In our most recent episode of the Marketing Strategy Show Kym was joined by Angela Ponsford, social media strategist and co-partner of Dotti Media to discuss Facebook Advertisements and common mistakes she sees in here work. Check it out here if you missed it.

Angela’s background

• Started Dotti Media 4 years ago, focusing on Social Media Strategy
• In the last 3 years has shifted its focus solely onto Facebook Advertising
• Before starting Dotti Media Angela was a forensic chemist and she feels there is a lot of similarities in the two areas: both require good analytical skills, looking at data, problem solving in looking at what’s working and what isn’t working
• There’s a lot of courses, Dotti Media offers courses showing you how to add Pixels to your website. Dotti Media also offers case studies for re-targeting
• Dotti media also has a blog full of helpful articles including “seven things to check before your next Facebook Campaign: Choose the right objective” and many more.

Why do you need Facebook Advertising? 

• Generally, most your customers are on Facebook, either on their personal page chatting to friends, or on their business page trying to grow their organization
• Facebook has over 17,000,000 monthly active users in Australia so if you aren’t trying to reach any of them you are cutting yourself off from a massive audience
• Linkedin can be great for building business 2 business relationships but most people are on Facebook more often and at different times of the day
• The primary reason you should be on Facebook is simply because that’s where your customers are.
• Facebook is getting so much smarter, its showing your ads to the right people. If you had asked a year ago what’s the most important part of running Facebook ads was she would’ve said you need to get your targeting right, she doesn’t believe that, it’s simply not true anymore. 

Where to start with Facebook Advertising?

1. Your first goal should be to get 500 followers, then look at creating more engagement by paying for the boosted ads
2. Before you run Facebook ads, you need to create a decent Facebook page
3. A lot of people will say “it’s too hard’, ‘I’m too late to the game” or “I am never going to be able to build a big page on Facebook” but the biggest thing with Facebook advertising is to just get started, start building and using ads on a small scale and the key for organic engagement or paid traffic is having engaging content, or interesting/appealing content
4. At the start, it’s not about the numbers alone rather the more important factor is the content you are creating
5. You should be paying for followers if you don’t have at least 500-1000 fans, it is a good idea to pay for fans before you start paying for ads on Facebook as Facebook restricts the number of times a random Facebook user can view your ad, however if they have liked the page they user is able to see the ad several more times, giving you more bang for your buck in that regard
6. So for a small business, five dollars a day and you’d want to build up a fan base of people who are at least aware of your brand and that you can then consequently show an ad to later down the line
7. Always be clear what you want to get out of the ad.

Different types of Facebook Ads

• Page like campaigns or engagement campaigns – these are ad campaigns on Facebook that are created solely with the goal to get more page likes. You may have seen examples along the lines of “like our page for up to the minute Facebook Ad strategies from the experts”
• Page Post engagement – this is essentially the same as the page like campaigns with the exception being the goal of these ad campaigns is to get more engagement on your posts rather than the page itself
• Traffic campaigns – these are ad campaigns with the goal of getting people to click through to your website.
• Conversion campaign – these ads are the ones that require action on your part usually filling in your contact details in exchange for a free resource or a regular newsletter
• Product catalogue sales campaign – these are one of the newest types of ad campaigns Facebook offers and these are if you have an e-commerce store on Shopify or Woo Commerce, this type of ad will allow you to dynamically show items from your shopping cart to people in the newsfeed. You may have seen something like this say if you were searching for holidays in Fiji, then you started seeing frequent ads for Fijian holidays

Common mistakes made when using Facebook Advertising

• A common mistake people make when building Facebook pages is asking “should I pay for followers?” As you may know there are hundreds of services based out of India and Asia promising “guaranteed followers” or “get a thousand likes now” and businesses commonly assume that more likes mean more people will see my page.
• This can sometimes be the case but isn’t a good rule of thumb to abide by
• Angela believes in some cases paying for followers is perfectly fine in scenarios where you have say less than 1000 page likes but Angela advises against paying for followers from India or Asia for example.
• A common problem Angela sees with people using Facebook Advertising is when a client will say “well that ad tanked” without a proper understanding of the goal of their advertisement / did the ad reach their goal
• Angela believes if you are going to pay for followers make sure they are in an area you want to target.
• Say you operate your business out of Melbourne you would want to be building prospects who are also in the Melbourne area or if you were a national business that can help people around Australia then you would want to be getting followers Australia wide (within your demographic)
• Angela also advises against paying for followers generally as an effective Facebook page is one with a lot of regular engagement whereas if you pay for followers from a click farm for example these are likely to be page visitors who liked the page, viewed/liked/commented on a single post and never interacted again.
• You don’t need to be posting three times a day unless that is leading you somewhere down the road to ultimately making a sale, then it is a waste of time
• A lot of people get caught in this dilemma of “I need to be posting three times a day, now of day and it takes up all my time” so they spend all their time creating their three posts and never spend any money on paid traffic, when a much better use of their time and money would be to just sit down and logically think what do I want to achieve?
• Video consumption is massive these days, you know people like to see the face behind the brand or the business.
• Most people assume video is too hard or they get embarrassed and shy so they don’t do it, so if you do create video content you are ahead of the pack

Boosting a Facebook Post

• If you want people to come to your website and buy your products, then boosting a post isn’t the best course of action for you as boosting a post is designed to get increased engagement on the post within Facebook, so Facebook will optimize it to get likes, comments and shares on the post
• A scenario where you might want to boost a post is say you have a post that you share on the page, and for whatever reason you think it’s a great post, you think it’s useful for your audience and for some reason it doesn’t get any engagement up front and if it doesn’t get any engagement then Facebook won’t show it, so it could’ve been you posted in the middle of the night when none of your followers were online so it did not get any engagement so Facebook thought this is a rubbish post we aren’t going to give it organic reach
• You might want to boost a post when you put a post out and it gets the organic engagements straight off the bat, then you might want to boost the post so you show it to even more people
• If you want to get more people to your website put a link to your website in a post then boost that post so it reaches more people