Top 5 things to STOP doing with Facebook Advertising

With over 350,000 female active users on Facebook, it’s the cheapest media to reach your audience in Trinidad and Tobago. Both SMEs and Enterprise businesses have a level playing field when it comes to accessing their potential customers, however, smaller businesses do not have the massive budgets that the corporate world are used to. Therefore, business owners need to understand the platform before giving a single cent to Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve seen too many pieces of irrelevant content on my newsfeed, so I’m here to help you help me! 🙂

Trying to Reach Everyone

Me: What’s your target market? Marketing Manager: Everyone Me:

via GIPHY

Companies such as Coca Cola and Apple have millions of dollars in marketing spend and they will NEVER have an objective to reach everyone. Pre-Social Media marketing included segmenting your audience to build early adopters. This hasn’t changed. Use the Facebook Audience Insights tool to determine their interest and the size of the audience, which will help define how you spend.

Doing It Solo

It’s called the Worldwide Web because it’s all connected. Like Google’s SEO, Facebook’s algorithm favours brands with mentions from other pages. That’s why there is a Crossposting feature that allows you to share views on content. It’s time to use local Influencers to expand the conversation beyond a single page, for example, Foodie Nation and the online celebrity Certified Sampson.

Brand Awareness as a Metric

Having 20,000 likes is important to your business because it means you have an audience to interact with and a community that will freely share information. Unfortunately, most brands stop at the numbers and that’s what we refer to as Vanity Metrics. They are as hollow as an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians. You need to incorporate how you intend to measure your Return On Investment. (ROI)

Do you even Pixel?

Every single dollar you spend should have an overall objective. The initial budget may go to growing your audience but when you reach the ROI stage your website should be installed with a Facebook Pixel. This allows you to measure, optimize and retarget your ads. Which basically means you can report X dollars on advertising brought you 500+ emails or X dollars in sales.

Text is so 1999

Facebook is literally handing you a silver spoon with its Canvas tool. They know you will continue to spend when you get high returns and that can only be achieved with video. I recently ran a national ad campaign and the video content costs 100% less per like. Users are rarely interested in your story unless it’s in moving pictures.

Regardless of your advertising budget, you don’t need to be an expert, but you do need to conform to the platform and understand what your audience like. Plan and create a Strategy that will maximise every dollar spent.

Good luck and I am hopeful to see more relevant content on my newsfeed such as road bicycle tips and cat videos.

#Facebook

UPDATED: Broken links