Facebook Advertising: 3 Questions to Answer Before You Start

With Facebook prioritizing content from friends and family in the organic News Feed, businesses have to work even harder to reach both existing fans and new audiences. For many businesses, targeted advertising is an effective and affordable way to build brand awareness, drive engagement, and even generate new leads from the social media site.

Before you start advertising on Facebook – and once your organic page management is in order – there are a few questions you need to answer.

1. What is Your Advertising Goal?

For local businesses that don’t rely heavily on content marketing to attract new consumers, you should select an advertising goal that aligns with what you’re trying to achieve with your other marketing efforts. This can take the form of an online or offline conversion, such as a website visit, form completion, in-person visit, or a call from your target audience. Depending on the goal you specify, you can create a call to action that helps drive brand awareness and conversions from your ads. Common Facebook advertising goals for local businesses include:

• Local Awareness
• Website Clicks
• Website Retargeting
• Page Likes
• Offer Claims

And, you don’t just have to pick just one goal! If you want to run multiple ad creatives or achieve different outcomes, you can spread your budget across a couple of different campaigns to get the different results you want.

2. Who Are You Targeting?

When building a new ad campaign, Facebook provides a variety of audience targeting options to help you reach and engage your ideal users when they’re on the site or app. Once you identify your target audience, you can apply their traits to your Facebook advertising program with traits such as:
People who are physically near your business or service area

A lookalike audience with traits similar to your current customers
People who have recently visited your website (retargeting)
People who meet a specified gender, age range, or interest

Remember that when it comes to Facebook, the more specific the audience you target, the more each impression will cost, because a narrowly defined consumer may be more difficult to identify. If you’re comfortable starting with a broader audience, you can always narrow it as you learn more about your target consumers, or use Facebook’s optimization technology to help your ad reach the users that are most likely to engage with your ad.

3. How Will You Manage Comments and Leads?

Of course, once your advertising is up and running, you’ll need a way to monitor any comments you get on your ads as well as any calls, inquiries, and leads that come into your business. Just like your other advertising programs, Facebook requires dedicated management in order to follow up with prospects who do contact you, whether it’s through your Facebook page, website, or phone, to really get ROI from your efforts.