Small businesses face the challenge of extremely limited budgets when it comes to promoting their business. Customers of small business are typically within a range of 1 to 2 kilometres. They cannot use traditional media like Outdoor or Bus Shelter or Print as it is too expensive and does not make commercial sense. Publishing regular pamphlets also involves considerable money with no guarantee of response. Hence, doing a staggered paid campaign on Facebook makes strong business sense for small businesses.
Facebook offers multiple targeting opportunities which include interest targeting, location targeting and content targeting. Once the campaign targeting parameters are set, Facebook’s advanced algorithms further refine the targeting and ensure that the message appears in the timeline on those users who are most likely to react to the advertising proposition. Your ad is shown only to users who match the profile of your ideal customer. For example, if you run a Yoga studio for females, you can target your sponsored post and paid ad to females within your age group who are interested in yoga, live, learn or work near your studio and have liked, shared or commented on Facebook content related to yoga.
When users log onto Facebook, they see content from their friends, associates and pages they have liked or are similar to the pages they have liked. They also see sponsored posts from national, regional and retail brands interspersed between these regular posts. These sponsored posts seamlessly blend in with the regular posts, with the only difference being that they are classified as ”sponsored”. When users view Facebook on a non-mobile device, they can also see proper ads on the right-hand side.
There are broadly 3 steps of executing a successful Facebook paid campaign:
- Create awareness about your business within your target audience
The best way to introduce your brand is to create and publish content that is related to your category but generic in nature. This way, you will attract the attention of your target audience without turning them off with an “oh, its an ad” expression. For example, if you’re a Yoga studio, you could create content on “5 tips for feeling fresh throughout the day” and share it as a sponsored post on Facebook with all relevant targeting in place. Your branding should be extremely subtle and appear at the end of the content piece. The first 4 tips should be unrelated to your business and the 5th tip should be about Yoga. Your target audience should believe the post to be truly informative and not done with the objective of hardcore advertising.
- Show people that you are an expert or most preferred in your category
Over a series of such generic article-based posts, your target audience would have become familiar with your brand and would probably have started liking your post and your page. Now, you should persuade them to begin trusting your brand as the expert or most preferred. Your content should now focus on your business, i.e. Yoga. Content pieces titled “How to de-stress with Yoga” or “How to choose the right Yoga training studio” make sense now, with your branding becoming slightly more prominent, but still subtle. When choosing the targeting parameters, choose only those people who reacted to the first set of posts. The users who react to the second set of content pieces will be included in the targeting parameter for our third set of content pieces.
- Make your full pitch
After herding your target audience together and moving them towards a base which has reacted to your first and second set of content pieces, this is the time to make a direct pitch and actually sell your product or service. “Discover true health through Yoga – Join Yoga Studio and begin your journey towards personal and professional success.” Content pieces with similar titles will now dominate your Facebook marketing campaign.
To summarize the above, if you’re a small business, you need to look closely at doing Facebook paid campaigns. The 3 steps of a successful campaign are:
- Create awareness about your business within your target audience
- Show people that you are an expert or most preferred in your category
- Make your full pitch