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Hello everyone – welcome to another Digitize Your Firm webinar where we’re going to be building on last week’s webinar by exploring Facebook and Twitter Ads, not to mention digital ad best practices.
For anyone joining us who is a digital ad pro or for those who have additional questions, simply click the green speech bubble at the top of the screen to open the chat and either type out your comment or ask to speak. If you already, be sure to click the ‘phone’ icon next to it to ensure your audio is connected.
As with all Digitize Your Firm webinars, this will be recorded for later playback in case you wanted extra time with a certain section or for listening on the go. If you haven’t already, visit the Weekly Webinar Schedule on our Digitize Your Firm page to check out our past webinars.
Now, let’s go over today’s agenda.
We’re going to start off by exploring the wonderful world of Facebook Ads, jump into learning about Twitter Ads, and close off with the best practices for your digital ads. We’ll also review the webinar, give you the topic for next week and answer any lingering questions you have.
Let’s dive in!
How often to go on Facebook – two times a day? Three? Seven? Well interestingly enough, Canada is home to the most active Facebook users in the world. You’re also part of 167 million daily active users that live in both Canada and the US.
With a market that large, it’s hard not to want to advertise and Facebook has made it quick easy for you to do so.
There are a few ways you can advertise on Facebook depending on what you wish to advertise – if it is an event, you can advertise event pages. If it is a certain post to share information, you can boost posts to provide more viewership, you can simply mark your Facebook page, or you can create an ad from scratch.
Unless you’re going from scratch, which we will break down, be prepared with an overall budget you wish to spend and a daily budget. The best part about marketing on Facebook is that you can spend small amount of money, such as $20 to $50 and get tangible results.
The key to Facebook ads is to put your effort into visually appealing ads with concise copy that contains less than 90 characters to inform people of your product and present a call for action. To provide an example, say you own a local bakery and want to get more customers ordering good.
You may create an image of a few of your products with your bakery’s slogan or logo and upload it along with the message “20% off all online orders with the code: FB Ad” and insert a call to action button that reads ‘shop now’ that directs to your site.
Once the ad is created, you will then look at placement which dictates where your ads will show up. Deciding where you ads show up can be just as important as putting them together – as it stands, you can chose to have your ads shown in the following locations:
Facebook:
Feeds – In a user’s general newsfeed.
Instant Article – articles you create that rapidly load for your audience
In-Stream Video – videos placed in your audience’s general newsfeed.
Right Column – the column you see on the right side of your newsfeed.
Suggested Video – videos that are suggested for the viewer to watch.
Instagram:
Feed – in your audience’s Instagram feed
Stories – your ad is shown as a story at the top of your audience’s Instagram feed.
Audience Network – your ad is shown on websites and in apps that have allowed advertisements from Facebook.
Why is it important to know where to place your ads? Because where your ads are shown and how frequently they are shown will distractedly change your budget – the last thing you want to do is throw your advertising dollars into a vacuum.
Say for example that you wanted to reach a 35 – 60 year old demographic on Facebook – what placement would you choose? Using the feeds, instant articles and right column would be a fairly good way to reach them while Instagram may not be the best choice.
Why? 55 percent of Instagram’s user base in the US alone are 18 to 29 year olds, with 30 – 40 year olds making up only 28 percent. Due to this, it may not been the best place to reach your audience.
If you’re looking to sell products, doing a carousel of photos in your audience’s feed as oppose showing your product on apps may be a better way to show your selection.
This being said, every day Facebook is doing it’s best to make it easier for you to advertise from helping plan campaigns to automatically setting your ad placement.
What makes this medium so effective, you ask? Well the key is the budget.
When you create an ad on Facebook, you can submit a daily or lifetime budget – and these budgets can be added the ad placement changed as you go. Not only does this provide a great deal of control over your advertising, but means you can start campaigns without committing a large lump sum upfront. You can choose to either use a daily amount you wish to spend, or a lifetime budget and get further bang for your buck by choosing when your ads shows during the day and night.
