Understanding how to market your content on Facebook is critical as the algorithms are always changing and your business‘s visibility is intermittent.

In a previous blog post, we discussed the decline in organic reach, and how Facebook is prioritizing your friend’s and family member’s content over that of advertisements and fan pages. Don’t fret though, there’s a way you can maximize your presence on Facebook and get the most out of your ad dollars. It doesn’t matter if you have no idea how to use Facebook ads or want to take your ads to another level, DDPR is here to spill the deets every business needs to know. Here are 5 valuable tips to maximize your Facebook ad budget.

1. Know your target audience.

There’s nothing like wasting money advertising to the wrong audience. Don’t focus on reaching the most people, instead, focus on reaching the right people. It’s important to have a clear understanding of what platforms your customers are using, their interests, why they are interested in your business, and the content that speaks to them most. The best way to learn this type of information is to assess your page’s Facebook Insights. Using Facebook Insights allow businesses to learn more about specific audiences and how to engage with them.

2. Consider How Much Each Customer May Spend at Your Business

When you run your first ad, you’re often left wondering what’s next. The idea is to have an increased customer LTV (Lifetime Value), which is the revenue on average you generate from each customer during their consumer lifespan with your business. It’s very easy to focus on Facebook ads as a quick fix to increase sales. The problem lies in comparing  upfront ad costs with the customer LTV.

Kissmetrics gives a great example to explain:

“Assume you’re selling a $50 product, and it costs you $80 to acquire a new customer. At first glance, this doesn’t seem correct. If you’re spending $80 for every new customer, and you’re only making $50, it’s clear that you’re losing money, right?

Well, it depends…

Let’s also assume that you discovered that your customer LTV (Lifetime Value) is $700. In this case, $80 per acquisition is not only acceptable, but utterly fantastic. You can afford to lose $30 per customer on the “front-end” of the relationship because you know that you’ll make far more money in the long run.

It’s always important to ensure you’re offering your customer a superb experience so that they continue to support your business. Calculating customer LTV allows you to assess whether your company is positioning itself for substantial growth. It acts as a guide for setting a marketing budget and maximizing the growth of the company. Here’s an infographic on how to calculate your customer LTV.

3. Use Facebook Pixel.

Facebook Pixel is a code placed on a business page to track, optimize, build and remarket facebook ads. Facebook pixel helps track the conversions, and optimize them from the collected data. Facebook pixel then helps build the targeted audiences for future ads. After that, it re-markets them to people who may have just visited the page in hope of converting them to customers. Pixel is best for optimizing ads, it helps business ensure they are showing the right ad to the right people based on the actions they are most likely to take. Create a pixel today!

4. Monitor ads in real time

The biggest mistake most businesses make is creating the ad, launching, and noting its performance after its completion. Facebook ads most definitely are not “set it and forget it” processes.  Monitoring the performance during its duration allow changes to be made and adjusted for an increased response. The idea is to maximize your ad dollars, and enhance the performance of each ad. For example, if the reach is low, updating the audience parameter can be an easy fix. Typically it takes a couple days to collect campaign data to measure ad performance. However, once you have the data, be sure to identify the ads that are performing well, then push those forward to continue to maximize the value of the ad budget.

5. Tell a story to your audience

Who doesn’t love a good story? When creating ads, make sure they are eyecatching and captivate your audience’s attention. If your aim is to increase subscriptions, create a call to action w/ an accompanying creative piece of content; like an introduction video. There’s also the option of creating a narrative video introduction + article/item + call to action. When creating ads, think about different ads you’ve seen from competitors or major companies and what exactly about those ads drew you in. What about those ads made you want to come back for more. What is it about Target’s Facebook ads that make people want to go in and “check it out” even if they don’t need the sale items

Facebook continually makes major changes to the way businesses interact with their customers, but there is still value in a Facebook advertisement. Most people feel that Facebook is the grandparent of all social networks, but it is still the primary social platform for most millennials and 35+ adults.. So gather your campaign ideas, set an ad budget, and optimize your business Facebook ads with our 5 tips and let DDPR know how it turns out!