So, you’ve chosen your ad types, written creative, ran and optimized your campaign. What’s next?
Evaluating Success
It’s a fairly straightforward process to decide if your campaign was successful. Did you get fans? Conversions? Sign ups? Did you fulfill your campaign’s original goals? That should be easy to measure.
The optimization strategies outlined in my previous column should have allowed you to make the most of the dollars you spent on Facebook. You’ve (hopefully) come away feeling satisfied that it was money well spent.
Don’t forget about the less tangible successes of the campaign. Not only did you get fans or sign-ups, but you now know more about the users who are interested in your product or brand. You’ve learned about the messaging that resonates best with different groups of people, or the keywords that drive the highest conversion rates.
Take time to look at the data on a deeper level. Isolate individual ad elements and evaluate their performance over the lifetime of the campaign, using the important metrics you determined during the optimization phase.
Look for trends or interesting data points to pull out. Perhaps older males way outperformed younger males, but middle-aged females outperformed both. Maybe creative focused on your product’s features, and that had higher click-to-like rates than copy that was more brand-centric.
Making The Most Of What You’ve Learned
One of the most obvious ways in which to use the data is to guide the creation of future Facebook ad campaigns. Use what you’ve learned to run an even more efficient campaign the next time. As we discussed before, there are a wealth of ad types and targeting options that are available to advertisers. Take advantage of them!
Get more fans by targeting people who you know will be interested. If [cooking] was a low-cost, high-volume keyword for the first campaign, try targeting users with interests in home and garden magazines, popular chefs, or cooking shows for your second go-around. If college-educated users had high click-to-like rates, look into targeting alumni of specific colleges.
Once you’ve acquired said fans, think about how you can utilize them. It’s not enough to get them; you have to keep them engaged.
Create Page Post ads to promote specific content on your page and boost your EdgeRank. Retarget fans with a conversion-focused campaign. Users who have already expressed an affinity for your brand by liking it are much more likely to sign up for a sweepstakes or submit their email for a mailing list. Try Facebook’s new Offer Ads, which allow business owners to create coupons for services or products. Turn those new Facebook fans into legitimate consumers.
Outside Of Facebook
The information that you’ve generated through Facebook advertising is not limited to Facebook. It can easily be applied to other media channels, and you can use the data to inform your entire marketing strategy.
Through keyword testing, perhaps you uncovered a population of users outside of your normal customer pool, which you haven’t been reaching with your traditional approach. You now have an entirely new understanding of who your customer is.
Creative-wise, you can also convert Facebook to SEM, for example. If product-focused text does indeed have a higher CTR, think about tweaking some of your SEM copy to focus similarly. If it’s the brand name that’s doing it on Facebook, it’s likely that it will also resonate well on Google.
Once you feel comfortable on Facebook, take your brand or product to other social platforms. Twitter is obviously the first that comes to mind. Try promoted Tweets (see below) to get your content out to more Twitter users, or use Promoted Accounts, to encourage users to Follow you.
Although Twitter is quite different in many ways, it’s easy to see how the interests of your Facebook fans would map to users on Twitter. If your Facebook fans like [cooking], it is safe to assume that potential Twitter followers would feel similarly.
Keep Trying!
Don’t let this be your first and last foray into the world of Facebook advertising. It can certainly be daunting to start out, but you’ll learn quickly as you go. The aim of this column was to help you feel confident enough to advertise on Facebook. Hopefully, you now understand the different elements of a Facebook ad, how to create a campaign, and how to optimize your ads for best performance.
Keep in mind that Facebook requires (and deserves) attention. Continue to build your page and keep your existing fans engaged.
Also remember that Facebook is constantly rolling out new capabilities for advertisers. Stay up-to-date with the latest developments. Be willing to try new things, to experiment, and you’ll be rewarded with a robust and active consumer fan base.
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