Are you concerned about how much you’re spending on your marketing vs. the return you’re getting? You should be!
More often than not, you have to spend money to make money—but it’s not just about spending cash. It’s also about expending resources. This includes your own time, as well as any time that any of your team members are spending on any kinds of marketing. If you’re not tracking your results vs. your spending, then you’re probably wasting time and money.
And by the way, if you’re sharing content on Facebook, it’s quite possible that almost no one is seeing your content. The fact is, unless you’re boosting some of that content and, more importantly, running Facebook ads, your reach is extremely limited. It all has to do with Facebook’s algorithms, which help keep the platform from getting too spammy. Good for user-ship, not so good for businesses.
But there’s good news:
Facebook ads are effective, inexpensive, and they make it super duper easy to track your ROI.
Understanding the ROI of Social Media
Social media marketing isn’t just about making immediate sales. Sure, if you have an ecommerce site, you might get a sale the very first time that someone sees your ad—but probably not. People usually need a certain amount of exposure to your brand before they come to trust you enough to buy from you. Tracking that brand visibility is an important metric that will coincide with your eventual sales; the more people who become aware of your brand, the sooner that they’ll trust you, and the more likely they’ll be to buy from you.
Facebook ads help to build your brand’s visibility, familiarity, and trust with your target customers to grow your follower base, and, over time, to use that relationship to convert more followers into actual customers.
That’s why it’s very important that you track two key metrics: 1) Your REACH (ie. Cost per Exposure) and 2) Your comments and clicks (ie. Cost per Engagement). At Barker Social, we help our clients track these metrics scrupulously for their Facebook ads and their entire social media marketing campaigns so that it’s easy for them to understand the overall return on investment.
Reach Your People
There are over 1.86 billion monthly active Facebook users as of 02/01/17 (Source: Facebook) and 1.23 billion people log onto Facebook every single day.* You can target your ideal customers within that enormous pool using Facebook’s excellent targeting features. You can also hone in on who you want to see your ad according to their location, profession, personal habits, age, gender, interests, and hobbies. You name it, you can target it!
Affordable Results
We like to start out Facebook ads with A/B testing. We kick things off with an ad spend of $25-$50 per ad on two different variations of the same ad—the graphics and text on this ad will differ, but the core message is the same. This way, we can gauge the response to the ads to see what’s resonating with your target customers. We make sure that there’s a good response before adding an additional ad budget to the more popular of the two ads. The goal is to get the Cost per Click (CPC) below $0.99 per click. We consider $0.15 to $0.99 to be a good CPC, though it does depend on the industry.
What’s great about Facebook ads is you can monitor the relationship between the ad spend, the number of people that the ad is reaching, and how many people are clicking. This is really powerful information that wasn’t easily available to old-school marketers before the digital age. With this information, you can begin to forecast how much money you’ll need to spend to get the desired results you’re looking for in terms of building your audience, and in the longer term, making sales.
Other Perks
Another great thing about Facebook ads is that they’re synonymous with Instagram ads. Facebook owns Instagram and all of the advertising is run through the Facebook dashboard, so when you create a Facebook ad, it will reach users on either platform, based on the target audience attributes that you select.
No other platform even comes close to producing Facebook’s results when it comes to advertisements. In almost every case, Twitter ads are not nearly as successful as Facebook ads.
Facebook Ads Work
The bottom line is that Facebook advertising works. You can reach people who you never would have been able to reach before, and you can easily trace the return you’re getting on your investment. Of course, maximizing the effectiveness of your Facebook ads does take some expertise. If you need help with your Facebook ads, get in touch. We offer a free marketing consultation and we’d be happy to take a look at your business and make some recommendations about what would work best for you.
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*Source: https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/
