Let’s dive in! 

How to Create Your First Facebook Ad

Now that you have a Facebook page and have a fair idea of what kind of ad format to use (again, for beginners, I recommend the Promote Page or the Post Engagement ad), let’s start with the process itself.

Step 1: 

Go to the ad center. Click on Create Ad

Step 2: 

Choose your objective:  

This is where having a clear objective is important. You will be prompted to choose your objective of creating an ad. Depending on your page analytics, Facebook also gives recommendations. In the case of this page, Facebook has recommended more website visitors as the objectives, however, that is not our fundamental goal at the moment. If you’re new to FB, you might want to promote your page instead. 

Step 3: 

Select your audience: Remember the point about being specific with your target audience demographics in the planning phase. Well, this is where you will need them. Facebook displays ads only to the audience demographics you choose. For example, if your audience are male millennials in UK speaking English, you will enter that information to the audience segment. Your ads will be displayed to this specific audience. The narrower you can go with your locations (for example a specific location in UK), the better your results. 

Step 4: 

Set Up Budget and Ad Duration 

FB ads start at $5. You can place limits on your ad spending, for example, $10 every day for the next 10 days. You will not be charged more than $10 and once the 10 days are over, you can choose to increase your spending or cut it off. The amount of money you spend determines your reach – the more you spend, the more your reach. For beginners, I wouldn’t recommend spending more than $200 – $300 just to understand the platform and the results. During this time, you’ll need to monitor your campaign and see what works for you. 

Step 5. 

Pick Format: From the eleven formats above, choose the one you’re most comfortable with. Do make sure though that images and videos are of good quality. Poor quality media will ruin your ad efforts! Do remember to write a convincing copy/caption along with each ad. 

Step 6.

Submit: Submit your ad and watch as FB displays the ads to the right people. 

Step 7.

Monitor: Track your ad performance. FB automatically displays data for total post engagement, the number of people reached, the cost per post engagement, number of photo and links clicked, page likes and shares. You will also get information on how many percentages were men or women and where the ads were placed (mobile or desktop). 

Choosing Between Boosting a Post and Running an Ad

If you’re new to Facebook page ads, you’re probably confused by the Boost and Promote option. 

In a nutshell, the Promote option allows you to promote your page to a broad audience demographics. If you’ve just created a Facebook page and are planning on increasing your reach, you can use the Promote option. 

The Boost Post option is a feature that lets you advertise (or boost) a specific post on your page. The purpose of Boost post is to get your audience’s attention for that specific post instead of the whole page. 

So for example, if you already have a post that has higher engagement than the others, you could boost the post to make it go viral. The downside is that boost posts can become expensive and are beneficial only until you’re paying for it. The moment you stop paying, your traffic will go down. It’s not long-term.

A boosted ad will look just like a post, with the only difference that the audience can see a, Sponsored label in the top left-hand corner with a call-to-action in the bottom right-hand.

You May Also Like to Read:

How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Indiegogo Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 1
How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Crowdfunding Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 2

Collection, Carousel & Slideshow Ads

Apart from a single image and video ads, you can also use carousel and collection ads. These ads are available if you choose the ‘website traffic’ objective. For the promote page app, you can still use a collection of slideshows but you can’t add a web link to it.

Here’s how you should use each of them.

Collection Ads: These are catered for the mobile audience and work best if you have a cool video to go along. With collection ads, your video and images are placed in a grid with your video taking center stage and other items in your catalog displayed beneath the video. You can use this template when you want to show off your product catalog using rich videos and images. The purpose of collection ads is to make it easy for people to browse your products without leaving the platform. So if you’ve got a collection of fancy product images, use them in collection ads!

Carousel Ads: Previously known as canvas ads, carousel ads are available only on mobile. It may seem similar to collection ads, but it’s different in the sense that it lets you add links to each of the product you advertise, giving customers more options and increasing your click-through rate at the same time. Facebook also recommends using carousel ads to tell a story, showcase a process or display multiple features of a product – use it any way you want to!

