Advertising On Facebook: Essential Advice For Media Startups
An expert offers some insight into effective Facebook ad campaigns
Facebook is an essential advertising tool for any media company or startup.
With nearly 2.2 billion active users and a sophisticated advertisement manager platform, it’s no wonder six million advertisers use Facebook to reach consumers.
The social media giant offers scores of targeting options based on demographics, connections, interests, and behaviours. Although an effective campaign isn’t necessarily a hyper-targeted one warns Uzair Chutani CEO of digital marketing company Growth Driver and Digital News Innovation Challenge (DNIC) Entrepreneur-in-Residence.
“Targeting is a balancing act,” said Chutani, adding that “advertisers can be tempted to over-target their audiences.”
“Over targeting” describes when a campaign has too many targeting options activated, so only a very small demographic will be reached, explains Chutani. A campaign targeting males 18–25 from Toronto who are single, work in advertising, like Marvel movies, frequently travel and own a motorcycle would be an example.
This can restrict Facebook’s algorithm which is meant to find users who are likely to respond to an ad campaign.
Rather than focus on audience targeting, startups should look at what their overall goal is and ask themselves what they want out of a Facebook ad campaign. Are you trying to increase traffic to your company’s website? Are you trying to get more downloads for your app? Perhaps you want to boost your brand visibility?
Figuring out exactly what you want an ad campaign to do and how you’re going to measure that outcome is a crucial first step when advertising on Facebook said Chutani.
“Establishing this upfront makes it simple to evaluate the success (or) failure of the campaign.”
Chutani points to DNIC participating company Ground , a news curation and verification smartphone app , as an example of a well planned campaign using a specific objective and audience targeting.
Ground’s campaign objective was to increase their overall mobile app installs, tracking their cost per install along the way.
Since Ground is an app that compiles news content from multiple sources, it was essential that the campaign did not target audiences on a single diet of CNN or Fox.
“We had to find people who are actually looking for a solution that is more unbiased” said Harleen Kaur, CEO of Ground.
“Using Facebook’s targeting methods we were able to target and find those people while reducing cost.”
The results have been overwhelmingly positive for the media startup.
Ground has been able to acquire tens of thousands of mobile app users using Facebook’s mobile app install ads in the last two months
