Facebookis
the king of social media with over
2 billion active users logging on to the platform every single month. People
from all over the world go on Facebook to post status updates, read their
friends’ updates, meet new friends, and more.
As a business owner, you want to capitalize on the sheer number of
Facebook users and get them to visit your website. Imagine if you can get
even just a very small percentage of Facebook users to land on your
website!
You’re talking thousands of people reading your content – people who will
more than likely share your post if it’s something they find super valuable
and useful!
Organic Facebook Posts Vs Facebook Ads
There are two ways to promote your content on Facebook: (1) by
promoting it organically to your fans and followers, or (2) by promoting it on
Facebook Ads.
With the first method, you’re not paying any money to Facebook. You’re
only promoting to your fans and followers. On the surface, this may sound
like a great plan.
However, with each algorithm update, Facebook organic reach is ever
dwindling. This means that even if you have millions of fans, only a small
percentage is going to see your post in their news feeds A few years ago, organic reach was extremely good. Every time you posted
something on your fan page, a large majority of your followers will see your
post. So if you were promoting or selling something, you would essentially
get sales without paying for traffic.
However, in recent years, Facebook has been doing its best to go back to
its ‘social’ roots. Instead of showing posts from fan pages, Facebook has
been prioritizing updates from people in your circle of friends.
If you’ve got hundreds of friends, you’ll see most of their posts on your
news feeds instead of posts from pages you’ve followed. This is obviously
great news for Facebook users themselves, but not so much for business
owners who carefully manage and maintain a huge following on Facebook.
So, with the ever-declining numbers of organic social media traffic, many
business owners have been forced to turn to Facebook Ads.
Many social media marketers swear by the power of Facebook Ads as it is
very cost-effective compared to other advertising options like Google
AdWords and other traditional marketing methods.
With Facebook Ads, you no longer need to worry about organic reach. You
can simply set up an ad from your Ads Manager account, target the right
audience demographic, define your budget and Facebook will take care of
the rest for you.
The truth is no other social media or advertising platform can offer the kind
of targeting options that Facebook offers. You can target people based on
many different factors such as location, interests, hobbies, affiliations, and
so much more.
There’s even an extremely powerful tool called Facebook Pixel. It’s just a
snippet of code you add to your website’s header section. The pixel is
powerful if you know how to use it and read its data correctly.
With the pixel, you can track what your visitors are doing on your
website.
You’ll know if they signed up to your mailing list, or if they bought
something in your eCommerce store. With the Facebook remarketing
feature, you can retarget people who’ve visited your site and send them
highly targeted offers.
With the lookalike audience feature, you can upload your own customer
data, and Facebook will try to look for people who are similar to your own
audience. This basically means reaching more of the same people with just
a push of a button!
How To Drive Traffic To Your Website Using Facebook Ads
In this section, you’re going to be learning a few ways to get people to land
on your website simply by signing up for Facebook Ads. Let’s begin!
1. What do you want to achieve?
This is the first step on the list. You have to sort out your goals – do you
want to increase your brand awareness? Do you want to get your ads in
front of as many people as possible? Do you want people to visit your
website? Install your app? Buy from your online store? Facebook Ads have 3 different campaign objectives – you have to choose
the right objective that will match your goals.
For example, if you want people to visit your website, then you may want to
choose the Traffic objective. But it’s not always the right choice especially if
you’re targeting people who have yet to hear about your brand. This kind of
traffic is called ‘cold traffic.’ If you want higher engagements on your posts,
you’re going to have to convert this cold traffic to warm or hot traffic.
Facebook will not only help you drive traffic to your website, but you can
literally grow an entire community on the platform.
In addition to publishing content on your brand’s fan page, you can also
create a Facebook group to make engaging with your audience even
easier.
This way, you not only establish yourself as an authority, or as a leader in
your industry, you also let people know you’re ready to help them out when
necessary.
For cold traffic, try getting them aware of your brand first. You can choose
between Brand Awareness or Reach objectives. You’re basically
introducing your brand to your target audience, sort of like saying “Hello,
I’m here! I exist!”
You can try letting your ad run for a few days while spending a few dollars
each day. It’s not going to bankrupt you, you just want to test the waters.
When your advert’s been viewed by a good number of people, then you
may want to create a second advert and this time use another ad objective.
You can then target the people who’ve engaged with your initial, testing-
the-waters ad.
Since they’ve already engaged with you, they’re not cold traffic anymore.
They’re now known as a warm audience – people who’ve interacted with
your brand previously. You’re not total strangers anymore.
