Despite the variety of security and data issues over the past 12 months, the platform’s wide reach across both Facebook itself and Instagram makes it a must for the majority of businesses.
Though, despite all of this, there are still many who only see the “boost” button as the only point of entry for facebook ads and for many it’s just not the appropriate way to approach the platform. Here at Fluid we create campaigns that use the full arsenal available through Facebook and in this article we’re going to take a deep-dive into five of these options to show you the true potential of Facebook advertising.
Audience Insights
When we start a campaign for a new client, one of the most important factors is understanding the audience — luckily Facebook has created Audience Insights. Available as part of Business Manager, it gives you the ability to really explore the demographics, interests and potential opportunities of your target audiences. For example, if your client’s key audience is parents in Manchester with children aged between 2 to 5 — you can select that audience and then discover the pages, interests and more that the audience already engages with. This helps guide creative, copy and targeting options when building your ads. It’s also extremely addictive to look at the digital breakdown of the UK, but we’re not going to lead you down a path of procrastination.
Custom Audiences
Where to start with Custom Audiences, quite possibly one of the most powerful aspects of Facebook — you can create audiences based on everything from website engagement, to three-second views of a video. For us, this is where the power of “meme” style content provides the ROI that is so elusive in the world of social marketing. Imagine you share out a piece of meme content with no sales CTA at all, often a difficult sell to management right? Well if that piece of content reaches 100k new users on Facebook, you can now create a custom audience based on those who have interacted with that exact post and target those new users with a product-focussed ad.
Product Catalogues
For all those in the e-commerce world, travel or property, product catalogues could be your new best friend. Either through a direct integration with Shopify, Magento or Marketing API — or by simply uploading a product list in CSV format, you can create ads that automatically pull product information from you inventory. Combined with a remarketing audience, this is how Amazon can display ads with the products you have viewed on the platform or how travel operators show you the latest prices for flights you’ve browsed.
Instagram Stories
Instagram ad spend is rising at a rapid pace and may outstrip Facebook itself in the next 12 months, but until that point — it’s extremely underpriced at the moment. Quite simply, not enough businesses are advertising on the platform which means that your CPC will be extremely low and with Instagram now seeing 1 billion monthly active users, it could be extremely valuable to your business.
Campaign Optimisation
A relatively new feature in the Facebook Ad Manager arsenal — campaign budget optimisation allows you to set a budget at the campaign level and Facebook will automatically optimise your campaigns so that spend is adjusted towards the best performing ad-sets. Although we advise using such functions alongside a robust analysis and management system, the platform is often optimised to perform at its best when using the tools that Facebook puts at your disposal!