Finally, another piece of Facebook advertising is choosing your Audience and applying Detailed Targeting.
Audience – your audience can be customized by inputting a certain location such as a city or country where people can see your ad, to the ages, sex you wish to target and language.
Detailed Targeting – you can drill down further into your audience base by adding in interests and categories that are related to your targeted audience. If you are selling products used by a niche industry, you can select that industry so that everyone who follows it will see your ads. You can target individuals who align themselves with a certain demographic, purchasing habits, behaviors online, and more.
When you are done and submit your ad for review, it will be processed and depending on the content provided will be given a relevancy score. This score is calculated on the amount of positive and negative feedback Facebook believes your ad will get, with the final score coming out of 10. The higher the score, the less you are likely to pay to reach your audience.
The best way to prepare your ad and to get a high relevancy score is to have strong visuals, concise writing, and a clear call to action. It can also be in your best interest to provide different versions of the ad to see which scores a higher relevancy as oppose to just using one.
From there, once your campaign is approved it will run and provide with metrics you can use to judge effectiveness from reach, to cost-per-click, budget spend, and more. Remember to keep a close eye on this and to not be afraid to change your existing ad should the need arise (or, as we said earlier, submit others to track effectiveness against each other).
As we’ve previously stated, Twitter is a great platform to engage with your audience in 140 characters or less while providing resources they find useful, answering questions, and more.
But what about advertising on Twitter? What do you need to know?
The first is that Twitter is much like Facebook wherein you’ll be able to do specific targeting, follow similar metrics, and create a variety of campaigns.
For starters, you can four types of campaign geared towards different goals such as:
Website clicks or conversions
Increasing your followers
Building awareness of your brand or a topic
Building your Twitter engagement
When you choose which campaign you would prefer, you can then set your audience preferences – which is similar to Facebook, but allows for some unique targeting abilities.
With other platforms, you can choose to target countries, locations, a specific gender, behaviors, select an age group, language, device.
This is where it gets interesting however as you can choose to target keywords, allowing you to put your content in from of people searching for a certain phrase or hashtag. For example, if you’re pushing a new content marketing service for small business, you may choose to target the #business, #smallbiz, and #entrepreneur hashtags.
You can also create tailored audiences from data you can take from your CRM database such as Twitter IDs, Twitter usernames, email addresses, cellphone numbers, or mobile advertising IDs.
Afterwards, just as with Facebook, you can set a total budget and daily spending limit. You can also set a target cost for impressions (so you don’t pay until those impressions are met), or do automatic bidding.
Finally – you choose your creatives by choosing or creating a tweet, adding content such as links and images and you are off to races. From there, Twitter does quality and relevance scoring in a similar way to Google Ads wherein the better your posts perform, the less you pay per click.
So how can you obtain and keep a high relevancy score?
First, add an assortment of tweets (2 – 5) but be sure to refresh them with new material as the campaign goes along. Unlike Facebook, promotional tweets can become very stale very quickly.
Maximize your campaign by using posts that have previously seen a lot of success or that have had high engagement rates as they have already been successful organically.
Ensure that you target narrowly to really get your content in front of those who need to see it. While it may seem like a good idea to go broad so others can see it, if they have no interest, you’re wasting money to gain impresses that don’t see any clicks or conversions.
Finally, find what resonates well with your targeted audience and build off that. If certain playful content will jokes does better than content beginning with a question, use more playful content and jokes.
After this, keep an eye on how your campaign is doing from the main Twitter Ads dashboard. Keep an eye on your results, the rate these results are coming in at, and the cost per result. If you begin to see less results and the cost per result rising, refresh your campaign with new content.
Now that we have a solid grounding in digital marketing ads across of the most used social media platforms (not to mention the internet!).
Let’s take it one step further by talking about the best practices to employing all of these different mediums so you don’t just nail you first digital campaign, you hit it out of the park.