Slideshow Ads: If you don’t have the budget to create a video, no problem! Slideshow ads collect your images and turns them into a video, so when you run the ad, the audience is actually watching a compiled video of your images! You have rich video editing tools and a collection of music to use when creating the ad. Slideshow ads use less data than an actual video and so you can easily use it to tell your story, show off your products or lead your customers through a process.

And this is the end of our third part guide! 

In our next part, we’ll get into details about setting your budget and how you can optimize it to achieve maximum results. 

Stay tuned!

Also, Need help to boost your crowdfunding campaign? Hire our crowdfunding marketing agency today.

The post How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Crowdfunding Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 3 appeared first on samitpatel.

To capture a chunk of that audience is every marketer and business owner’s DREAM.

The only way you can achieve that dream is by mastering Facebook ADVERTISING.

Facebook advertising is one of the most challenging features of digital marketing after PPC ads. It’s competitive. It’s complex. It’s nerve-racking. Yet, it’s also one of the most powerful platforms that offer you the ability to reach your target audience directly. Since it’s so extensive in nature, we’ll be covering this in three parts. You can read the first part here to get a preliminary understanding of how to use Facebook as a marketing funnel.

Setting Up Your Facebook Page

The first step to running a successful Facebook ad campaign is setting up a successful Facebook page. It is highly recommended that your Facebook page is active with regular posts and engagements, ‘before,’ you run an ad campaign. Why do you need to do this? Because your audience wants information about your business before they decide to do business with you.

Here are a few things to do before you initiate a Facebook advertising campaign.

✔️ Setting up a page: To run a Facebook ad campaign, you need to have a facebook page. Setting up a page is just a matter of seconds. All you have to do is click the Create Page option in your personal profile, enter your page name, choose your business category, upload your company logo and cover photo. Done! You now have a page ready.

✔️ Uploading business profile & cover photo: Use a 360×360 pixels profile photo size. If you’re a business, your logo is your profile picture. Your cover photo can be a graphic with your business tagline or caption. It can also be a short video that introduces your business.

✔️ Create a complete profile: Nothing is more annoying than incomplete information. Make sure you have your address, About Us section, Photos, Demo videos, and every other information ready on the profile before you invite friends or share information.

✔️ Create consistent branded posts: Facebook content is mostly image-based, so, you should either have a designer on board who can help you with branded posts or you can try your hands at Canva, a free design tool. Ensure consistency in terms of fonts, brand colors, and other design elements.

✔️ All relevant links/CTAs: Make sure your phone number, landing page URL and CTAs are ready and are connected to your FB page. The most important is your landing page or website.

✔️ Put up some posts: As soon as you have your page active, begin posting. Use an editorial calendar to plan your posts for at least a month in advance of running an as campaign. You should ideally have 4 to 5 posts a week divided into various types – a blog link, a quote, a meme, some inspirational stuff, etc.

✔️ Use Facebook’s Schedule Post Option: Now that you have your content ready for all the days, it’s time to post it on Facebook using the Schedule Option. Initially, you’d have to use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule posts on FB, but now, the channel has a pretty good and easy-to-use schedule option. You can schedule posts in advance. This leaves you free time to monitor and measure your posts.

✔️ Posting schedule: Experts recommend a posting schedule of maximum two times a day, focusing on when your audience is most active. You can obtain information about your audience from Facebook Insights.

✔️ Invite friends: Once you have a few content pieces ready, start inviting your friends to like your page and share your posts on their newsfeed. The more people share your page, the higher your chances of getting likes and engagement.

✔️ Super Important: Whatever you do, DO NOT BUY FAKE FOLLOWERS. They are ineffective and can even possibly drag your engagement rates down.

✔️ Familiarizing Yourself with FB Page Manager: The FB page manager is a full-fledged business tool. It has an extensive list of options. From assigning page roles (important when you hire a social media manager to handle your account), to monitoring and measuring insights. Familiarize yourself with the options of the page manager given in Settings. For example, cross-post (posting one piece of content across several channels) without using any third-party tool. There are some great functionalities you can use to optimize your page. All you need is to spend time exploring each option.

