Do You Need A Facebook Page To Advertise (On Facebook)?

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The short answer: YES! But a more detailed review of how the Facebook advertising platform and workflow operates, offers a surprising insight. You really don’t need 1000’s of followers, and a robust content marketing plan to get some surprisingly good results.

First off, if you haven’t got a Facebook business page up and running (and advertising account), you’re going to need these, so head over to Facebook and fill your boots.

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Now, I have a client at the moment that came to me and asked if we could create some advertising campaigns on Facebook. “Great” I said, but it turned out there was a catch: “We don’t have any social media channels set up, and we want to start straight away…”

To bring you up to speed, the client runs a very well established ‘No win, no fee’ compensation solicitors firm in the North of England. My instinct was to encourage them to create a Facebook business page and begin to develop some interesting, visually appealing content that their audience would be keen to share, and once we started to develop a sizeable following, we’d start to boost posts and create look-a-like audiences to re-target adverts towards. But the client has neither the time nor budget to invest into those activities.

How can you advertise on #Facebook when you don’t even have a page?

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Hmmm, I Scratched My Head…

“If we create some REALLY nice visuals for the Facebook adverts, maybe say a carousel style ad to encourage clicking, heavily boost it, and drive people straight to the company website, there’s no reason we can’t just use Facebook as an advertising platform to drive traffic to the website and and capture audience details with a super-slick landing page…”

The brainwave came from a similar project I’ve been running for another client who are running a promotion this Autumn for some commercial navigation software. We’ve been building their Facebook presence for a few months and recently started to drive traffic to their website in order to build a ‘website custom audience’ with a Facebook tracking pixel.

This allows us to retarget website visitors at a later date with the promotion, and knowing they’re pretty warm leads as they’ve already visited the website means that the adverts generally get much better engagement and conversion rates. They originally had about 50 likes on Facebook; in the past 3 months we’ve increased that to nearly 500 and have a custom audience with over 10,000 people on ready to re-target promotional ads at when they are ready. All of this was achieved with a budget of just £200 pcm!

Tracking pixels allos you to retarget website visitors and get better conversion rates.

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It Worked For Them, So Lets Give It A Try!

So if you’re thinking about running some promoted posts on Facebook, and either have a small number of likes or don’t even have a Facebook business page yet, here’s some tips to help you to get the most from your campaigns:

– The reach/engagement rates for your adverts are not negatively affected by the number of followers/subscribers your Facebook page has (just make sure you don’t target your existing followers!)
– Re-targeting increases engagement with paid adverts exponentially – make sure you utilise this game-changing functionality by installing a Facebook tracking pixel on your website!
– Once your advertising account is set up for your new account, you may have a restricted credit limit, but this just means you have to pay Facebook more frequently
– Use a ‘send people to my website’ advert to drive traffic to your red-hot landing page, check out Instapage for some inspiration
– Use a strong ‘call-to-action’ in both your advert copy, and image. Actually tell people to click your advert link to send them to your landing page!
– Have a strong and obvious call-to-action on your landing page, such as ‘request a demo’, ‘sign up here’, ‘start your journey’, ‘enter our competition’, and don’t be afraid to use a BIG BUTTON!
– Once the Facebook page is set up, try and post a few times a week with fresh content that reflects the ‘call to action’ of your adverts – new visitors will often just review the first 2-10 posts on your page.
– Track everything to see which adverts are working most efficiently and how many clicks/conversions you’re getting. Using a combination of Facebook tracking pixels, Facebook insights, and some Google UTM codes, you should be pretty sorted.
– Create a post on your page and paste your Facebook business page URL into it to display a ‘profile card’ for your page. Click on the dropdown arrow in the top right of the box, and select ‘pin to top’. New visitors on your site will now have a clear call to action to like your page when they hit your site for the first time!

Check out some great tips to get you started with #Facebook ads, courtesy of @hairyhandshake

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Posted by The Social Sasquatch on Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Oliver Jenkins is The Social Sasquatch. You can find him giving out free high-fives on Twitter: @HairyHandshake