Also, while planning your goals, you need to map out your strategy. You
can’t just spend money on Facebook ads without knowing which variables
to measure. It’s important to know when you need to stop advertising when
nothing seems to be working.
2. Know your target audience
Knowing this information is crucial to succeeding on Facebook, or any
other social media platform for that matter. If you’re targeting the wrong
crowd, then chances are you’re not going to get very good engagement
rates.
For instance, if you’re offering women’s hygiene products, there’s no sense
including men in your target audience, right?
And if you’re targeting younger women, say 18-30-year-olds, then you
shouldn’t include females outside of that age range.
Otherwise, you’re just going to be annoying people. When people report or
flag your ads to Facebook, you’re going to get a low relevancy score.
In the world of Facebook Ads, you want to have the highest relevancy
scores possible (9 or 10). This means people are interreacting positively
with your advert, so you’re probably targeting the right kind of people.
However, even if you do have good relevancy scores, but you’re not getting
any sales or conversions, then you probably need to work on putting out a
better offer in front of your audience.
The thing is, knowing who to target is extremely important. You don’t want
to be wasting money, you don’t want to be annoying Facebook users.
Rather, you want to add value. To do that, you’re going to need to know
first what your audience needs which leads us to our next point.
If you don’t already have an existing demographic for your target audience,
you can run ads targeted to different groups of people.
Find out which group responds best to your ad. Once you’ve found the
winning demographic, then your job just got a whole lot easier as you’ll find
out in the next point.
3. Create highly engaging ads
Knowing your audience and what they want will allow you to create ads that
will speak directly to them. If you’ve got a product or service that addresses
your target audience’s pain points, then you just may have extremely good
conversion rates.
That’s the beauty of putting the right offer in front of the right audience –
you not only bring value to a lot of people, you also reap plenty of profits in
return.
When creating ads, it’s best to know what kind of content your audience
prefers. If you’re targeting older audiences, then you may want to use
videos and high-quality graphics to make it easy for them to consume your
content.
Put yourself in your audience’s shoes, would you want to consume content
in video format or would you want to squint your way through a 2,000-word
article with size 10 font!
Optimizing your ad design is extremely important too. Facebook users gets
a lot of visual stimulation from the photos and videos their friends share
with them. You have to stand out too if you want people to notice your ad.
In fact, it’s your design that’s going to convince people to stop scrolling on
their news feeds long enough to scrutinize your graphics and read your
title. If it’s something that interests them, then they’ll likely click and read
your entire post on your website.
If you’re trying to get people to sign up to your mailing list, then you have to
offer them something of value first.
You don’t just create an ad on Facebook asking people to sign up for your
list. You can’t just expect people to give you their email address simply
because you asked for it. No, it doesn’t work like that.
If you want people to follow your call to action, you’re going to have to give
them something valuable first, so you’ll gain their trust.
When creating your ads, you need to specify where you want your ads to
appear. There are quite a number of places where you can place your ads
– in people’s news feed, the right column, in the audience network, in
instant articles, and Instagram.
To determine the most optimal placement for your ads, you’re going to
have to do a lot of split testing. When testing, you’re going to have to
isolate variables one at a time, so you know exactly what’s working and
what’s not.
For instance, if you want to know why people aren’t engaging with your
ads, then you may want to split test by creating a second advert with a
different cover image, or a different title, and so on.
Split testing may feel like an unnecessary expenditure, but most Facebook
Ads experts suggest split testing your way to success. It’s better to know
what’s going to contribute to your success, and what’s going to impede it so
you can adjust as necessary.
Is Facebook The Right Platform For Your Business?
Just because Facebook has billions of active users doesn’t mean you’ll
automatically find success on the platform. If you’ve tried different
combinations of ad objectives and ad creatives and nothing seems to be
working, then perhaps you’re targeting the wrong crowd.
You may feel like you’ve spent far too much money just to quit cold turkey,
but sometimes it’s better to cut your losses while you still can.
The good news is Facebook is not the only social media platform on the
planet so you can always seek out your target audience somewhere else.
However, for those who’ve found their audience on Facebook, then know
that you’ve got one of the most powerful social media tools at your
fingertips.
Facebook will not only help you drive traffic to your website, but you can
literally grow an entire community on the platform.
In addition to publishing content on your brand’s fan page, you can also
create a Facebook group to make engaging with your audience even
easier.
This way, you not only establish yourself as an authority, or as a leader in
your industry, you also let people know you’re ready to help them out when
necessary.
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