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Getting ads in front of the right people can seem like a real challenge, but the powerful marketing tools available to small business owners is impressive — if you know where to start.
Connor Smith is an experienced marketing consultant with insight into how to get the biggest bang for your buck using Facebook Ads. We recently chatted with him about his own experiences helping clients leverage Facebook's paid services for their own companies, and what the most important things to keep in mind are when aligning your marketing strategies with your business goals.
Name: Connor Smith
Business: Science Growth Labs, part of Science Inc.
Started: 2013
What services do you offer your clients?
I work closely with small businesses and startups to help them manage their paid ads on Facebook. What I do is heavily focused on performance marketing in the world of social media — essentially, advertising with very measurable results.
My aim is to drive marketing campaigns with a focus on return on investment, particularly in paid digital media such as Facebook. I'm also familiar with organic marketing within these channels, especially when used by small business owners and freelancers, but my focus is in paid digital marketing and customer acquisition.
The reason we're so focused on Facebook is because it's one of the single best marketing platforms ever. The ability it provides businesses to target their audience at such a granular level hasn't really been seen before. You can find new customers by geographic region, by demographics and even by interest.
Facebook can also tell businesses how many people saw their ad and who visited their brick-and-mortar store as a result. It's very powerful.
How can a small business owner or self-employed professional with a tight budget leverage Facebook to reach new customers?
So much of the process, from setup and optimization to the development of ad material and audience targeting, is designed to help businesses get real value from their Facebook Ads.
But the most important thing when a company owner is trying to make the system work for them is knowing their main goal.
For example, in an ecommerce business it's likely that one of the highest priorities is improving conversion rate. Depending on the type of company, you may want to let Facebook automatically help you optimize your actions and drill down to the most important goals of the ad campaign.
Tracking is the next big thing that small business owners can do to get the most out of their Facebook Ad campaigns. Facebook offers the ability to study the stats on a really granular level, so I always recommend making sure you have tracking implemented on your website (using Google Analytics, for example) so that you can gain valuable information from every dollar you spend and each visitor you send to your site.
You're also going to want to test at *least* four or five different ads against one another to make sure you're gaining a good understanding of your audience.
The reality is that you don't need to spend a ton in order to learn a lot.
What is the easiest way to get started with running ads on Facebook?
Let Facebook do most of the work. Start out with a small budget.
Small business owners don't have to risk a spending a large amount of time or money in order to see a response, so long as they're tracking the results of their campaigns.
First, optimize to your goal and then go through the process of setting up a campaign for one or two audiences.
Keep it simple, but test at least three "creatives" — each ad is a combination of imagery or video and messaging. The data from this will help you learn a lot in just a few weeks.
What's the minimum amount of money someone needs to spend in order to quickly learn whether Facebook Ads are working?
If a company is selling a mobile app and is expecting people to download their product pretty readily, they can see a good return on an investment of $50 to $100. It all comes back to what the product is.
If you have a product that's more expensive, or if you're looking for a new client in the service industry, it will probably take a bit longer to see a good response. You could spend anywhere between $100 and $10,000 — it all depends on what you're selling and whether you're trying to reach a broad or niche audience.
Companies purchase Facebook Ads on a bidding system. When someone scrolls through their Facebook feed and sees those advertisements, the companies have essentially placed a bid to access them.
Facebook is tracking us by our interests, by our demographics and by all the things that make us unique consumers. For companies, the name of the game is to get their ad in front of the right audience for the lowest price. They're competing directly with other advertisers for the use of that space.
What are the top three things to keep in mind when setting up an ad on Facebook?
The first is tracking. In my mind, a business shouldn't even begin a Facebook campaign unless they're able to measure the impressions they gain as a result of their ad. They need to be able to tie every dollar spent to every dollar made so they know how effective their campaign really is.
The second thing is to make sure you're setting up a campaign that will help you work towards your goal. Facebook helps businesses optimize their ads in order for the company to meet their target, but it's crucial to let the system be able to find the right people. If you're just trying to get clicks, you're going to end up with low-quality traffic.
Lastly, I would say that companies need to have the right demographic identified for their campaign, along with the right creatives (your images, copy, video or call to action) to reach that audience.
What are you hoping to learn from the folks here about how they're using Facebook ads to get new customers and grow their businesses?
It would be interesting to hear what people are doing to get started, especially if they don't know what to do.
The whole Facebook system is so intricate, and there are a number of ways to get value out of an ad campaign, so it can be overwhelming unless you have help. Learning about those problems is very interesting to me, and I'd love to know how OWN IT members are getting started on their own!
Tell us!
Are *you* running ad campaigns on Facebook? How did you get started and what have you learned so far?
Have you had any experience running your own Facebook advertising campaigns? Were you able to navigate the setup and create the ad you wanted? What obstacles or difficulties surprised you?
Share your story with us below so that we can together navigate best practices for running Facebook Ads and getting new customers.
Can't wait to hear more! :-)
