Target the customers that you KNOW will want to hear from you
Use lookalike audiences and target to people who have already been to your website. Target your existing customers but when you do this, bear in mind that they may have recently bought from you. Make sure you ‘exclude’ people who may have made a purchase in the last few weeks by using the pixel data from your website.
Also bear in mind that if you’re targeting people who already engage with you on social media, an advert could be annoying. This is particularly true if your organic content contains calls to action. So consider excluding eg people who like/follow your page or only include them for example every other month depending on the product or service you’re offering. The best solution is to put yourself in their shoes: what would annoy you?
Set advertising FREQUENCY
On some Business Manager accounts, you can now set frequency to ensure a person only sees your advert for a maximum of say three times. You might not have this option yet, but you can still check on your adverts regularly to ensure the frequency doesn’t go above eg 6.
What’s the recommended frequency I hear you ask? It seems to depend on the advert. We’ve seen some good results from adverts which have an average exposure of 7 times per person over the course of the advert. But others which have a good conversion rate when exposure is just once or twice. Bearing in mind that people get annoyed by seeing an advert too many times, the only real way to know is to test test test!!!
If you haven’t got the time, inclination or budget to test, aim for 3. A frequency of 3 is not too many, perhaps too little but definitely not too annoying.
Make the advert RELEVANT
Who are you targeting and why? Do you think EVERYONE could benefit from your product/service? Well they might but if you don’t make it relevant to individuals then we are just going to ignore it.
This isn’t just about selling eg children’s products to parents. This is about creating different content to respect and acknowledge people’s life stages, their interests, their situation, their ethnicity and what’s important to them. It might be harder work to create this content but even a small change in your copy can make a BIG difference.
Social media is ALL about connection and connecting so you need to make sure your adverts reflect the fact that you KNOW and UNDERSTAND your customers.
Your advert results will depend on your audience
If you’re selling a high ticket item, you’re NOT going to want to start by running adverts that take someone to a page to buy it. You’re going to need a strategy.
How do you warm up your audience? You create content (and promote that content because it’s good but not too selly) to increase brand awareness. Organic reach is hard to achieve these days so advertising will help boost that reach and find the people most likely to be interested.
Good organic content makes great adverts
Some of the BEST adverts began life as organic content that did really well. Facebook encourages us all to put some budget towards promoting good content (because it wants our money!) but it’s not wrong: good organic content makes GREAT advertising material.
Most marketers will tell you to add a call to action on this organic content if there wasn’t one there before – usually you can add a button with a CTA. BUT how refreshing it is to see an advert that is purely about brand awareness with no CTA? If we eg watch your video for 10 seconds you can remarket to us at a later date with a CTA. That’s what the clever advertisers do!
Make adverts interesting!
It’s too obvious! But making adverts interesting/funny/engaging is just the BEST thing you can do for your brand. It will get you a better ROI and it will be worth it.
- Make SURE the images are GOOD. What is good? Clear, colourful, interesting, pretty!
- Make SURE your video is good – colourful, movement, people
- AVOID stock images unless you can make them interesting and relevant.
- Be honest with yourself about it: would YOU respond to YOUR OWN ADVERT?
Even if you have a small marketing budget, you can create content that is good quality using a decent mobile phone and all the apps there are available to you now. Look at Canva, Videoshop, Premier Rush, Spark, Lightroom SO MANY APPS!
Happy advertising!
Susie 
