Facebook Ads should be a core component of your digital marketing plan. There! We said it! If they aren’t, we should talk. Facebook ads should be a part of a much bigger content strategy that works to get you in front of the right people at the right time.
More than two billion people use Facebook monthly, so why wouldn’t you be where your potential customers are? Facebook offers two ways to market your business – Facebook Ads and Boosted Posts. Both offer benefits, but which one is the best choice for you? Keep this in mind – boosting isn’t advertising.
Boosting posts only offers a fraction of the choices you get with Facebook Ads — and boosting posts, simply stated, wastes money.
While it’s true you’ll improve the reach of your post through boosting, that improvement is merely superficial. With boosting, your targeting options are extremely limited. Yes, you’ll choose behaviors and interests, demographics, and geography. You can’t, however, use your custom audiences.
What Custom Audiences Can Do for You?
What? You don’t have custom audiences so you’re not missing out? Oh, but you’re missing an enormous piece of the marketing puzzle if you’re not focused on building your custom audiences.
Your pixel should be installed so you can focus on building custom audiences supported by your website traffic, your Facebook page and post engagement, your Instagram traffic, and your email lists.
And you ought to be creating Lookalike Audiences, too. Period.
This is how you get real results with Facebook Ads. And boosting doesn’t allow you to use any of those audience options.
If your goal is to gain more attention for your posts, how about creating an ad campaign with it. Boosting limits your goals to website visits and engagement. Through Facebook Ads Manager, not only are you able to select your objective, you’ll maximize it through awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, conversions – all depending on your desired outcome for that post.
When building campaigns in Ads Manager, you’ll be able more directly follow the Buyer’s Journey to match your campaigns to your audience’s specific needs.
Here are several features of Facebook Ads you ought to be taking advantage of:
Placement options
Facebook can automatically place your ads where they’re likely to perform best. However, you also have the choice of selecting where your ads are shown. This includes the desktop and/or mobile News Feed, Instagram, Instant Articles, among others.
If your audience is large enough, it makes sense to split test your placement so you control the delivery, not Facebook. Nine out of 10 times, Facebook will feed your ads to mobile, which could sway your results on you.
Lookalike audiences
One of the best things about Facebook Ads is that it’ll help find your audiences for you. Once you create your custom audiences, let Facebook do the diligence of finding more people to focus on.
Dayparting
Also referred to as Ad Scheduling, this feature allows you to show your ads off and on automatically throughout the week on a recurring schedule.
Custom conversion tracking
The Facebook Pixel allows you to track standard events that happen on your website—View Content, Complete Registration, Lead, increase Cart, Purchase, etc. rather than only using the nine Standard Events, consider custom conversions as an enhancement to your tracking. Custom conversions enable you to build up to 40 values by combining the events with specific URLs visited to hyper target.
How do Facebook Ads and boosted posts compare? Simply put, there’s no comparison!
Organizations that believe they’re doing enough on Facebook by simply boosting posts are doing themselves a disservice by leaving money on the table…or throwing it away.
The purpose of Facebook Advertising is to be extremely strategic and precise. The use of Facebook Ads remains among the most misused—or underutilized—tools in the marketing toolkit. If you think might be missing out, as I said, we should talk.