Online Marketing: Are You Making Money with Your Facebook Ads?

    Have you tried using Facebook marketing for your business and been unsuccessful? Are you like the millions of business owners trying to generate sales from Facebook ads but not seeing a positive ROI?

 

     Since Facebook’s launch in 2004 business owners have been doing all they can to harness the power of the social network to generate money. Now with over 1 billion users on the site, the pressure is on to capitalize on this highly targeted group of users and turn their social browsing into spending!

Facebook Ads are born!

     Soon after Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook in 2007, they launched Facebook Ads to the public. This complimented the newly formed Facebook business pages that were launched in late 2007 to allow business pages to attract potential customers to their newly formed pages and drive sales back to their website. Online marketing companies and business owners alike starting chomping at the bit to advertise on Facebook, as the cost of Google PPC was increasing at a steady rate.

It’s all about word-of-mouth advertising even in the digital world

     Over one billion people Like and Comment an average of 3.2 billion times every day. When you have a strong presence on Facebook, your business is part of these conversations and has access to the most powerful kind of word-of-mouth marketing. As we know positive word-of-mouth in any business turns into sales.
     The standard business owner who is looking to get into Facebook advertising could be overwhelmed by the amount of online marketing material there is out there to learn and master. But I say go to the source and see that Facebook actually has four basic but good steps to get started.

 

      Facebook wants their business users to utilize the tools they have provided in order to be successful and make money. They understand that happy business owners who are making money will continue to purchase ads.
      Businesses should have success goals they would like to hit (i.e. sales conversions, increase Likes, increase site traffic, increased email signups or an increase in social interactions about the brand). Reviewing the analytics is a top priority in order to understand where progress is being made and if the ads are leading to a positive return on investment.

Top 6 areas to track analytics

There are certain areas that you will want to measure and track:

1. Brand awareness : You can also utilize socialmention.com to measure this
2. Influence
3. Audience Engagement
4. New Likes / Emails / Subscriptions
5. ROI from ads, posts and contests
6. Conversion Rates

     Monitoring this activity will help you determine the success of your efforts and understand the value of Facebook advertising. With this data in hand, teams should meet weekly for brainstorm sessions so the entire team can be on board with the promotions, giveaways, contests and other merchandising tactics being used to drive virality and click thru rates.
     Complimenting Facebook advertising with fan-to-fan interaction, encouraging fan conversation and sharing will increase potential conversions. It’s about enhancing the fans experience by creating a community that entices fans to interact. Engagement is more important than gaining Likes due to the long term relationship that is built.
     PostRocket released 17 survival tips for Facebook marketing and engagement is number 6. Below you’ll find17 handy tips for marketing with Facebook.

 

      In today’s competitive corporate world of online marketing, most businesses have a social presence and with that come hiring a social marketing team to execute social activity and Facebook ads. A quality social marketing manager will keep the goals in focus collecting data and generating reports that includes weekly or monthly growth.

Test your ads once, twice, three times . .

Ad growth depends on the marketer using multiple different ads to test the ads:

• Call to Action
• Images
• Phrasing
• Landing Pages

      These tests will help the marketer learn the most out of their ads. A social marketing manager has to conduct a finely tuned ballet of ads, content, and engagement to generate the best results. With Facebook currently being the largest publisher of all U.S display ad impressions delivering 28 percent of all display ad impression it is safe to assume for the moment it’s not going anywhere. (28% of all display ad information provided by The Social Marketer: www.socialmarketertraining.com)

By Matt Silvers