How do you ensure that your Facebook Ads make the biggest impact possible? With over 1 billion active users, it can be tricky to reach your intended audience on Facebook. Check out these tips we’ve put together that can help you get the most out of your ads.

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Facebook is cracking down on overly promotional posts by restricting their organic reach. In what is being called the end or death (Melodramatic much?) of organic reach, brands are now finding that their Facebook posts are only being noticed by 1-2% of their Facebook fanbase.

In response to this change, one recommendation from Brian Razzaque, CEO of SocialToaster, is that brands set aside a budget for social ad spending in order to ensure their message can still be broadcasted to existing and potential customers on the popular social network. So, once you establish your budget, what’s next? How do you ensure that your ads make the biggest impact possible? With over 1 billion active users, it can be tricky to reach your intended audience on Facebook, so we’ve put together a few tips that can help you get the most out of your Facebook Ads:

Establish Goals

Before you even think about launching your first ad, you will need to put some thought behind the strategy of the campaign. After all, you wouldn’t go into war without a battle plan would you? The first thing you’ll have to decide is what do you want to achieve with your ad. Do you want more page likes, do you want to send people to your website or do you want to drive app downloads? Facebook gives you a few options to choose from. This decision determines the specific layout of the ad and will make the rest of the ad creation process and measuring the success of the ad a lot easier.

Even more important than setting goals, how are you going to track the conversion process of the ad to ensure whether or not the campaign is successful? Advertising isn’t the black hole it used to be. Ensure that whichever conversion tracking parameters you prefer are in place prior to launching any campaign. Not only will they help you calculate the ROI of the ad spend, they’ll also help you optimize and improve the campaign during its lifecycle.

Targeting the Right Audience

When creating your ad,spend a bit of time thinking through who you want to see it. Do you want to connect with existing fans and their friends, or do you want to reach a new audience? Are you interested in reaching women age 24 – 32, or are you targeting men that live in top 10 markets? The ads manager gives you the option to broadcast your message to a broad audience, but also allows you to narrow it down by location, age, gender, interests and other specific demographics.

Advanced tip, you can also import existing contacts (say, from an email marketing list that you have curated over the years) and Facebook will match the information with its user base.You can also tell Facebook to build a look-alike audience, to show your ads to individuals that have similar demographics to already converted customers. Use your end goal that we previously established to help guide your targeting.

Chose the Right Placement

Facebook offers several options for ad placement within their platform. You can have your ads shown on the right hand column of the page, as sponsored posts in the News Feed for desktop users or as sponsored posts in the News Feed for mobile users. To determine which medium is best for your needs, think about your target audience. Is your audience going to be using Facebook through mobile? According to Facebook, 78% of its users are on mobile and 30% are exclusively mobile. If you find your website is garnering a high volume of mobile traffic to your website, chances are your ads would benefit from specifically focusing on a mobile audience. Conversely, if your website, or conversion process, is not optimized for mobile, you probably wouldn’t want to send users to it through a mobile ad. Instead you would opt for one of the more desktop friendly ad unit.

Create and Test Different Ads

So now that you’ve decided what you want to achieve, who you want to reach, and where you plan to reach them, it’s time to run your ads! To make sure you’re ads are performing to their highest ability, use the Facebook Ads Power Editor to duplicate and create different variations of the ad to run simultaneously. You’ll want to make sure you split-test every variant of an ad during it’s life-cycle including its: headline, ad copy and accompanying image (especially the image). Use the analytics tools to determine which of these variant ads get the greatest response. The Power Editor can also help you make ads in bulk, to save you a bit of time once you figure out which ads and targeting work best for you and your audience.

Facebook ads are a great tool for getting your business noticed, but at SocialToaster, we know that’s only one component of a successful social marketing strategy. If you’re looking for the best social media marketing solutions for your company, contact us today!