media update’s Adam Wakefield spoke to Matan Atias, global client partner at Popimedia, about how businesses can effectively use Facebook, and why they should avoid using Boost, to market their brand and expand their market.
Why is the ‘Boost’ feature on Facebook an ineffective way for businesses to reach consumers on the platform?Boost offers businesses the wrong type of bidding to reach customers. It’s important to bear in mind that 90% odd of Facebook users are not engagers. By utilising the Boost functionality as a business, you are effectively bidding for engagers – as are the majority of community and campaign managers. This leaves around 10% of the audience, a very small, and highly saturated audience, which then becomes exceedingly expensive to reach, due to size and advertiser competition. And, this effort is being made for a target audience which does not, in fact, drive real business results.
How can a business best utilise Facebook to reach customers, if the Boost button is so ineffective?The first rule of Facebook advertising is to set your business objectives. Pair your business objectives with Facebook advertising objectives. These advertising objectives offer a critical guide to using Facebook as an effective business marketing tool.
For example, it’s premature for a newly launched organisation to set an objective to convert an audience. By adopting an inside-out approach, using a strategic and modular method, it is possible to attain sustainable growth and bottom-line results.
If your goal is to create awareness about your new business’s name, products, or services, your Facebook objective should correlate with that. In this instance, you should push to drive awareness to the right people, with the right message. This will inform the correct ad types, and it is key to test multiple ads on the platform.
If you employ an iterative process, by clearly setting out your business goals, aligning those goals to objectives, and deploying the right type of outreach, results will outstrip your spend – unlike with Boost, which will likely disappoint or not allow for scaling.
When producing content for Facebook, what two tips would you give to content creators so their content makes an impact?The first rule of marketing applies here – and is punished by the ad serving algorithm if you are off the mark: understand your audience. Only with deep, detailed knowledge of your audience, are we able to create content that is relevant.
This applies to both the customer and the prospect. Secondly, make that content meaningful. Either include a call to action, or offer something useful, for example.
Utilise the full bouquet of Facebook targeting only if necessary. This means if you need to you can target by age, location, interest, relationship status and more. However, only granulise if necessary. With the Facebook serving algorithm becoming far smarter over segmentation, deep granulation can actually harm your campaign. The tip is to provide additional data in the form of online and offline conversion data to move campaigns to return-on-ad-spend optimisation.
What are the two most obvious mistakes businesses make when using Facebook to promote their brand or product?Businesses must go back to brass tacks and honestly assess where they are in the business evolution. Once we’ve created a clear timeline and outlined goals, we can easily identify the correct objectives.
For example, if a client is attempting to drive website traffic rather than website conversions, Facebook as a platform will not achieve the desired business outcomes if the signals campaigns firing back are incorrect. Clicks are not conversions and often do not correlate.
Therefore, conversion and more upper funnel data are the important signals to use. By going back to basics, and understanding first the business’s goals, the next step is to match these with the full spectrum of objectives and ad types available on the platform to garner the best possible results.
For more information, visit
www.popimedia.com.
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