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Using Facebook Ads To Grow Your Books Sales

Facebook has over the last couple of years, become increasingly more commercial

It used to be that you could post on Facebook and likes would roll in from all over the place. However, that is no longer the case.

Due to some of the more recent updates, organic search results are next to zero on Facebook now. Which means marketing on Facebook requires a budget.

If you’re are new to Facebook you may ask the question, is it worth it?

The answer to that is simply, yes. And here’s why.

As of June 2017, Facebook had over 2 billion monthly users. That’s nearly a third of the world’s population.

What this means is that they have access to 2 billion potential customers for you.

The recent advertising system they integrated, whilst it reduces organic views, massively increases your potential reach. Allowing you to carefully target the campaign by demographics such as age range, location, and interests.

Done properly, a well put together Facebook campaign done with regularity is one of the most cost efficient and effective marketing strategies to undertake.

All this new technology is a little daunting though. So we’ve put together a quick guide to help you reap the rewards of Facebook.

Two things you should be doing on Facebook for your business that don’t cost anything

1. "Like" pages that relate to your business.

Companies create Facebook pages to advertise promotions, new services or upcoming events. While this is something you can do as well, you can also "like" those pages to show your support and show other followers that you up-to-date with whats going on, and in so doing raise awareness of your business.When you click "like" a page a notification is posted to your wall showing that you have acknowledged the page.

2. Join professional groups.

There are thousands of groups of professionals that have been created within Facebook. Do a simple search of keywords that are related to your business and see what you can find. These groups often serve as forums for other professionals that are looking to do the same thing you are -- advertise yourself on Facebook.

Sometimes these groups require an invitation in order to see certain content. Often you just need to message the group administrator, explaining who you are and why

How to Set Up a Facebook Ads Campaign

Step 1: Set some goals for your Facebook Ads

Before you begin with any marketing campaign is important to sit down and think about what you want to achieve. Set a few realistic goals and you will be able to measure how successful you were. For example:

·         Do you want to increase brand awareness?

·         Perhaps you want to get more website traffic from Facebook?

·         Maybe just grow your Facebook likes?

·         Do you want to increase attendance at an event?

·         Increase the reach of your content on Facebook

·         Or boost engagement for our Facebook Page

Step 2. Go to Facebook Ads Manager

All of Facebook’s ad campaigns run through the Facebook Ads Manager tool, which you can access via a direct link at facebook.com/ads, or by clicking “Manage Ads” in the drop-down menu on your Facebook account, or by clicking any of the CTAs on your Facebook page.

To get started with your first ad, click the green button in the top-right corner of the page.

 Step 3. Choose your objective

When you click to create a Facebook Ad, you’ll go to a page where you choose the objective for your campaign.

With Facebook, you have many different ways of approaching an ad campaign. These ways can typically fall within three categories of benefits:

Awareness

These are objectives that generate interest in your product or service:

·         Boost your posts

·         Promote your page

·         Reach people near your business

·         Increase Brand Awareness

·         Increase your reach

Consideration 

Objectives that get people thinking about your business and looking for more information:

·         Send people to a destination on or off Facebook

·         Get installs of your app

·         Raise attendance at your event

·         Get video views

·         Collect leads for your business

And Conversion

Objectives that encourage people that are interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service:

·         Increase conversions on your website

·         Increase engagement in your app

·         Get people to claim your offer

·         Promote a product or catalogue

·         Get people to visit your shops

Step 4: Define your audience and budget

Customizing your target audience

This step is one of the most exciting things about Facebook ads. Because Facebook has so much information on each individual you can be very specific about who you are targeting, or very broad.

 The audience for your ad can be customized based on all the following demographics:

  • Location, starting with a country, state, city, zip code, or address, and refining even further with a mile radius

  • Age

  • Gender

  • Languages

  • Interests – Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, the Pages they like, and closely related topics

  • Behaviours – Things like purchase behaviour and intent, as well as device usage

  • Connections

In addition, with the Connections setting, you can choose advanced targeting, which lets you include or exclude people who are connected to certain pages, apps, or events. You can also further customize your targeting using custom audiences to retarget people who have already interacted with your business.

Setting your Budget

Once you’ve selected your target audience, you next need to choose how much you’d like to spend on your ad. When you set a budget, it’s important to remember that this figure represents the maximum amount of money you want to spend. 

Step 5: Create your Advert

This is where it gets really fun! It’s now time to choose the images (or video), headline, body text, and where your ad will be displayed on Facebook. For the text, you get 90 characters to share a quick message that will appear above your image(s) or video.

There are two ways to create adverts: 

Using an Existing Post, or Creating a New Advert.

Using an Existing Post

For certain types of adverts, such as boosting posts, you can create your ad using an existing post that’s already been shared on your Facebook Page. To do this, select the ‘Use Existing Post’ option from the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. From here, you can choose which Page you’d like to select a post from and pick an individual post from that Page to use as your advert:

Creating a New Advert

The first task when creating an ad from scratch is to select the format you’d like to use for your advert. 

Facebook currently offers 5 various formats for adverts each with a different effect:

Carousel: Create an advert with 2 or more scrollable images or videos

Single image: Create up to 6 variations of your advert using 1 image

Single video: Create an advert with one video

Slideshow: Create a looping video advert with up to 10 images

Canvas: Tell a more immersive story by combining images and videos

For either of these the content is immensely important. If your ad is going to be a success, you want your image and copy to be enticing enough to make people want to click.

Step 6. Place your order

Your advert is ready to go. Submit your ad by simply clicking the ‘Place Order’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Once your ad is submitted, it’ll be reviewed by Facebook before it’s put live (you’ll receive a confirmation email from Facebook once the ad is live).

Over to you

Thanks for reading, I hope you find to be a useful guide for getting set up with Facebook Ads!

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