Maximizing Your Next Facebook Ad Campaign

Every online business owner today knows that social media are critical tools for marketing. While you can place ads on websites, make videos, or send out emails, online campaigns are sometimes hopelessly ineffective without a social media thrust on one or more of the many social media channels.

What would have costs thousands of marketing dollars a decade ago, businesses can now achieve on Facebook for as little as two to three dollars a day. You can target groups by extremely specific interests, and most of the work is cut out for you, as Facebook users embed searchable profile information directly into their pages. You can control exactly who sees your ad — men, women, 20-somethings, jazz enthusiasts, vegetarians, you name it.

What many of these same business owners don’t know, however, is how to maximize the results of their social media campaigns on Facebook on a bare bones budget. Facebook is affordable, but if you follow these strategies, you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition:

1.  Reward loyalty. Social media marketing campaigns are not all about gaining new customers. A great way to use Facebook for marketing is to reward your loyal customers. Reach out to your customer base and have them like your page, offering a prize or discount in return. At an impressively affordable rate, you can send out ads to all the customers who have liked your page, reminding them of your business in a less intrusive way than sending an email.
2. Search for new customers. One of the advantages of Facebook, as noted above, is that it is fairly simple to find an audience that will respond to and resonate with your business. If you run a blog about running, for example, there will be an obvious customer base that will respond to your ads. Runners often put “running” in their interests, and sometimes will like race events as well as shoe and athletic ware brands. You can use this information to guide your advertising efforts. Furthermore, a search on Amazon for running gear will also give you recommendations based on the search, which might give you more leads about where to look for customers and where to run ads.
3. Leave no stone unturned. While there are obvious customer pools for most kinds of businesses, there are also less obvious groups of customers who would respond your ads as well. By researching the pages of people who “like” your page, you can identify common interests and use those to expand your ad campaign to include people you might not have thought to reach out to otherwise. For example, perhaps people who run also enjoy the book Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Trends such as that can be used to change the course of your marketing efforts.

Knowing where to put your marketing eggs, so to speak, is never an easy task. But by experimenting with Facebook’s very inexpensive ad options, you can easily uncover new target markets and bring new customers to your business.

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.