We all know how much potential Facebook has as a marketing platform. With billions of active users worldwide, and an advertising platform that makes it easy to find your intended audience, Facebook gives great opportunities to reel in plentiful leads with comparatively little outlay.
The flipside of that huge user base, however, is that everyone’s feed is saturated with content. People spend a lot of time scrolling, and rarely scrutinize every post that rolls by (to do so would quickly become exhausting!) So advertisers have to work hard to get their content noticed.
This presents a dilemma in budgetary terms. On the one hand, why spend more money when there are no guarantees that Facebook’s users will see your content? On the other, could spending more result in more eyes on your content (and therefore more chance of catching leads?)
What we recommend is to optimize your Facebook ad budget by optimizing your content. With a simple but sustained Facebook advertising strategy, tied to your overall enterprise resource strategy, you can hone your ads to bring in the best ROI possible without spending too much extra cash.
How can you do this without having to hire a social media agency? Let’s take a look.
Set clear objectives and goals
Clear goals and objectives ensure that you are only allocating funds where needed. When everyone has clarity on what you aim to achieve and by when, it is much easier to focus your budget where it is truly needed.
The best goals and objectives should be tightly aligned to your overall business strategy. This will not only help make your campaign perform to the best benefit of the business, it can also be of great help when setting your budget.
Make use of your ERP accounting system to gain insights from across your organization before setting your budget. This way you’ll be able to make sure it’s aligned with your overall strategy and company goals.
Choose the right ad format
Facebook offers several types of ad format:
- Video – a post containing video content.
- Image – a post containing a graphic or graphics.
- Carousel – a post showcasing up to ten videos or images in one ad, which the user can scroll through.
- Instant Experience – a full-screen ad which opens when someone on a mobile device taps your ad.
- Collection – an Instant Experience featuring multiple products in an immersive, browsable format.
Audience research should tell you which of these will work best for your audience. For example, if your audience tends to scroll Facebook on mobile devices, they may find carousel ads more accessible than someone using a desktop would, due to the touchscreen format.
Similarly, videos may be eye-catching and engaging, but if your target audience tends to scroll Facebook during work breaks or during their commute, they may not want to spend time watching a lengthy video. Instead, an image post which gets the relevant information across quickly and easily may be better.
By choosing the right ad format, you ensure that your budget is going towards something likely to bring results rather than on a format which your target audience won’t engage with.
Expand your Facebook ad funnel
Don’t make the basic digital marketing mistake of having a short advertising funnel. If your Facebook ad funnel heads straight from awareness to consideration to purchase, and then stops, it’s time to expand it.
Expanding your Facebook ad funnel in order to optimize your budget may seem counterintuitive, but it’s actually a great way to optimize your Facebook ad budget, your Facebook ad strategy, and even your marketing as a whole.
By expanding your advertising funnel to include extra stages (for example: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty, Advocacy), you give yourself the opportunity to gather extra, more granular, and more specific data on your customers and their behavior.
You can then cross-reference this data with funnels, data, and workflows on your cloud ERP systems. This will allow you to draw both wide and specific insights about how your customers interact with your content, where your investments are giving the most returns, which areas of your funnel could use more investment, and where you could divert and divest Facebook ad resources.
Create ads for every part of your funnel
It’s tempting to create ads for certain stages of your funnel, and just to track customer behavior through the rest. However, we recommend creating ads for every stage in your new, expanded Facebook ad funnel.
Won’t this cost more? Possibly, but the aim here is not to slash your budget, it’s to optimize it.
By creating ads for each stage of your Facebook ad funnel, you improve your chances of conversion. Adverts for every stage help to guide the customer through their journey, and nurture them to conversion. It reduces the chances that they will drop off at any point during their journey.
So, by creating ads for every stage of your Facebook ad funnel, you can improve your metrics and your conversion rate. Ultimately, this boosts your ROI, which makes it an excellent use of your budget.
Create split tests
Running an ineffective ad campaign is like pouring your budget down the drain. So it’s a very good idea to make sure that your campaigns work before you send them live.
Facebook offers a comprehensive ad testing service. Among the quickest and easiest tests to run are split or A/B tests, which give insight into which variables will perform best with your target audience.
Running split tests can be time consuming, but it is worth it to ensure that your ads will resonate with your audience.
Refine your ad
Once you’ve got the results from your tests, refine your ads to perfection. You may find that you need to run new tests after more substantial changes. Again, it’s worth it to make sure you’re backing a winner with your advertising budget!
When you are sure that your ads will resonate with your audience, and that they will help you to achieve your established goals, send them live. Also, you should know how to turn off facebook ads to manage your landing pages.
Monitor and adjust your ad campaigns
Constant monitoring and adjustment is key to advertising on a platform as variable and fast-changing as Facebook. Keep a close eye on your metrics, and if you notice any troubling patterns forming, go in and investigate. There are plenty of social media monitoring tools that can help you to do this.
It’s worth doing a lot of social listening around your ads. If you aren’t sure why an ad has stopped performing as well as it should, going through its comments (or other social media engagements with your brand) could reveal the reason.
Facebook makes it easy to adjust and refine ad campaigns, even when they are live, so don’t be afraid to adjust on the fly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is $5 a day enough for Facebook ads?
It depends on your advertising goals and your target audience. For some campaigns, $5 a day might be enough, but for others, it may not be sufficient.
How much should I budget for Facebook ads per month?
There is no set budget that works for every business, as it depends on factors such as your advertising goals, target audience, and competition. However, it’s recommended to start with a minimum of $500 per month for Facebook ads.
How much does it cost to get 1000 views with Facebook ads?
The cost to get 1000 views with Facebook ads can vary widely depending on factors such as audience targeting, ad format, and competition, but the average cost is around $7.19.
Conclusion
Through careful strategizing linked to your overall business goals, you can optimize your Facebook ad budget by ensuring that everything you post gets results.
Things like creating ads for every stage of your (expanded) Facebook advertising funnel may take up more of your budget initially. However, it will optimize your spending by bringing in more conversions and boosting customer loyalty.
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