Facebook Ads: 10 Steps to Get the Most Bang for Your Buck
by Dori SaltzmanThere’s an urban legend among travel sellers about a Canadian travel agency that landed a 1,200-passenger group cruise booking just by running Facebook ads. To top it off, he also signed a contract to handle the group’s cruise bookings for the next several years.
Here’s the rub – it’s not an urban legend. It’s all true. (See Facebook Lead Yields Cruise Booking for 1,200, September 30, 2010.)
Yet many travel agents dismiss Facebook ads. They just don’t see them as a viable form of advertising and marketing. One agent said he’d heard that Facebook ads were “a waste of money.”
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Social media expert and consultant Sophie Bujold disagrees – strongly. “Facebook ads can yield big results and can often be more effective than other paid online media placements, like banner ads or other pay-per-click mediums,” Bujold told Travel Market Report. (See Facebook Ads: Do It, They’re Worth the Money, June 27, 2011.)
To achieve good results, Facebook ads must be done correctly, Bujold cautioned. “Running an ad campaign is definitely not a spectator sport. In order to achieve maximum success with your ads, you need to have a plan and follow through with it.”
Here are Bujold’s 10 steps to achieving success with Facebook ads.
1. Have a goal. You need to know what you want to get out of your Facebook ads. Start off by getting very clear about what you hope to achieve, as this will determine tactics such as the type of ad you create, including image and copy; the landing page, and how long it will run.
2. Give it eye-appeal. Never run an ad without a photo. When choosing an image for your ad, select colors that contrast with Facebook colors. Blues tend to get lost because they blend with Facebook, while reds, oranges and yellows attract attention. Faces and quirky pictures are also attention-grabbing. For instance, to promote a family vacation, you might use a funny picture of a kid doing something on the beach, rather than just a pretty beach photo.
3. Make the content compelling. You only have 135 characters to explain to Facebook users why they should click on your ad. “Think about if you were reading the ad, what would compel you to click on it,” Bujold advised. “Your copy needs to be very direct about what people can expect when they click like, ‘Discount on Princess Cruises’ or, ‘Great family vacation options.’”
4. Be clear about your call to action. Always make your call to action very clear. If you want people to book, say, “Book now.” If you want people to “like” your page, say that.
5. Definitely go for the “like.” The like call to action is most successful, because people are used to seeing the like button all over the Internet. “The less involved the consumer needs to be in the commitment, the easier it is for them to commit,” Bujold said.
6. Start with more than one. When Bujold starts a Facebook ad campaign, she always creates at least five different ads. As she sees which ads are generating the most click-throughs, she pulls the others. A single campaign with multiple ads is no more expensive than a single-ad campaign. “You can create as many ads for a campaign as you want,” Bujold said.
7. Adjust as you go. The beauty of Facebook ads is that you can get live reporting on how they’re doing at any moment and adjust as you go. “If you see your ad is not getting enough click-throughs, you can try doing the same ad with a different picture or the same picture with different copy and see if anything changes.”
8. Tweak one thing at a time. Don’t panic and change everything if you’re not getting the results you want right away. Instead tweak one thing at a time so you can determine which pieces are working and which are not.
9. Change it up. Facebook ads have maximum efficiency within three to five days of being published, Bujold said. So when you start to see click-throughs dropping off, it’s time to refresh your ad. “Either do a second wave of something completely new, or change just the photo or just the copy to keep the momentum and interest going.”
10. Link to a Facebook page. There tends to be a higher conversion rate for ads that point to a page that resides on Facebook. So if you want to promote an event or sales offer, create a Facebook page dedicated to that event or promotion.