✔️ Page Insights: One of the most important features is the Page Insight. These are metrics that give you insights on page views, page likes, page followers etc. What’s the most crucial is you can actually see which of your post has been the most popular throughout the week. This information can help you get a very accurate idea of what your audience prefers to see on your page.

✔️ Delegating social media management: Facebook management is a full-time job and if you were to do this with other channels, it will eat up your whole day. My best advice? Hire a social media specialist from Upwork, share your goals and expectations, assign them a role on the page, bring metrics on an excel sheet and use your time to focus on business or product building.

Beginning with Facebook Advertising

Right! So you’ve got your page set up, great posts going out and have a fair amount of engagement. Now you want to grow and you’re venturing into Facebook ads for crowdfunding.

Let’s go through it step by step.

Creating Ad Objectives

It’s always important to narrow-down your business goals before you start an ad campaign. You have to know why you want to run a certain ad type and what is your end goal.

For example, if you’re a new business and want to gain traction, Page ads may be a good choice. If you’re an established business, you may have deeper business goals, such as attracting leads or increasing sales.

Facebook categorizes most business goals into three broad or common objectives which are:

✔️ Awareness: If you’ve launched a new business or project, your first goal or objective may be to help your target audience know about your business. For example, you’ve launched a new bookstore in town and want to inform your audience. Your first campaign would be an awareness post informing your audience about the bookstore and the benefits of buying books from you.

A narrower goal of awareness is maximizing your brand visibility and reach. This means running a campaign that caters to a wide audience demographic just to get the initial buzz going. So again, back to the bookstore example. This time, your goal may be to attract a national audience with online ordering. Awareness is a fundamental objective of any new business, product or service. It’s the first step you can take to attract your target audience.

✔️ Consideration: The second objective is to help your audience find out more information about your product. The consideration objective uses your website or landing page to help people find the information they need to consider buying from you.

Narrower goals of consideration can be driving traffic to your website, getting your app installed, getting people to engage with your posts, collecting leads and signups, connecting with customers and encourage their interest in your business.

✔️ Conversions: The most important objective for every business investing in Facebook ads is conversions. This is the phase where you want people to make the purchase via your website or online shop. In the case of crowdfunding, this is where you want people to fund your project.

You May Also Like to Read:

How to Carry Out Research for Your Crowdfunding Campaign – Part 1
How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Crowdfunding Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 3

For conversions, you could have goals as getting people to buy from a discount offer, leading people to specific products in your store, or giving them incentives to purchase from your brick and mortar store.

The narrower your objectives, the better you will be able to create effective ads.

Eleven Types of Facebook Ad Formats

Facebook ads can be categorized into eleven main elements (as of 2019). You can employ multiple formats depending on your ad objectives. Each ad format forms an ad set which is tied to the ad campaign.

✔️ Video: Smartphones have allowed people to create high-res videos seamlessly. This has led to an increase in video consumption with nearly 45% of people watching more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week. Video ads are one of the most powerful ways to attract your new audience, provided it is creative and thought-provoking.

✔️ Images: Image ads are super popular with e-commerce stores. There are the easiest to make and do not take more than a few minutes to execute. One powerful image can play a significant role in traffic generation and lead conversion. Facebook allows for normal JPG and PNG images as well as 360 Panorama images that you can use to give your audience an immersive experience.

✔️ Collection: Have a variety of products to show? The collection ad format lets you display your product catalogue when you run the ad. This means if you want to showcase your new arrivals or the different versions of your product in one ad, you can easily do so with the Collection format. You can combine the main video with these products and the ad will be displayed in the form of a grid. This kind of ad is highly effective in getting your users to convert!

✔️ Carousel: Want to showcase ten images or videos within a single ad, each with its own link? The carousel ad format does exactly that. This is a perfect ad for businesses that want to show a process, a collection catered to individual tastes or simply a sequential story.

✔️ Slideshow: Slide-shows are basically a collection of your top-images turned into a video format. So if you don’t have the budget to create a professional video, you can use the Slideshow option to gather your best images and turn it into a facebook video. The perfect solution for those who cannot create a video.

