How to advertise your business on social media

First of all: Set Up Your Pixel

Pardon a what now? Use the Pixel, I can’t stress this enough, it’s one of the most useful tools in understanding your audience.

Say less than 2% of people end up converting upon the first exposure to your ad (this is a pretty fair guesstimate) you are going to have to run that ad multiple times to get a higher conversion, people need to become aware of your services and your brand and yes it does take time.

The Facebook Pixel is a snippet of code that gets placed on your website and lets you know what actions your website visitors (who have arrived there from your ad) are taking. You can then segment these visitors based on their behaviours and retarget them separately, catering the content more specifically to each group.

To find out more about the Facebook Pixel and what it can do for you here’s an interesting blog on Hootsuite that tells you more.

Second: Set your basic Custom Audience

Facebook offers your business a massive audience, with over 1 billion users a day the potential to reach new customers is clearly there, but with those numbers a somewhat amount of people to reach for your small business. It’s important to be strategic and think about how you want to be represented to them every time they see your brand.

With Facebook Custom Audiences you are able to target those who are most likely to be interested in your business, minimise wasted ad spend and in turn maximise your return on investment, a winning scenario!

With this tool you can define groups of people and build your Customer Audience with people who already have a relationship with your business, such as past customers, people who have visited your website, or new customers then you get to target the types of add they see depending on where they are in the “buyers journey”. This increases the likelihood of converting or at least reminding them of your services at the right time.

Third: Remarket

It used to be so subtle, almost magical, you open up your browser and wow Google knows you want a TV and John Lewis has a price match this weekend! Unfortunately it got creepy and now it’s feels more like “please stop chasing me around every website I view, I don’t want your TV and I don’t want my partner to know I was even looking at them as then they will want a new TV”.

An ongoing debate is still bubbling along about remarketing, do your ads do more damage than good to your reputation when following people around the internet, (yes I did look at a Samsung TV on the John Lewis website but no I have no intention of buying it…or do I?!).

Research still shows that when you do want, say, a new TV, if your ad is the one that triggers the action to purchase it’s likely it will be from the website they see first (we are all a little lazy right)? Remarketing really can work in your favour, when done well. So the main headline here, be relevant, make sure you are there when they need you, when they are thinking about you but don’t even know it’s you they want. Done well, it’s seamless and done well you have the power to engage with more relevant people to your business.

You have a variety of ways to engage when remarketing, as mentioned earlier, setting your Facebook Pixel code will be a great starting point, create webpage Custom Events, try Facebook Video messaging, classic ad remarketing, the list goes on. The main point is remember to track, measure and be responsive to your audience.