Boosted Posts and Facebook Ads are an affordable and effective way to market your business. If you’re wondering whether to use boosted posts or Facebook ads in your next marketing campaign, read on for a few helpful insights!
Posting to social media – and Facebook in particular – is easy. But, turning those posts into profit is much more difficult.
If you’re using Facebook to reach customers and you’re looking for ways to grow your engagement rate or your follower base, it may be time to consider a boosted post or an ad.
When thinking about creating an ad on Facebook, it’s important to create an appealing message that will resonate with your target audience. Essentially, the ad will run more effectively if it’s relevant to that audience.
For an effective Facebook ad, it’s important to have a catchy headline, creative images, provoking text and calls to action, and a link description.
Overall, these are the key elements of a Facebook Ad that are meant to attract ideal leads:
- A relevant and appealing message targeting a specific audience
- A catchy headline
- Engaging images
- Provocative text
- Calls-to-action
- A link description
Before you choose images or headlines, start by coming up with the message you want to convey to your target audience.
There are two ways you can use paid advertising on Facebook. You can create a Facebook Boosted Post or you can create an ad through Ads Manager.
Knowing whether to use Facebook Ads or Facebook Boosted Posts starts by identifying what your business wants to achieve.
So, what does a boosted post mean on Facebook? Simply put, it optimizes the page for likes, comments, shares, or overall brand awareness.
On the other hand, Facebook ads can optimize app installs, website conversions, video views, shop orders, and more.
What are Facebook Boosted Posts?
Facebook boosted posts provide a simple way to advertise your business. Boosting a post simply means using funds to expand the number of people who see that post on your page’s timeline. With boosted posts, you can target a specific audience of your choice and also decide to select Instagram for ad placements.
While boosts are the simplest way to advertise on the platform, they don’t have quite the same customization features as Facebook Ads.
When selecting the target audience for your boosted post, you can choose from the following criteria:
- Location
- People who like your page
- People who like your page and their friends
- People in your local area (or set a range covering a certain distance from you)
PRO TIP: Boost posts that have already proven successful, since you’ll know that they will resonate and promote engagement.
Facebook boosted posts also allow businesses to create a custom audience around a location, age range, interests, demographics, or behaviors. You can also narrow your audience by excluding people from viewing your ad.
Business owners love the fact that Facebook allows users to set a max budget and a timeframe. That means, if you run an ad for 10 days and set a $100 budget, you will spend $10 per day automatically, instead of budgeting based on a single day’s effectiveness. You’ll also see an estimated number of people your ad will reach, based on your budget and location. Typically, estimates are in the hundreds or thousands of people!
When targeting your ads, knowing which audience you want to target is key to success! If you’re looking to target your current customers or those that have interacted with your brand, running retargeting ads to your social media followers, newsletter subscribers, or current customers is ideal.
However, if you’re looking to spread the word to strangers about your brand, service, or product, prospecting ads are your best bet. Knowing the audience that you are speaking to will not only help you understand their pain points, but will help you connect with the right individuals that want what you have to offer.
What are Facebook Ads?
Facebook Ads are created through Ads Manager and offer greater customization solutions that can help your business reach its specific goals by targeting the audience you want most.
You can choose awareness, consideration, or conversion objectives to better optimize your ad. The platform also allows users to focus on increasing brand awareness locally, expanding reach, increasing traffic, generating messages, driving engagement, and more.
Facebook Ads are slightly more complex than post boosts but are very effective at delivering your business’s message to a large and targeted audience. When creating a Facebook Ad, you can choose to target either a custom audience or what is called a lookalike audience.
A custom audience is a group of your existing customers, which is pooled from existing customer data from the Facebook platform.
A lookalike audience lets you serve ads to people who are just like your existing customers.
After you choose a Facebook Ad audience type, you can select an ad placement. The placement selection will ensure that your post is visible either on the Newsfeed (sponsored ad), Messenger, Instagram, and Right Column ads. These ads will show up differently on your Facebook dashboard.
Ad formats on Facebook include:
- Facebook image
- Video
- Carousel
- Page post engagement
- Leads generation
- Messenger ads
Instagram formats include:
- Photo
- Video
- Carousel
- Instagram stories
You can even tailor your Facebook ads to look like your Instagram ads.
Measuring Your Facebook Advertising
Before you get started creating your first/next Facebook ad, it’s important to think about how you will track its performance.
You can use a Facebook pixel for your analytics, or you can rely on Facebook Insights to give you an overview of your ad’s analytics and record them in a spreadsheet.
Always strive to learn what worked and what didn’t from one campaign to another to be better informed on ways to twerk your ads for outcomes you desire.
Facebook Ads Best Practices
The following are some helpful tips that will enable you to successfully target your Facebook ads to the right audience. Not only will following them increase engagement with your brand, but being strategic in your ad creation will definitely lead to better sales!
- Know what you want as the end goal of your ad
- Experience with audience targeting
- Optimize for mobile
- Use GIFs and video content to get more engagement
- Conduct A/B tests (Facebook enables users to conduct split targeting ads)
- Use Instagram ads for greater engagement
- Make sure your copy sounds organic and not like an ad
Overall, when creating ads on Facebook, it is ideal to do some research on your target audience, competitors, and which platform is right for your business. Then, we recommend that you go small with your budget and test out how your ad works initially before you invest a larger budget in the campaign. Ideally, experiment, prototype, and tweak as much as possible when it comes to ads so that you get enough feedback to know which approach works best.
And if you need a bit more help with social media ads, you can browse some of our helpful articles that will help you reach your ideal audience and grow your brand awareness:
How to Set Up Facebook Ads for Your Brand
Should I Be Using Every Social Media Platform
Does Your Company’s Social Media Need a Makeover?
Got Social Strategy? Social Media Strategy Tips for Lead Generation
Social Media Engagement: The Response Is Greater Than the Post
Let Your Customers Help You Advertise: The Benefits of Location-Based Social Networks
As one of the top marketing agencies in Chicago, we continually look for new ways to promote and advertise our clients. Boosted posts and Facebook ads are a great way to reach new customers. If you believe Facebook Ads may be in your future, but you’re not sure how to execute them, contact us today to see how we can help!