One of the most effective ways of reaching a new audience and spreading word of your expertise is to take full advantage of Facebook’s marketing tools. The problem is that, to the newbie, it can look quite daunting. Since it’s one of the ways we reach new clients, we thought we’d give you a quick and easy rundown on how to do it yourself.
1. Understand your audience
It might sound obvious, but understanding your audience and how they use Facebook is key to making this work. If you’re appealing to a younger audience, say 18-29 years old, the chances are that many of them will be using ‘adblockers’ – a plugin on their phones and computers that stop adverts reaching them.
Nearly 30% of British internet users are now using adblocking software, which should tell you two things: traditional digital advertising (banner ads, pop-ups, etc) aren’t reaching the audience you think they’re reaching, and people dislike their intrusiveness strongly enough to take action.
2. Find a way to interest them
While intrusive advertising may be moribund, more and more people are open to being presented with new ideas and interesting bits of information. At My Accountant Friend we find it far more beneficial to share useful information on life as a freelancer and need-to-know bits and pieces about the tax world than to simply announce who we are in an advert.
We know that most of our clients find tax quite a dry subject, and many employ us for the simple reason that they find it very hard understand the world we work in. If we can help them to understand through this blog, as well as share some of the knowledge we’ve picked up from our freelance clients along the way, then it becomes both a useful resource as well as an effective marketing tool.
So, our subject is freelancing and simple tax tips. What might yours be? If you were to strip away your sales patter, what is there about you and your business that more people might be interested in? What could you write about or make mini videos about that could draw them into what you do? We’re talking here about content marketing. For many small companies, it’s a cheap and effective way of spreading the word.
3. Perfect your headline and photo editing skills
Once you’ve written a blog post to draw people into your website, make sure you have a title that catches the eye and a bright or striking image that illustrates it well. Part of Facebook’s method of reaching an audience is to award each post a ‘relevancy score’ which matches the post, its text and its image with the right audience. A high relevancy score means that everything has lined up well and the audience is responding accordingly. A low relevancy score means precisely the opposite.
For example, say you’re selling records in the capital. An article about “London’s best record shops” that has an image of a record stall that is clearly in a London setting is likely to reach a London audience more effectively than something that makes no written or visual reference to London at all.
So from the beginning, you need to think about how you can write an interesting article that really reaches a specific audience in multiple ways.
(One thing to note: if more than 20% of your post image contains wording, Facebook will reject it when you come to point 5.)
4. Post to your company page
Assuming you have a company Facebook page, post your article ensuring that your pithy description matches the article and image you’ve chosen in the article. How can you pull people into the article with no more than three lines of Facebook copy? How can you do it without seeming too salesy and desperate? It’s not something you’re likely to get right first time, but that’s the beauty of digital publishing – if it’s not working, simply edit your post until you start to see some traction.
5. Get out your credit card
OK, so you were always going to have to spend some cash eventually, but the great thing about advertising through Facebook is that you can spend incrementally, and you can experiment with relatively small amounts.
The best way to do this is to set up a Facebook Business account that connects to your Facebook company page. By doing this you can keep all of your receipts, admin details, credit card details and analytics in one place. You can assign whoever you like within your organisation to operate this, and it acts as a central hub that only your people can access.
Once you’re set up, there are several steps to promoting a Facebook post successfully, so it’s best that we go through them one at a time.
Start by clicking on the green ‘create advert’ button in the top righthand corner.
This will lead you through to a series of options that relate to the type of audience you want to reach, and the aim of your post. For an article post, you’re looking for ‘engagement’, which is in the ‘consideration’ column. Click that and you’ll get the option to name your campaign. Give it a simple name you’ll remember – this is entirely internal, so nobody but you and your team will ever see this name.
Now the real fun begins! First of all, you can define the location of the audience you want to reach. Let’s say we want to reach people within the M25, so we type ‘London’ and then reduce the geographical radius to about 25km. You can do this for any location, so it’s up to you to decide whether you want a broad audience or a very specific audience to see your post. Bear in mind that the more specific the article subject, the more likely you are to have a specific audience. This allows you to be more accurate with your targeting, and therefore more efficient with the money you have available to spend.
Next up is the opportunity to define your audience by age, language and interest. Again, this helps you to refine the audience you’re paying to reach. The list of interests is vast, so spend time searching through until you really feel you’re casting your net to the right people.
You can see the potential audience size on the barometer to the right of the screen, and your estimated daily audience reach just below it (the latter will change according to the amount you’re willing to spend).
Scroll down and you’ll find that you can choose where your article is placed. This refers to a number of locations within the Facebook empire, most importantly Facebook itself and Instagram. You can choose which of these you want to make use of.
Instagram is great for building brand awareness when you have a very visual post, but it’s not so great if your aim is to get people to read your article (far fewer people will click through from an Instagram post to a blog than they will from a Facebook post).
The final part of this page allows you to set your budget and time limits. You can choose whether to spend (a minimum of £5) per day, or to set an overall budget that Facebook will aim to spend efficiently over a fixed period.
Again, it’s worth experimenting here. For the record, we often find that an overall budget over a period of a month is a good way to make use of Facebook’s algorithmic expertise without having to get too specific, and having specific time periods and budgets allows you to judge your performance from month to month. You can monitor how well you’re doing on a day to day basis (see point 6, below) and adjust your settings accordingly.
The last part of the setup is to choose the post you want to promote. To do this, go to the ‘Select a Page Post’ dropdown menu and scroll through until you find the post you created in point 4. URL parameters can be set if you’re trying to monitor your success in an external analytics package or if you’re getting involved in remarketing, but for the purposes of this blog, let’s leave these options alone. The post will work fine without them.
Check you’ve done everything to your satisfaction and click ‘place order’. Facebook will review your request and you should see things start to happen within a few hours.
7. Keep an eye on what’s going on
Make sure you’re getting the best out of your Facebook marketing by going into your business account each day and choosing ‘adverts manager’. Click on the ‘Performance (default)’ drop down and select ‘performance and clicks’. The most important part here is to check that your clicks, CTR (click through rate) and CPC (cost per click) are healthy.
The higher the clicks and the lower the CPC, the better! If you’re experiencing high costs and low clicks, you need to look at the a mixture of your imagery, your headline and your settings, specifically the settings that deal with the demographics and interests of your audience. Refine these to target more relevant audiences and you should start to see traffic arrive on your website fairly soon.
