are 1.62 billion users accessing Facebook each day, and Facebook has a great deal of knowledge about these users to impart on you. Whatsmore, its Pixel and Standard Events widgets that transfer knowledge between Facebook and your website really drill down into what your target customers want to see. If a user has Facebook open in the background of a device and then visits your website, the Pixel will track them. However, it will not track what they have been looking at on your site. This is where the Standard Event comes in. Both of these are an integral part of being able to create a successful sales funnel as part of your social advertising strategy. 

Paying for your ads is a bidding process on Facebook. There are a lot of factors to take into account to ensure your budget works hard for you, such as your bidding strategy and the placements you choose. You also need to make sure that Facebook determines your ad to be relevant and that it meets their three separate relevance metrics: engagement ranking; quality ranking and conversion ranking. By testing and making adjustments where necessary, you can ensure that you are getting the most from your budget. 

Boosted posts are not created in Ads Manager, therefore you don’t have the ability to customise them as much as you can an advert. A boosted post tends to be optimised for page likes, comments and shares, whereas an ad is much better for generating website purchases, app downloads, newsletter sign ups, etc.

With an ad you can be a lot more creative, and include specific call to action buttons that will drive your audience to take that action. Your targeting capabilities are much more granular in Ads Manager as you can overlap audience types or create lookalike audiences. With a boost you just get to decide on location, interests, age etc. 

With the ability to run A/B testing across you ads on variables such as audiences, placements and the creative, you can test and refine your adverts. This is not a feature available within boosting.

Essentially, you are unlikely to generate business from a boosted post but you will drive engagement and brand awareness. If you want to drive an action such as those mentioned above, the best way is to run an advert.

First and foremost you must define your objectives for your ad so you can define what a successful ROI would be for your business. Consider what your ideal customer looks like, and we can show you then, how Facebook advertising can fit in with your current marketing strategy. 

Vista we will design an ad campaign that will help you to achieve your objectives. Whether you want to set up a lead generation or ecommerce campaign, we can give you the guidance you need to run TOF (top of funnel), to BOF (bottom of funnel) campaigns, and advise on the budget that you’ll require to achieve your goals. We then use Ads Manager to assess the success and ensure that you’re getting the most from your ad spend, as well as a great ROI.

Lisa has completed the Emma Van Heusen Facebook Adcelerator Group Training Programme as well as the Digital Mums Social Media Management course. Emma Van Heusen is recognised as one of the most experienced and respected Facebook Advertising experts in the industry. Lisa is now a member of the Digital Tribe of EVH graduates and Facebook Ads specialists, because sharing knowledge within social media marketing is integral due to the ever evolving nature of the platforms.