10 tips for marketing your business

With the New Year almost upon us you are probably looking for more customers, so are examining marketing options.

Advertising on Facebook is one option that you do not want to overlook, with one billion people a day on Facebook and constantly improving advertising options, advertising on Facebook can be incredibly cost effective, used the right way. It is extraordinary in offering you the ability to select a particular target audience, monitor the effectiveness of your ads, and modify the ads to adjust to responses.

To get maximum results from Facebook Advertising, you need to take a few key steps.

Step 1. Begin with a Clear Goal.

Two of the most common goals would be to generate sales directly from the ad or to increase awareness of your business while building a contact/email list for future marketing efforts. Everything about your ad should be constructed with your primary goal in mind.

Step 2. Choose your Geographic Area.

Does your business only serve your local area? Do you sell products that can easily be shipped anywhere in the world? For either of these cases or anything in between, you can tailor the regions where your ads will appear to match your needs.

Step 3. Customise your Ad for the Demographic you wish to Reach.

Because of the information Facebook collects about its users, you can define your advertisement’s target market based on age, gender, location, interests, or several other criteria. Combining those criteria allows you to be specific when you construct your ad for that target.

Step 4. Direct your Ad to Existing Contacts.

Upload a customer or contact email list. Any of the people on that list that are also Facebook members will receive your ad.

Step 5. Set your Budget.

You can choose to run ads continuously or for a particular period, and you can select how much you are willing to pay. Budgets are set as a maximum daily expenditure or total expenditure over the duration of the campaign.

Step 6. Use Images.

Images receive far more interest and generate higher response rates than text-only ads. Consider creating multiple ads with different images to test them to examine their relative effectiveness.

Step 7. Use Facebook Ad Manager.

Facebook Ad Manager accumulates metrics on responses to your ads and presents them in comparison to the goals you set when the campaign was initiated. Using the information available, you can alter the campaign, change the budget or target market or even completely re-create the ad. A big plus – Facebook Ad Manager is available as a smartphone app.

Step 8. Use Conversion Tracking.

With Conversion Tracking, you place JavaScript code on your website that tracks visitors’ actions. That JavaScript sends information to Facebook, where it is compared with their record of prospects that looked at or clicked on your ad. Among other things, you can determine how many people viewed your website or made a purchase after seeing your Facebook ad.

Step 9. Boost your posts.

Boosting a post is a different type of advertising. Boosting a post causes it to appear higher in the News Feed of the ad recipients, thus raising the likelihood that it will be seen. You can have any post boosted, increasing its exposure.

Step 10. Always include a Call to Action.

Salespeople know they should “Always ask for the sale.” Professional salespeople do not present information to prospects and hope they will choose to buy. They offer the information and ask the prospect to act – to make the purchase. You need to do that in every ad you create. Depending upon your desired response, include buttons or links asking the reader to respond. “Click Here to Buy,” “Like This Page,” or “Click Here to Receive My Newsletter” for example.

There is even more to Facebook advertising but if you start here and follow these tips in creating Facebook ads and you can expect a great response to your advertising.

BREAKING NEWS

Facebook: Tests New Professional Services Feature: Facebook is “in the early stages of testing a way for people to easily find more Pages for the services they’re interested in.”

Rolls Out Improved Video Publishing Tools: Facebook introduced “two new tools for embedding public videos and posts from Facebook: a new embedded video player API and support for the oEmbed standard.

Introduces Live for Verified Pages: Facebook is “beginning to roll out the ability for verified Pages to share live video using Facebook for iOS.”

Facebook at Work Will Release Soon: Facebook at Work “is expected to launch in the coming months, after spending a year in tests.”

Twitter: Twitter Tests Promoted Tweets on Logged-Out Accounts: Twitter is running a private beta test that allows select marketers in the US, UK, Japan and Australia “to reach the over 500 million people who visit Twitter each month to keep in touch with what’s happening without logging in.”

Twitter Experiments With New Timeline Format: Twitter is “testing a new timeline format where tweets are sorted by relevance instead of in reverse chronological order

LinkedIn: Offers New Insights on Job Postings: LinkedIn helps job-seekers with “new insights on LinkedIn job postings” such as your connections at the company, its history of hiring people like you and current employees with similar roles as the posted job.

YouTube: YouTube Unveils New Trending Tab: This new tab in the YouTube app delivers the top trending videos directly to Android, iOS and desktop devices. “It’s the best way to catch the videos, creators, and trends that people watch, share, and talk about each and every day.”