What is the strong suit of Facebook Ads?

In my experience with the platform in your demographic (we sold apparel to men and women ages 18-25), we see a great deal of traffic converting through the use of great imagery. We saw an average conversion rate that was 10-15% greater than our Google campaigns or our media buys on various websites.

Ads anywhere can be tailored to your specific goal, and Facebook provides excellent ways to reach each of them.

If you have any questions, let's set up a short call and we can talk through the best strategy for you from a brand story perspective.

Facebook Ads are incredibly powerful for a variety of reasons. The most powerful feature about Facebook Ads is the ability to target. Simple demographic and location targeting is useful if you want to target a specific group, say 18-30 yr old middle class people who live in certain urban areas. This isn’t that difficult with most ad platforms. What is extremely powerful about Facebook Ads is the ability to target people based on interests or behaviors.

Say for example, you are promoting a ski area to people in the 18-30 yr old middle class group. If you are trying to sell season passes or lift tickets you can target people who are already connected to that ski area on Facebook, you can target people who enjoy skiing and live within the geographical area likely to attend the ski area, or you can target people who are engaged with other regional competitors or friends with people that frequent your area or local competitors.

You can also use Facebook Ads to help explain an idea or reach a new product. Say you want to increase exposure for the same ski area. You can widen your net and run advertisements designed to help build the brand and create exposure, still geographically limited to help maximize the effectiveness of your budget.

You can also track all of these ads all the way down to the sale to determine how effective they are in terms of driving traffic and sales. You can then refine the campaign accordingly in real-time to help maximize your profit.

Best target goal? Conversions.

The ability to target these the strong suit of Facebook Ads in my opinion. You can't pay rent with publicity.

Conversions can be as straightforward as purchases if you're selling a product, something like lead capture if you're selling something over a webinar or with a sales team, or even something top of funnel like being added to an email list.

As long as you have a bit of historic data (go with a break even analysis for your first run) you can tie every lead/webinar registration or email sign up to a dollar cost. At that point you're making an investment, not a guess.

You should be building out campaigns towards each of those segments. For first impressions, narrow down your audience and then bid on impressions to ensure you're reaching them again and again and again. Then implement retargeting to ensure you're able to hit them up with ads focused on the different reasons a consumer would purchase your product.

Facebook are incredible for making a first impression exactly because of the targeting - you can target not just by the location (country, states, cities, zip codes), gender and age, but by a huge variety of other choices: education, relationship status, job industry, income, interests, behaviours... everything is there!

However, Facebook ads work much better for B2C companies rather than B2B. The simple reason: why do people go to Facebook? Why do You go to Facebook? - to engage with friends and family members, to find some interesting things, catch up on the news. But people do NOT go to Facebook with an intention to buy.

So, even with the incredibly power of interests targeting, there's so little you can do. For example, if you were promoting legal services, you could continue doing that for years and years without any success - if I didn't have any legal case, I wouldn't take any notice into the ads.

On the opposite, if there's already a heavy need for your products and if they have a short 'life', the awareness campaigns can quickly generate immediate conversions too.

So there's a combination - in most cases you need to use the brand awareness campaigns with the acquisition campaigns. Best of all, you can use the Facebook remarketing to target even your current clients, subscribers or website visitors and generate conversions in that way.