✔️ Instant Experience: Known previously as Canvas, Instant Experience uses the mobile’s full screen to display the ad. This ad format supports all of the formats above – be it a carousel, a collection, video or images; it’s main purpose is to grab the attention of the user and give them an enriching brand experience.

✔️ Lead Generation: Want to get people to sign up directly to your website? Use a lead-gen ad. You can create an ad with a basic form that asks for name, email address, and zip codes. This is the right ad to use if you want people to sign up for your newsletter or to avail a seasonal discount etc.

✔️ Post Engagements: Post engagement ads are simpler and more classic forms of Facebook ads. You can use these to promote a post on your page to get likes, shares and comments. Most businesses use post engagement ads to gain traction over a specific post.

✔️ Offers: Have a special deal coming up? The Offers ad format lets you create an offer right on Facebook itself. You don’t have to use any landing page or website to create an offer on FB, although you can make it creative by using a carousel or slideshow to make the offer attractive.

✔️ Event Responses: Have a special event coming up? Use the Event Responses ad format to create ads that specifically gives information about your events including time, date, location and any other important information. This is a great feature for social causes like marathons, walk-for-a-cause, and any other local activity.

✔️ Page Likes: This is the most basic form of Facebook ads. To do this, you simply go to your page and Promote it using the Promote option. Your FB page will appear as an ad. If you’re new to Facebook ads and want to experiment with how it works, you can start off by first promoting your page to the relevant target audience.

With so many options and features, Facebook ads are complicated, but they also offer a world of opportunities through strategic advertising. It is highly recommended that you spend time learning about each of these ad formats and how they can cater to your fundamental goals.

Follow us as we continue the discussion on Facebook ads in Part 3 of the guide or Need help to boost your crowdfunding campaign? Hire our crowdfunding marketing agency today.

The post How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Crowdfunding Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 2 appeared first on samitpatel.

Quick Post Overview Video ⤵️

It goes without saying that if you’re boosting an Indiegogo campaign for your business, you have to get started on Facebook and establish your reputation on the platform. But getting started on Facebook in 2019 is a daunting experience. It could also turn into a major disappointment if you don’t have a clear idea of your goals and of how to use the platform effectively to achieve those goals. 

Don’t worry though. Throughout my years of managing marketing for Indiegogo campaigns, I can understand your pain points and your frustration regarding Facebook. So whether you’re a complete newbie or someone who has given up on Facebook, this series is for you. At the end of the series, you will understand everything there is to Facebook for businesses or boosting your Indiegogo campaign. 

I do highly recommend that while you go through the series, follow the steps given and get hands-on experience. When it comes to digital marketing, it’s always necessary to practice as you go because reading or making notes is not enough. 

Ready? Let’s begin with Part 1 of the series! 

The Facebook of Today verses the Facebook of Yesterday

During its formative years, Facebook was merely a social platform that connected people. Gradually, it transformed into a platform that allowed people to interact with their favorite brands and businesses. Today, it’s more of a business driver than a mere social platform. 

When business owners think about Facebook marketing, they think of it as a social platform. They assume that they can simply upload cool pictures or videos, run a few page ads and they’ll find success with the channel. Unfortunately, that’s no longer how Facebook works. 

With millions of businesses competing against each other on the platform, it is now an expensive venture and one that requires well-planned strategies to see results. The platform’s refined algorithms, the focus on quality content, and the audience’s demand for authenticity from businesses have made it quite challenging for any new business to claim its spot. 

Does that mean you should not invest in Facebook marketing? Absolutely not. But if you really want it to work, you have to know three core things: your audience, your business goals & your objectives of using Facebook.

As you’ll see, these three core areas are tied to every aspect of Facebook marketing. And I don’t just mean theoretically… I mean it literally. Facebook categorizes its ads, its reach, its algorithm based on these three core things. 

So if you’re taking your first step into Facebook marketing to boost your Indiegogo campaign, you need to view it from a different pair of lens and everything you do must be tied to the three fundamental areas above. 

