By Kinan Alhoch

Advertising on Facebook seems simple; you plug in your credit card information, boost your page’s post, and you’re done. Just because it is easy to do doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed success. Here are a few tips if you’re thinking about Facebook advertising.

Boost Relevant Content

An ad must include relevant content, with an eye catching image, and a link to more engaging information about what’s being advertised. The ad itself should always have a clear call to action.

Narrow Your Audience

Ask yourself questions about your ideal client. Why would they want to engage with the content that you’re promoting?
Where is your audience located? If you are promoting information about a seminar in a specific region, you don’t want to spend your money promoting it to people who wouldn’t be able to travel the distance to attend.

Facebook also allows you to develop your audience based on their interests. For example, if you’re doing a jersey giveaway for your local sports team, you may include that sport, that sports team, and other similar local teams when incorporating interests. Develop your audience’s interests based on the content you are promoting.

Another audience consideration is how they behave. How do people behave on Facebook? How do they behave offline? Facebook has a feature that allows you to target an audience by behavior — it works similarly to interests so you can overlay this category with Interests.

So you’ve designed engaging, visually attractive ads, figured out the your ideal audience, your target location, audience interests, and behaviors; you launch your ad. What’s next? Track your results! Your ad is a living, breathing document and needs to be monitored and optimized to guarantee great results.

Kick it Up a Notch

Where do you go from here? Here’s a few tips on more advanced ways to use Facebook.

Power Editing

Especially if you’re managing several campaigns at the same time this powerful tool is designed by Facebook with features that don’t exist in a normal ad tool where you can write longer ad copy, schedule ads on specific days and times, more bidding options, split testing tools, and dark posting.

Dark Posting

Dark posts are ads that appear in the news feed but don’t actually publish onto your Facebook page. This keeps your content from cluttering up your Facebook feeds while more specifically tailoring content to your audiences. You can also split test your ads to the same audience to understand what works best for your services/products. Dark posts will allow you to keep all your content relevant and successful.

Split Testing

Also known as A/B testing — design two different ads leading for the same product or service you’re advertising. Perhaps you are a financial planner, you can test audiences with different income levels, or home ownership. The results of a split test will help you understand what does and doesn’t work with your ads.

Remarketing

Remarketing or retargeting is when you target an audience that has visited your landing page before but never converted into a customer. To remarket, make sure you design new and original content leading back to the services you’re advertising. Although it’s an “old” audience treat it as a brand new ad.

Go Mobile

You can use Facebook’s targeting feature to target people who are in your area and on their phones. Enter your location address and ensure you have the mobile news feed enabled. You can get more specific in Power Editor by targeting people who are traveling through your area only.