5 Best Ads to Run for Your Small Business
So you already know how important Social Media is to a small business, and you are already aware that advertising with Facebook + Instagram can be game changers for your business… but you’ve heard if you don’t have a big advertising budget to play with – might as well NOT advertise!
I couldn’t disagree more. FB advertising is not just for the big dogs, and here are a few ways you can make your ad dollars go further.
Run a Video Views Ad:
Video view ads are relative cheap to run, and FB can remarket to anyone who watched 3 seconds or more of your video. A good indication of how interested someone is in what you have to offer, is to track how long they watched the video for. Did they watch the entire thing? Or bounce after the first 3 seconds? Let retarget the people who watched for the longest. The best news is - videos do not need to be highly produced, or professionally edited. Just make sure you have good lighting and decent sound – prop up that cell phone and start recording. Keep it short and sweet (I like to have cue cards to keep me on track). Authentic videos resonate – perfectly polished videos don’t!
Post Engagement or Page Like Ads:
With new IOS4 updates – a good way to capitalize on FB data is to leave your leads ON FB. Don’t as them to leave the platform to give you their information. Bonus – these ads are also relatively inexpensive to run. Start with a post engagement and ask them to like your page with a follow up ad. Remember, you want to be getting your name (or company name / product name) in front of people multiple times. Plus asking them to like your page after they have already engaged with you is more authentic – Its like inviting someone out for coffee the first time you meet.. sometimes that works,, but it’s a little more natural if after the first time you meet you wait until you know you have something in common before jumping right to plans for the future ;p
Traffic Ads (to blogs or podcasts or videos etc):
The idea is to get your cold market to start to know like and trust you – what better way to do that than to let them hear more from you. This gives the potential customer the opportunity to learn more on their terms – you are not shoving a memoir at them on FB ads, your inviting them to get to know you better. The bonus to you here is that it builds up that valuable pixel data AND people see you, your brand, and your additional content for relatively little money. (Event better – make it easy for them to subscribe and they can be added to your email marketing)
Lead Magnet Ads:
Do those even work? Well, this one did – right? Run a lead magnet ad to get people to give you their email address in return for something of value. Best part is that once you have the email of someone, no matter what happens in the Facebook Advertising world. You have real data on your potential customers. Bonus here – email marketing (and remarketing) is almost free. So keep building that email list, but don’t forget to clean it out every once in a while too…
FB Messenger Ads:
This is great for service based businesses! Again, relatively low cost (do I sound like a broken record here?). It keeps all the information on the FB platform – which makes it easier for FB to track the data for you. I know I just said above that getting the email data OFF of FB was better, but it’s also harder. You will always loose a few people when they are asked to leave FB, any extra steps are always a risk. This ad minimizes the steps and keeps the conversation right there on FB. It also allows the response to the ad to feel personalized. High end service based businesses can really benefit here.
