It’s the season for holiday specials and promos so I wanted to make sure you guys had the information you need to create the best version of the best ad you possibly can. 

 

You Must Have a Plan

 

If you haven’t started planning, you need to start now. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are right around the corner. If you’re a retailer Black Friday is huge. Because of Covid-19, Cyber Monday will be a major event. Many people aren’t leaving their homes. Add in Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday and you will see there is a ton of planning needed. You’ve got to make sure your plan is ready to go.

Identify Your Target Audience

 

This is tremendous for your business and I’m still constantly amazed by how many businesses don’t know who their target audience is. I get super frustrated when I ask someone who their ideal audience is and they say “Everyone!” Nope. That is not true. Even if everyone could possibly use your product or service, you will do better in your marketing efforts if you find that niche audience. 

 

How can you find that niche audience? One way is to look at your Facebook insights and see who’s engaged now. How old are they? Location? Past purchasing history? Are they men or women? What’s their relationship status and education level? For instance, if you’re doing newborn portraits, chances are you’re looking at younger couples not single people in their 70s. 

 

Decide on Your Objective

 

A lot of companies get bogged down in vanity numbers. They get excited because 6,000 people saw their ad. Well, that’s great but how many products did you sell? How many emails did you gather? What was your conversion rate? If you don’t know what your goal is then it’s really hard to measure the actual effectiveness of your efforts. Decide what you are trying to get, whether it’s leads, sales, or something else. It’s very difficult to get there if you don’t know where there is.

Optimize Your Facebook Page

 

Don’t get so wrapped up in the ads that you forget to optimize your Facebook page. It needs to be easy for people to find you. Most people, once they look at an ad, go check out the Facebook page. If you have an amazing ad and they go look at your Facebook page and there’s no contact information and your most recent post was from August, that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. You look fake. You have to post regularly. First impressions are important in business.

 

Run the Right Type of Ad

 

What kind of ad are you running? What are you wanting to happen as a result of your ad? Is your goal “likes”, engagement, traffic to your website, or something else? For most businesses, engagement and traffic are their goals for holiday ads. Most are trying to send traffic to their website so they can make sales or sending people to a landing page so they can collect their email for future marketing. 

 

Boosted posts probably aren’t the best for your holiday plan. Boosting a post is super easy so they appeal to many business owners. However, I feel like it’s an easy way for Facebook to get your money without you digging in too deep to figure out what is happening. You often get those addictive vanity metrics without the numbers that actually matter. Sometimes they work but usually, they aren’t the best idea.

 

Why don’t they work? You are severely limited when choosing a target audience. You choose based on people who like your page, their friends, and location. Those are very broad options. You give up audience selection and ad placement selection. Basically, you’re paying for “likes”. Save boosted posts for when you are hosting an event and you’re local. That’s where they work best.

Check the Statistics

 

This step seems to get missed a lot. You have to track and edit your ads. You have to look at the “likes”. You have to look at the reach, which is how many people saw the post. You have to look at engagement, which is how many people interacted with the ad by either liking, commenting, or sharing. That’s how you measure. 

 

You have to look at the insights to know if your ad is working. For instance, if 100 people see your ad and 70 click through but only 8 buy, then something is wrong with the landing page. On the other hand, if 100 people see your ad but only 8 click through then something is wrong with your ad. You can even run multiple images or a split test to see what works better and adjust accordingly.

 

Now it’s Time to Run Your Ads

 

Use this information to run the most successful holiday ad you can and enjoy the rewards from your efforts all the way through Christmas.