According to worldwide research site, Global Stats, the giant Social Media platform, Facebook, controls 90% of Zimbabwe’s Social Media market share. This means that if your business’ Social Media Marketing efforts are channelled towards Facebook alone, your return on investment can be impressive because 90% is not a small number.
BY TAMUKA JAMES CHINZVENDE
Nevertheless, with all these impressive stats on Facebook, you have to know that each day, over 400 million people post on this platform, both advertisers and general users. If not done right, that post or ad can just go down the drain, never to be recovered and that may be a loss for you.
Now, the question is: “How do you leverage on the power, popularity and features of this giant social platform to increase your brand awareness, eventually increasing your sales?”
Here are the tips for effective Facebook advertising.
Know who your potential customers are
Before you create that amazing Facebook ad with great visuals and awesome content, you first have to ask yourself who your audience is. This answer will be a guide to everything you might want to do. You should know that Facebook has over 1,5 billion users globally and about a million in Zimbabwe. So, by trying to advertise without establishing an audience, your content might eventually end up being seen by people who don’t care about what you are trying to provide and this is a loss for you.
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Target and place your ads correctly
After you know who your customer is, the buyer persona. You now make use of Facebook’s superpower targeting. Facebook targeting allows you to target your potential customers by age, location, device, interests and gender. So make use of these depending on the product you are selling. If you sell video games for example, people who might be interested in this with the buying power to make it happen are in the age range of 18 to 25 and are mostly males.
Depending on the product or service you offer, you have to advertise to the right people with the buying power to purchase from you. It is an obvious fact that people in the 25-65+ age range have greater buying power than those in the 18-24. If the product is particularly expensive, I might urge you to go for the latter age range.
Make use of videos and images
People on Facebook no longer like to read sponsored posts. A while ago we managed a campaign and wanted to compare which post would perform better, a post with words versus one with a video. The first post, that only had words got 1 875 impressions and 23 engagements in 24 hours. The video got 2 546 impressions and 342 engagements within the same time frame. The amazing part is we didn’t have to hire an actor to do the video; we just took the post with words and documented it into a slideshow to produce the video. The same can work for images also, but your images should be visual.
The value proposition
The value proposition is simply the reason why the potential customer should click your ad to learn more about what you are offering. People will pay attention to your ad only if there is something enticing about it and moreso, if the product you are offering can create value and save them money. Yes, people love being told they can save money even if they are not actually saving it. So instead of saying shop with us, tell them the value they’ll get from shopping with you. Like we say in digital marketing, trade value for attention!
The call to action
Your call to action will tell your viewers what they need to do next. The call to action has to be enticing and it must compel people to take action. To succeed, a call to action should create a sense of urgency. After reading your call to action, your potential customer should ask why they are the only one who didn’t know about your business.
Don’t be quick to scale
Now that you know who your potential buyers are and you have the perfect visual ad offering a unique value proposition and an enticing call to action, you should now give Mark Zuckerberg your $50 for the ad and go sleep? No, you should wait. Do a trial run of the ad for 24 hours and set a Key Performance Indicator. In the first 24 hours, you should aim at achieving at least a 2% engagement rate, which means if your ad is seen by 1 000 people, you should have about 20 likes or comments or both. And you should achieve this with an ad budget of $3. If your engagement rate is below this, sit down and restrategise and go for it again.
If you succeed and get at least a 2% engagement rate, then scale up, at the same time keeping your eyes on the metrics. Be obsessed with the insights to see how your ad is performing, and keep on tweaking the ad as you go.
In conclusion, when it comes to social media, particularly Facebook, the variables are many, so you have to keep on testing and perfecting your strategy until you start getting consistent results.
Tamuka James Chinzvende is a digital consultant working for Zimbotech I.T Solutions. He can be contacted on [email protected]
