Op-ed by Geoffrey Setiawan, esd & associaties
Social media marketing
Over the years, Facebook has become a serious tool where marketers can gain an extremely high ROI through advertisements. For example, a report by Nanigans shows that retail businesses that advertised on Facebook experienced a 152 percent ROI on average in 2013. With 1.23 billion active users (as of Jan. 14), there is a good bet that your audience is on Facebook.
The large user base, paired with Facebook’s powerful targeting capabilities, allows marketers to effectively target their advertisements to a very specific audience segment. Also, because Facebook ads are done through a digital medium, every aspect of them can be measurable. With the right analytics in place, you can track all stages of your campaign’s conversion funnel, letting you adjust and optimize your campaigns very quickly. Despite the platforms potential, many businesses are still struggling to get stellar results from Facebook advertising. For example, recent research from Forrester shows that businesses, on average, have the least satisfaction from their Facebook marketing efforts.
Are these marketers missing something? Odds are, yes.
Facebook has many tools out there that are quite hidden from the ‘average’ advertiser. These tools can give you valuable insights, beyond just CTRs (Click Through Rates) and CPCs (Cost per Clicks), into the granular performance of your advertisements, allowing you to optimize your campaigns in a very short amount of time. Here’s a list of five tools that help us effectively optimize our marketing campaigns:
Tool #1: Power Editor
If you are not using Power Editor as a launchpad for your advertisements, then you are really missing out on many cool features that showcase the power of Facebook ads. Power Editor is a Facebook plugin that acts as an extension of the self-serve ad platform. You can only download it through the Google Chrome Browser. Facebook’s help center has a thorough FAQs section that will guide you through the installation and execution aspects if you are not yet familiar with the tool.
This tool allows you to access resources that are not currently available in the self-serve ad platform, such as Custom Audiences and advanced targeting options (we will take a deeper dive into this later). Basically, any new advertising feature that Facebook launches goes to Power Editor first.
Tool #2: Core Audiences
Back in February, Facebook introduced a new targeting feature called Core Audiences (And yes, this is only available in Power Editor as of right now). This feature includes improved demographic, interest, and behavior-based targeting. As you can see from the image above, this new feature allows you to target very specific aspects of your target audience.
You can even boil down to the target’s income or specific positions within their workplace. In his recent blog post, Jon Loomer (If you are not following his blog yet, you should) details the expanded targeting options that this feature brought, along with some tips on how to use it to your advantage.
Tool #3: Lookalike Audiences
When done right, the Lookalike Audiences can be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. When we run campaigns here at our agency, the advertisements that are shown to the Lookalike Audiences tend to perform in the top percentile of all tested social media ads.
The Lookalike Audience is an extension of Facebook’s Custom Audience tool. This feature essentially allows marketers to upload contacts via phone numbers, emails, Facebook IDs, or Mobile advertiser IDs and send them over to Facebook. Facebook will then parse the uploaded contacts against their database and return to you more contacts that Facebook deems similar to the ones you uploaded.
To give an example of how this can work toward your advantage, assume that you have just launched a campaign to collect leads in exchange for the downloads of your “Guide to Email Marketing.” If you upload the leads you collected and give them to Facebook, you can then assume that the Lookalike Audience you end up with will consist of people who are interested in email marketing or similar topics. With this expanded contact list, you can then use them to advertise your next white paper or content relating to emails.
Tool #4: Dark Posts
Besides effective targeting, another important factor contributing to the success of your advertisements is how effectively you conduct your tests. Because Facebook ads are strictly digital, it is very easy for marketers to conduct A/B or multivariate tests to continually optimize the campaign.
Facebook marketers do this all the time with their “Like” ads. But the more important question is how do you A/B test your promoted posts without having to publish all the posts to your wall? Your answer is dark posts.
Through Power Editor, you are able to create posts that exist within your page’s backend, but is not published for all your fans to see. This feature is extremely useful if you are conducting tests on your promoted posts. Let’s say that you are launching a campaign to gather more gym memberships through promoted posts. To optimize the campaign, you want to test the ads for:
Copy
CTA
Creative
Targeting
Without creating dark posts, your only option is to post each of these posts at different times to avoid spamming your fans. But this would not provide a very good situation to conduct your A/B tests as time will act as an added variable. By creating dark posts however, you are able to launch and end all of your test ads at the exact same time, giving you a more accurate representation of what worked and what did not.
Tool #5: Custom Reports
A/B testing your ads is a great step towards success. However, with so many variables to test, this process can become extremely time consuming and may not be economical if you are running a small campaign. There must be a more efficient way to find valuable performance insights about your ads, right?
Sometime in the middle of 2013, Facebook introduced their new custom reports. Their announcement of the added reporting features was small and not many marketers were aware of this update. The new custom reports added many new features (beyond just CTRs, CPCs, and Conversion Rates) to include statistical breakdown by gender, age, location, and placement.
How can this feature help you? Without conducting A/B tests, you can now know the combination of age groups, gender, geographic locations, and placements that yield the highest performance.
Staying updated on your advertising tools
Over the past few years, Facebook has been making many drastic improvements to their advertisement platform, including the addition of Partner Categories or Core Demographics. They have even added new advertising mediums like video ads.
As marketers, we need to stay updated on all these updates as these new tools will only make our jobs easier, allowing us to optimize campaigns in a much faster and more efficient manner.
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About the author: Geoffrey Setiawan leads esd in the development of digital marketing strategies, execution, and measurement. He integrates various digital marketing tactics, such as SEO, PPC, Social Media, Content Marketing, and Email Marketing to generate and nurture leads for clients across B2B and B2C sectors.
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