This is my week 8 review of the CXL Minidegree in Growth Marketing. You can preview it here: Growth Marketing Minidegree | Training Program by CXL Institute. Alternatively, you look at the other programs that CXL offers here: Digital Marketing Training Delivered by The Best. (cxl.com)
Personal Update
Last week I travelled to Zimbabwe on family business. Because of that and my health, I did not manage to complete my weekly update. Anyway, I am back in Malawi now. This week we will look at Facebook advertising.
Social media is a tremendous way to increase exposure and traffic for your business, create loyal customers, and generate leads and sales. Spoiler alert: Facebook remains King Social Network. It is the social-media platform of choice for the majority of marketers–and for good reason. It’s never been cheaper to build your brand and create new demand for your products and services. If you aren’t already advertising on Facebook, you’d be crazy not to
When fostering a post, Facebook will boost the reach of your article to a greater audience, based on a predefined set of interest and demographic targeting that you preselect.
Conversely, Facebook also offers traditional ads, which do not appear within a page’s timeline organically, and instead appear only as a result of paid and earned media efforts. These ads may also be known as”dark posts” or unpublished posts, as they are only visible to specifically targeted customers, rather than look on your brand’s Facebook page deadline to anyone who’s publicly browsing the page.
There are a whole lot of reasons that Facebook has been effective in dominating the social media advertising marketplace, and chief among them is simplicity of use and access. Nearly anyone can advertisements on Facebook – everything you’ll need is a credit card and a little know-how, though the know-how is pretty optional.
This post appears from the Facebook newsfeed exactly as with any other post. This is regarded as an organic article, as it’s posted and appears organically – without any paid advertising.
With Facebook, everything changes all of the time. Just once you’ve gotten the hang of the advertising tools – they change.
Boosted posts are among two kinds of primary ad types on Facebook. About Facebook, a Boosted Post starts as a regular Facebook post that you may share to your own brand. For example, consider this Facebook post which contains a link to an article about the best movies on Netflix nobody knows about from customer tech website TechJunkie.
Whether you are seeking to build brand awareness, add fresh Facebook page likes to your brand’s webpage, get people to watch your video, engage with your photographs, redeem a coupon, subscribe to a newsletter or almost anything imaginable, Facebook will help your brand reach its objectives, and with an extremely low cost of entry. And while $1 is not going to get you much mileage, it’s certainly worth spending a few bucks to learn the intricacies about this incredibly effective advertising and marketing platform. Facebook advertising can appear overwhelming, but getting started can be economical and easy to accomplish. The fantastic thing is that results are reported at a near real time basis also, no matter the aim, Facebook’s ad platform has the resources required for you to attain effort success and a positive return on advertising spend.
What does this mean: If you think about traditional software like Microsoft Outlook, after installing the software you had to download software updates on an ad hoc basis so as to alter or change the functionality. Conversely, with Gmail, you’re working in a browser. So, when Google makes a change, your browser is reloaded and the change is implemented. With all that said, Facebook’s company and advertising tools change all the time. Should you think of this such as software, it’s Gmail – maybe not Microsoft Outlook.
Ads can be practical for myriad reason, but think about an situation for a retail clothing store brand, Clothing Company Ltd.. The business has 100 stores across the united kingdom and US. They intend to run a Facebook campaign that includes hours of operation and address to the shop closest to the user seeing the advertisement. If there is a change, it can be implemented and run right away.
Boosted Posts v. Ads
Rather than posting 100 different Facebook articles and trusting they reach the proper users, leveraging unpublished posts/ads may allow to test creative variations, whilst limiting the delivery based on each individual user’s geographic location ie, targeting
The targeting is important, since the more engaged the viewer that your article appears to be, the more successful your campaign will do. The greater your targeting, the lower your final price per goal, while it’s link clicks, article shares or something completely different. (Facebook has tens of thousands of curiosity, demographic and behavioural targeting choices available, crossing a massive collection of industries and psychographic sectors.)
Because of the character of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, when a brand like TechJunkie publishes to Facebook, only a tiny fraction of their brand’s overall audience will actually see the post; normally 2–5% of a page’s followers will probably observe the article. To extend the reach of this post to more users – either your page’s followers or alternative Facebook users – you can boost your post, by employing a marketing budget to it.
Another benefit to fostering posts is that as users discuss, response (like, enjoy, etc.), and comment, the article appears to those users’ friends, extending the reach outside of your direct paid attempts – and generated interpersonal networking for your campaign.
Seriously. But, that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth using Facebook as a platform and leveraging the advertising tools and massive audience scale that they must give.
Concluding Thoughts
Facebook advertising is an effective format that should be in every growth hacker’s toolkit. Regarding my progress, I am now a week behind my work. I am going to have to dedicate a greater proportion of time to study if I am going to make it. On the plus side. the content is really engaging!