Google and Facebook have taken over the digital ad industry and don’t appear to be slowing down.
It’s no question that Facebook advertising is a prominent channel retailers & brands must be present in. However, different users have different needs and respond better to different advertising messages.
In the following guide, CPC Strategy and Socialbakers (one of the world’s largest social marketing & analytics solutions providers) team up to discuss how retail brands can improve their Facebook ad strategy by leveraging content optimization tools, and advanced targeting options to reach their customers.
FREE GUIDE: Facebook Audience Targeting & Content Performance
If you don’t have time to read through the entire guide, we’ve put together some quick highlights below:
Facebook Content Creation & Performance
Facebook Content is the new social currency but there’s a variety of challenges marketers face daily when it comes to content creation and delivering to the content objectives that impact their community and business.
Some of the main challenges Facebook marketers face today include:
1. Continuous content creation:
It’s hard to be consistently great when it comes to crafting messages that will appeal to your various audiences.
2. Figuring out what is relevant to your audience:
Content creators lean more and more on trending topics or events to help connect and drive their messages to the audiences. Marketers need to know more than ever what is interesting and relevant to optimize their content objectives. Overlooking what is relevant to the audience can significantly tank social performance.
3. Getting visibility on the busy feed:
Publishing at the historical conventional times—lunch, after work, weekends just doesn’t work anymore. With mobile, people are constantly connected and the best time to reach audiences has dramatically changed from traditional posting times.
4. Determining which content to invest in:
With more money being spent to achieve more in social media we have seen that there is a huge challenge marketers face in investing in the best content to gain the best return on their investment.
The majority of paid content is content that organizations should not have invested in. Poor quality content means significantly higher costs for reach, engagement and in the end reaching business objective goals.
According to Socialbakers, poor quality Facebook content can lead to:
- 40 Xs higher CPC
- 20% higher CPM/li>
- 4 times higher chance of negative feedback than the relevant content
Click here if you’d like to learn more about how to improve your Facebook content creation and performance.
Advanced Facebook Targeting Options
Once you’ve nailed down your creative, advertisers are presented with a handful of categories to tailor to your campaign’s objective. Each category acts as a layer, further defining your audience. The more layers you add, the more specific your audience definition will be.
Custom Audiences are a major component of Facebook targeting options. Although they may provide more value as a retargeting approach, they look to put advertisers in a position that helps businesses sell and market to customers they already know, and not explicitly tied to new markets.
Whether it’s retargeting existing customers or putting together a cohort of prospective buyers, Custom Audiences simplify the process of marketing to specific groups with scalable ads.
Lookalike Audiences are also available within the same section. They allow advertisers to target consumers who mirror or look similar to former or already existing customers they may have.
This audience option is incredibly valuable, as it allows advertisers to reach an entirely new group of prospective customers, identical to previously converted customers, they may not have found otherwise.
Additional Facebook advertisers can target via:
- Specific Web Pages
- Email List Segments or Tags
- Time on Site
- Engagement on Facebook
- Fans
- Behaviors
- Interests
- Demographics
Click here if you’d like to learn more on how to leverage advanced Facebook targeting options.
When to Post Your Facebook Content
Once, you’ve got your Facebook creative and targeting strategy determined, the next step is figuring out when to post and promote. Timing is everything and every day, social media marketers struggle to find the optimal time to publish their content.
According to Socialbakers, in today’s world content and messages are posted at blinding rates. The platform channels are busier than ever and ensuring your message is the one that is visible is extremely difficult.
Many rely on the good creative to gain visibility but it’s only a piece of the puzzle and often content is lost in the noise.
If figuring out when to post your content is something you struggle with, check out our recent interview “When is the Best Time to Run Facebook Ads?“ with MosesVelasco, Chief Product Evangelist at Socialbakers.