Creating a Strategy Unique to Your Business Nature and Goals

Businesses now understand the trick to being successful on social media, which is really nothing more than being customer-centric, creative, and smart. 

In the case of businesses that are dependent on crowdfunding and want to use Facebook to maximize their goals, you also have to ensure that factors as trust, reliability, transparency are depicted in your strategy. These can easily be achieved through efforts as a quick and timely response to queries, engagement with the audience on comments and reactions, and authentic content (facts, statistics, reports, etc).

You May Also Like to Read:

How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Crowdfunding Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 2
How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Crowdfunding Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 3

Note: The guide in these series can be used by everyone and isn’t necessarily limited to Indiegogo campaigns, however, you might need to tweak goals and objectives based on your respective business nature. 

How to Create a Facebook Marketing Strategy?

Your Facebook marketing strategy for Indiegogo doesn’t have to be something very complicated. It can just be a few slides on a PPT or a simple document that outlines your goals, your approach, your campaign, your content, and a list of activities that you will carry out to achieve those goals.

Before you define your content and task list though, you need to ensure your strategy covers the following important segments: 

✔️Audience demographics: You’ll need this part when you run ad campaigns, so make sure you have your demographics carefully noted. Your audience demographics should be created based on actual audience research and not guesswork. You can use tools like surveys, forms, interviews, and customer journey maps to identify your core audience. Without understanding your audience, their motivations, and their social media behaviors, you cannot create an effective strategy. 

✔️Narrowed-down goals: The broader goal of every business investing in Facebook marketing is revenue, but this broad goal alone is not enough. You have to dig deeper and create narrowed-down, achievable goals. For example, getting your first 50 signups in a month or your first 50$ in donations are goals that you can set. It is based on these goals that you will create your ad budget and develop a targeted approach. 

✔️A well-planned editorial calendar: Without a social media calendar, you’ll be lost. As a rule of thumb, anyone starting with social media MUST have a social media editorial calendar that consists of content they want to post and when they want to post it. If you’re willing to go the extra mile, you can also add metrics, observations, conversions, etc to the sheet, making it a Master document of your social media strategy. 

✔️Campaigns: Facebook ads for crowdfunding are based on campaigns and each campaign has its own goals, deliverables, timeline, and expected results. For example, your first campaign could be an awareness campaign designed to introduce your business to your audience. You can create hashtags, content assets, ad sets, timelines, and measurable metrics all based on your campaign. The number of campaigns you create depends on your ad budget and business goals, however, startups and businesses generally create three to four campaigns in a time span of 6-months to a year leading to the final launch of their business. 

✔️Ad budget: FB’s algorithms make it hard for a brand to gain traction organically. If you want traction, you need to use FB ads which can cost you from anywhere between $200 to $500 a month, depending on your business goals, your audience reach and the results you’re expecting. If you’re completely new to FB ads, it is highly recommended that you go for the lowest budget option and measure your conversion rate (the cost of each conversion, calculated as $$ ad spent/number of conversions) before you spend more. 

✔️Content: Create a good mix of visual, textual, and video posts to keep your audience engaged. A good FB strategy should include content for five days a week, one posts a day. 

✔️Brand persona: Build a brand persona relevant to your business. The tone of your messages, the content, the brand colors, the content choice should all reflect your brand image. Think of yourself as a brand, having your own unique identity. Each social media post should reflect that identity. Remember, consistency in design is paramount to a pleasant user experience. 

You’ll be dealing with an extensive flow of data, so I recommend you use multiple tools to stay organized. Your strategy document, editorial calendar, metrics, and reports, etc should all be in one central folder (or preferably Google sheet). Use tools like EverNote and Monday.com to save interesting content or ideas and to keep track of your task list. 

Remember, Facebook marketing is expensive, complicated, and requires effort; but it is not impossible to see impressive results if you understand your audience and are willing to stand out from the crowd with high-quality content and a great strategy to back it!

Need help to boost Indiegogo campaign? Hire our crowdfunding marketing agency today.

The post How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Indiegogo Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 1 appeared first on samitpatel.