Welcome back to the Bean Media Blog! If it’s your first time, we aim to use this blog to help business owners out there to better understand how they can use digital marketing. Today we want to talk about social media advertising and how you can achieve your goals realistically. Years ago we primarily worked with Google Ads, but as META has improved their ad platform, and provided agency-focused personal assistance, we’ve found much success with moving some budget into Facebook and Instagram. We work with our good pal Nic L. at Meta on a weekly basis to ensure we are always up to speed with new tools and tips, as well as ensuring our strategy and concepts are up to Meta best practices. The personal assistance is a major difference maker for us in providing confidence in the system.
Let’s talk about how your business can utilize Meta advertising to achieve your digital marketing goals!
- Page Likes
- Awareness
- Video Views
- Traffic
- Lead Gen
Page Likes
You’ve probably seen a “page like” ad before, but why would someone pay for likes? Well, the idea behind page like ads is to maximize your budget and steer “paid” traffic into your “organic” bucket. We consider Facebook to be somewhat of a “pond” that the user feels is “theirs,” a feed that is dedicated to things they like, whereas the vast Google Display Network would be more of a vast ocean, where the user journeys out and isn’t sure where their journey may take them.
By fishing for page likes with a paid budget, you can put your brand into that user’s pond, so that more of your organic on-page content is seen by them once they “like” your page. This allows you to begin your ongoing organic relationship with them, where you can establish trust and faith in your service or product so that when they are ready, they already know where they’re going.
Awareness
Back to the “ocean vs pond” analogy. When the user is perusing their Facebook or Instagram feed, they know what to expect, but there’s a lot of content flying in front of their face every second. Their pond is serving them up their algorithm, while others are being served theirs. When we began utilizing custom audiences in the Google Display Network years ago, we loved the idea of being able to affordably place our ads in front of ONLY the right users through targeting. The same logic applies to awareness ads.
Each of these “strategies” that Meta provides will have a cost associated, but page likes and awareness are a great way of having a paid presence without breaking the bank. Because awareness is affordable, it’s a terrific strategy for smaller to medium-sized companies who may want to lift some of their content to attract more eyeballs and grow more engagement, but with paid audience targeting you can choose exactly who you want to see that message, which is a huge advantage.
Video Views
Another way to utilize Meta for getting your messaging out is with the Video Views intention. This may seem simple, but has a lot of ability to get creative and competitive with your messaging. By utilizing video views in paid Meta advertising, you can get an idea of how much of your video a user is watching, to test to see how effective it is on your user. You can run longer videos or shorter videos, and you have control over what placements you want to run your ad on.
Reels and Stories have become much more popular on Meta since the inception of TikTok, and it’s subsequent “tall” video style has also become more popular. By being able to place your video ads in different formats, in different places, you can get a lot of quality messaging out, with the ability to custom target your audience with creative audience creation methods.
You can even create an audience to run a future ad to from users who viewed 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 50%, or other levels of viewership. Basically, if someone watched 50% of your video ad, you can consider them a bit interested, and use anyone who watched 50% as an audience to show a future ad to.
Traffic
As mentioned, each of these approaches will have a different cost to them, and traffic will be a bit more expensive than awareness, page likes, or video views. You can also utilize engagement calls-to-action (CTAs) for direct messaging or calls, but if you want to send a user to your website you can use traffic. This is where you will expect your user to leave Facebook or Instagram to take action on a landing page or product page on your site.
The goal of a traffic campaign is to convert. Whether you’re looking to sell a product or service, generate phone calls or contact forms, if you want action on your website, you need to use traffic. The CTA button has options to test and try out to see what works best, but know that cost will be higher for traffic. By using the Meta Pixel, you can create events on your website to help track the quality of the traffic you’re getting.
Example, someone landed on your website, and filled out a contact form. If you have your event setup for a Lead, you can create a custom audience from all the people who filled out that form (or any event, click, pageview etc) and run a future ad at that audience.
Lead Gen
Lead Gen (lead generation) is the most expensive in terms of cost of these 5 approaches, but when flowing, can also be the most lucrative for Return-on-investment (ROI). If you have a service or product that you need leads for, you can use traffic to drive the user to a landing page to take action, but you can also utilize Meta Lead Gen ads so the user never has to leave their “pond.” The native (inside platform) lead gen form will open up when the user clicks your CTA (call to action) button, but instead of going out to your website you can create your own form right in Meta so the user can provide their contact details immediately.
This is a great approach, especially if you have the budget to dedicate, but it isn’t easy. You can’t expect someone to be in an extremely aggressive buying mindset while perusing their “pond,” but you can if you have the right target, the right message, and you have established trust over time. Someone probably isn’t going to fill out the form if it’s their first time ever seeing your brand, because they just don’t know you yet, but if you are practicing good organic content creation, you certainly can achieve leads through Meta.
What’s Best for Your Business?
We understand social media can be frustrating to get to and/or keep up on, and that’s why we provide both organic and paid social media marketing strategies. We can help the lift on creating graphics, blogs, videos, podcasts, or any other type of content you need, but we are also seasoned in targeted advertising on Meta. The two work best in tandem, but if you’re struggling to see ROI from your social media endeavors, don’t be shy! We can help! Just reach out via our contact form or by phone and we can start thinking about your strategy today!