15 Mar Digital Marketing for Financial Advisors (Step 4: Running a Facebook Marketing Campaign)
When you’re new to running Facebook campaigns, you might be wondering how to start. Even navigating the backend of Facebook may seem like a chore. Sure, it can be quite confusing at first but once you get the basics right, you’d find this process increasingly fulfilling. Without further ado, let’s get you started on running your own Facebook ads.
Marketing Objective of Your Campaign
Think about what the main objective of your campaign is. If you’re a financial advisor running a recruitment campaign with a landing page, your objective should be ‘Conversions’ because you would want to measure the number of people who visited your landing page, and submitted the contact form to sign up.
Awareness | Consideration | Conversion |
Brand awareness Reaching people who are likely to be interested in your brand | Traffic Increase the number of visits to your website or number of app users | Conversions Get more people to use your website or app. To track and measure conversions, use Facebook pixel or app events |
Reach Show your ad to the maximum number of people | Engagement Reach as many people as possible & drive engagement with your ad | Catalog sales Show products from your catalog based on your target audience |
App installs Get more people to download your app | Store visits Promote your business people who are nearby | |
Video Create ads that automatically show items from your catalog based on your target audience. | ||
Lead generation Collect information from people, including newsletter sign-ups | ||
Messages Starting conversations with customers with your ad |
Adapted from Facebook
It’s also important to understand the 3 levels of a Facebook campaign:
Campaign | Choose a single marketing objective for each campaign. A campaign can contain 1 or more ad sets and ads. |
Ad set | Define your targeting, budget, schedule, bidding and placement. May contain 1 or more ads. |
Ad | The creative i.e. images, videos, etc |
Selecting Your Target Audience
Ask yourself: Who is my target audience? Think in terms of age, gender, location, lifestyle and interests. Once you’ve figured that out, you can easily fill in the audience and detailed targeting fields set by Facebook.
Setting Your Ad Budget
There are 2 ad budget models: Daily and Lifetime. As its name suggests, Daily Budget lets you set a fixed spending per day. Lifetime Budget spreads the total sum across the campaign duration. You may schedule your ad set to run continuously, or stipulate its start and end date.
If you’re new to Facebook ads, a budget of $20/day is ideal. Run your campaign for at least 2 weeks to gather enough data to make valuable insights. You can conduct a split test in a single campaign by testing one of the variables: Audience (ad sets), creative, placement, delivery optimisation, product sets. This will be discussed further in our next article.
Monitoring Your Ads
Running Facebook campaigns involves constant trial and error. Don’t be disheartened if your campaign hasn’t been yielding results. Pause the campaign, and hypothesise on why the campaign didn’t work well. Is your ad set not targeting the right audience? Is the ad creative not appealing to your audience?
A simple way you can go about this is to first, test out a few different ad sets with the same creative. From there, you’d be able to figure out if the problem lies in the audience or the creative.
Important Metrics | What does it mean? |
Link click-through rate (CTR) |
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Cost per lead (CPL) |
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Frequency |
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Practice Makes Perfect
Get yourself familiarised with Facebook ads while keeping in mind the tips we’ve shared above. You may not succeed all the time, but you’ll always learn something new. Going forward, always remember to monitor the data and optimise relevant areas to improve the performance of your campaigns.
This is exactly what we’ll be discussing in the next article Step 5: Optimising Your Campaigns. Do keep a lookout for the article as we will show you how split-testing can optimise your ads and produce better results.
