In the last post in our At The Drawing Board series, I wrote about deciding on a marketing strategy. In this post, I’m going to talk about the first part of our strategy: Facebook Ads.
We decided that Facebook Ads would be a good way to bring leads into our funnel and raise awareness of our company and services. From our ads, we’d collect email addresses so that we could stay in contact with leads via email marketing.
But just deciding to use Facebook Ads is the easy part. Planning Facebook Ads is a whole different ball game.
Facebook Ads come in many types, which are ever changing. The type you choose is based on the objective you want to complete.
In our case, our objective was to collect email addresses, which gave us a few options:
- Conversions – An ad run with the objective of converting users. The ad pushes a user towards your website with the aim of the user completing a specific action. (Such as, in our case, filling in our email form.)
- Traffic – This type of ad aims to push users towards a particular website. (In our case, it could be a landing page for our email list.)
- Lead Generation – An ad that collects contact information from users directly within Facebook, providing you with a list of people that signed up.
There are a few other objectives that didn’t seem like they would be as relevant to us:
- Brand awareness – Making more people aware of a Facebook page and brand.
- Reach – Showing an ad to the maximum number of people
- Engagement – Getting people to engage with a Facebook page’s posts. (Increasing reactions, comments, likes, etc.)
- Video views – Getting people to view a video.
- App Installs – Having users buy and install an app.
- Product sales – Aiming to get people to buy products from an online store.
- Store visits – Having people visit your real world location.
Many of these ad types seem similar but have small differences beneath.
So what are the main differences between ad types?
- The options are given for how the ad looks and works. Since each ad is based on a certain objective, each one looks different. A video views ad will consist of a video and text, while an engagement ad will only show a post from your Facebook Page. Some ads show a button, while others like the lead generation ad are unique and contain forms that can be filled in.
- How the ads optimize. Once you run an ad for a certain amount of time, Facebook can automatically optimize it in the background so that your objective is more easily obtained. With that in mind, it needs to know what you want from your ad so it can help you get there.
With all of this in mind, since we were looking to collect email addresses, we decided to start off with a conversions ad.
Our basic plan was that our ad would direct users to a page where they would enter their contact details. Those who entered their details would have converted, which was the main goal we wanted to strive for.
However, we could have used other types of ads too. Any good Facebook Ads campaign will try out some ad types to find the one that works best and completes an objective for the least amount of money.