1. Write for SEO
When you write any content, it should be written with SEO in mind. What is SEO? It stands for search engine optimization, and essentially means to write in such a way that your website will be ranked higher and therefore will show up when someone searches your site, or a keyword pertaining to your site. For example, if you were doing an article on Twitter ads, the keywords may be ‘Twitter ads’, ‘digital marketing’, and ‘Twitter marketing’.
While there are entire businesses and services dedicated to helping organizations rank higher, we’re going to provide you with quick tips.
Link to internal pages on your site
Add alt text to all photos that you post, including keywords
Write with a focus on keywords
Have an article or page’s focus in the url, as well as in the header
Get your content externally linked from other websites
2. Use Video
Here is a well-known secret – people love video! It’s a medium that allows for a lot of information to be conveyed in an interesting way, especially with well thought out visuals. Using video as a marketing tool is a fantastic way to engage users – in fact, 90 second videos retain 53% of videos until the end.
To stand out from the crowd, use subtitles (as 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound), experiment with live broadcasts (as they received three times more views than recorded videos), and post into native apps such as Facebook – don’t hyperlink.
3. Be Responsive
When you put digital ads on the market, be ready to receive questions (or criticisms) as more people see them. Be ready to respond to all of these across channels, whether it is emails, Facebook comments, or Twitter direct messages. Stay engaged with your audiences and answer questions or comment that may be looking for further information on the ads.
4. Go to Your Audience
Depending on your age group, demographic, and even location – the audience you are aiming to reach spend their time on different channels. Some may prefer Instagram, other Facebook, or certain sites pertaining to their interests.
Plan your content using keywords you want to use to reach those people when creating a Display or Paid Search campaign, and find the social media platform that they inhabit.
5. Relate Everything Back to Your Business Strategy
This may seem obvious, but make sure everything you do relates in some way back to your business strategy. Whether it is a corporate objective, a company pillar, or a quarterly goal, ensure that you have measurements in place to relate it directly back to the overall strategy. While you may save money marketing digitally, dollars spent are still dollars spent and it is important to show how each ad, each promoted tweet, and each instant article relates back to the organization’s mission, product, or service.
To review, let’s go over what we’ve covered today:
1. When it comes to Facebook, you can get fantastic results while spending small amounts of money. The key to success is to keep the ads short and concise, offer promo codes in the ad’s title or description, select the right location for your ad to show up. Don’t be afraid to use audience and detailed targeting to really be precise with who you want to reach – and keep last week’s chat about relevancy scores in mind. Also, come with a set budget ready and be clear with advertising hours to maximize success.
2. Twitter is an entirely different beast – and while there are similarities to Facebook, there are key differences you should look out for. Have a clear understanding of the objective for your campaign and do your research on keywords that can help you reach your targeted audience. Come with at least 2 – 5 different Twitter ads to fight ad blindness and get more bang for your buck. Don’t forget to come with a budget in mind, and block out the days and times you want your ad to be live.
3. Now that we’ve taken you through digitals advertising 101, we look at the best practices you should always keep in mind when setting up any digital billboard. Remember to write for SEO by using keywords, linking to other pages on your site, keep the keyword in the ad’s title, description, and having others link to your site.
If you able to, create videos as they truly catch the eye and don’t forget to ensure they are subtitled! Once your ads are out the wild, don’t forget to watch the comments and replies as closely as you watch your analytics and respond. In the same vein, go where your audience is – whether it is general digital advertisements or social media ads. If your audience loves Instagram, putting the bulk of your budget into Twitter may not be the best idea (depending on your objective).
Finally – make sure everything links back to your business’s overall strategy whether it is a principle of your company, a quarterly objective, or your organization’s mission statement. While digital ads are a powerful way spread any message, use them as a strategically as you would any other tactic.
Next week, we’re going to crack open the topic of content marketing and explore the art of content creation. We’re even going to head back to school and talk about the importance of spell check both grammatically and when it concerns the audience you are marketing to.
