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Dan Dryfhout is an avid digital marketer from Ontario. Dan loves snowboarding, mountain biking and in some occasions, long walks on the beach. He moved out west to better serve these passions, especially the beach walking...

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Are You Leveraging Facebook Efficiently?

Facebook is known for using data to effectively target consumers within the platform. From targeting based on education levels, to targeting specific interests like frequent travelers, to remarketing to users who have visited your website and have shown a considerable amount of interest. Marketers should be leveraging this efficiently to target their perfect audience!

Facebook Ad Strategy

Do you know your audience?

Knowing your audience can make or break your marketing campaign. If you are spending all your money targeting the wrong consumer, you will not get the performance you could be getting. Facebook is a platform where users spend time engaging with friends, they are not actively looking for your product or service like Google. With Google Search, users are typing in specific keywords and this is your basis for targeting criteria. However, with Facebook, you are targeting their interests, demographics, and pages they’re connected to. The method here is to target interests and demographics similar to your existing audience, and then market to them with eye catching, effective headlines to generate an interest for your product and/or service. Facebook has a new data input called Relevance Score to allow you to understand how relevant your ad is to the audience you are currently targeting. This is definitely a good tool to gather how effective you are at reaching the right audience.

Leveraging the right ad types

When launching new ads on Facebook, marketers and clients alike should have an idea of what ads suit their marketing goals and what ones are worth testing. It is a good idea to select a couple of ad variations and to analyze the data to see which ones are working for you. If your goal is to build brand awareness, I would create a campaign with the objective of clicks to website and I would choose for Facebook to optimize and bid on impressions. Right hand column ads are also great for this tactic as they are still present on the Facebook interface, but have very low CPM costs. If your goal is to sell products, I would create a campaign with the objective of website conversions and optimize and bid towards conversions. Multi Product and Newsfeed ads are perfect for this approach as they are right in the middle of the user’s Newsfeed and display photos with a large real estate which highlights your selected product.

Are you wasting money on the wrong audience?

Analyze your campaigns performance periodically. Each ad set should have a different audience and not all audiences will behave in the same way. I also recommend remarketing to consumers who have visited your website and show a significant amount of interest in a product and/or service. I prefer to create a wide-spread campaign with multiple audiences and analyze the data after a few weeks. This way you can truly see the proper data without making any assumptions on which audiences will do better. After analyzing the data, you can scale back to find the most efficient audience. Who knows, some audiences may surprise you!

Over time, through efficient targeting, you will see a significant improvement in results and goals as a company. Marketers can always sell products on platforms, the key here is to sell those products for the lowest amount of dollars spent to generate a better return on ad spend.