Facebook’s recent algorithm change has been top of mind for marketers planning their 2018 campaigns and strategies. Why? Because businesses and brands must now rely heavily on paid advertising if they want to continue to reach and grow their audience.
“We all need to become better media planners”, said Greg Allum, Head of Social for global marketing agency Jellyfish stated.
Marketers must understand how to plan targeted media campaigns on social platforms in 2018 to see results. Whether you are running a contest, offer, or giveaway on Facebook, you will need to pair this strategy with an ad campaign if you want people to see your post.
This is why we’ve created this 3-step guide on how to setup Facebook ad campaigns that will drive relevant traffic to your online contests, provide deeper insights about your target audience, and generate more leads for your business.
Step 1: Research Your Audience Using Facebook’s Tool “Audience Insights”
Audience Insights is a highly underutilized tool that helps marketers target their ads more effectively. The key advantage to using Audience Insights is that it allows you to learn more about your audience before you put your valuable marketing budget on the line.
This tool can be accessed through Facebook Ads Manager (or using this link) and provides both behavioral and demographic data about your current audience and potential prospects.
Audience Insights aggregates its data through two sources:
- Self-reported data on Facebook gathered as people share on their personal profiles
- Third-party data partners that is matched to Facebook user IDs
This data can be used to not only create more targeted campaigns, but also build out more precise audience personas and prompt new content and campaign ideas for future content strategies.
Are you sold yet?
Now that you have an idea of benefits of this free tool, let’s learn how it works.
First, you will create a new audience.
The first prompt you will see when you create an audience will ask you to choose from the following options:
- Everyone on Facebook – This will show data for all Facebook users (and this is the option we suggest if you are building an audience and don’t have a large following on your Facebook or email list).
- People connected to your page – This will show data for your page fans (and we recommend analyzing them first if you have a very large audience already in place to learn more about them).
- A custom audience – This option lets you learn more about people on your email list or visitors that have gone to your website. (We recommend analyzing them first if you have a very large audience here already)
Second, you will define your audience.
On the left side of the page, you will see an option to narrow down and define your target audience. Enter the countries and/or cities you would like to target, their age and gender, and their interests.
Note: Avoid entering generic interests
Unless you have a large marketing budget, we suggest narrowing your audience to a reach of 200,000 – 500,000 people. When an audience is too large, it becomes much harder to compete with companies that have very large budgets to spend.
Now, let’s say that you sell home fitness equipment, instead of targeting the interest “fitness”, consider targeting a more defined interest like “treadmill” or a similar brand like “Bowflex”.
Unless you have a large marketing budget, we suggest narrowing your audience to a reach of 200,000 – 500,000 people. When an audience is too large, it becomes much harder to compete with companies that have very large budgets to spend.
Once you have the main categories defined you can even create more defined niche campaigns using advanced categories like behaviors, relationship status, education, financial information, home, language, and more.
For example, using the same example, you could target the relationship status “single” and target the home category “homeowner” to hyper-target a segment of the population that would likely purchase at home gym equipment and care about their health to attract a mate.
As you define your audience you will see the middle section changing, showing the number of monthly active people that fit the audience, and the other categories under “Demographics” changing.
Third, it’s time to learn more about your audience.
You will see six categories across the top of the middle section:
- Demographics
- Page Likes
- Location
- Activity
- Household
- Purchase
This is where you can explore and discover new test audiences that are relevant to your target audience.
For example, under “Page Likes” you will see the top categories your potential audience is interested in and the most popular Facebook pages within these categories.
For example, when targeting an audience that is interested in “Treadmills”, the page likes category shows that it is highly likely your audience will also like the page “Treadmill Doctor”.
You will see an affinity score, which tells you the odds your audience will like a page compared to the rest of Facebook users. If this score is high, it is likely worthwhile to create a test audience targeting users who like this page. You can use the same process for other categories like location and purchase behaviors.
Lastly, save each target audience as you go.
Hit “Save” for each new audience segment, and use relevant titles that clearly define what the audience is. This will be very helpful when you go to create your campaigns, so you know which ad copy to place with each audience.
Step 2: Create Your Campaigns for Your Contests
Before we walk through the ad setup process, it’s important to have the following prep work done to give your ads the best chance for success.
- Have the contest or promotion page ready to go, making it easy for your audience to sign up. Woobox makes this super easy, and allows you to craft eye-catching, mobile-optimized pages that you can easily link with your Facebook ads.
- Make sure to have a few attention-grabbing headlines, clear copy that includes the contest information and the prize information, and instructions on how to enter.
- Images to go with your copy with the correct ad specs
Once you have everything ready, you can now begin to set up your ad campaigns.
- Go to Facebook Ads Manager and create a new campaign. Make sure to give it a name that references the contest so you can properly reference the campaign later.
- Pick the campaign objective. We suggest “Traffic” to drive traffic to your contest landing page.
- You will be taken to the “Ad Set” stage where you should name the Ad Set according to the target audience details. You will then choose where to send the traffic. If you are using Woobox, click “website” and you will be able to insert the Woobox landing page link later on. You will then choose the audience, which you have already defined and created. You will choose “Use a Saved Audience” and see all of the audiences saved in the drop-down options.
Next, you will see an option called “placements” and we suggest using “Automatic Placements”, especially if you are new to creating ad campaigns. Facebook does a great job optimizing the locations your ads will perform best.
And finally, you will set the budget and schedule. This should be based on your marketing budget and can be adjusted and updated later on in the monitoring phase. You can adjust the bid amount on the budget in advanced settings, however, we suggest choosing “Automatic” as Facebook does a great job here getting your clicks for the best price.
You can also set a start and end date for your ad based on your contest timeline.
The final steps are to insert the contest link (which Woobox makes simple and easy), uploading the imagery or video associated with the ad campaign, and inserting the headline and copy. You will see your Ad Preview on the right-hand side. Once everything is uploaded, you are ready to hit “Confirm” and launch your ad.
Step 3: Monitor Your Campaigns
A mistake that many marketers make is what we like to call “setting and forgetting” their Facebook ads. Once your ads are up and running, your work is not done. It is important to monitor how the campaigns are performing.
To find reports, go to the Account Overview section, go to Ads Manager and then click Account Overview.
You can then select the dates you want to view and customize the metrics you would like to see (which should be based on your goals for your campaign, such as “link clicks”).
Be sure to look at which campaigns are performing the best and the worst, and adjust the budgets in these accordingly, so you can optimize the results for the remainder of your ad duration.
Ready to grow your audience and generate massive reach for your contests with your new Facebook Ad creation skills?
Woobox is here to help you easily create an eye-catching contest, giveaway, coupon, instant win, and much more, so that you can focus on your business and strategies. Woobox is free to sign-up and create a user-generated content campaign.
Discover how easy it is to incentive and excite your customers. Try Woobox now.
