With on-going updates to Facebook’s algorithms and the introduction of advertising on Instagram, more and more brands are choosing to utilise paid advertising to increase exposure and generate website traffic from a highly targeted audience. We’d always recommend brands to use advertising since Facebook reduce organic reach to below 5% of your existing audience, and so its effectiveness to gain awareness and traffic is invaluable.

There are now also a variety of ways to implement your paid advertising budget, including targeting people based on their age and location or lifestyle habits and online behaviour all the way through to re-targeting people who have visited your website. We’ve broken down the key aspects for you below:

The Facebook Pixel has been around for a while, but has recently been revised and improved by Facebook to make it more powerful than ever. It allows you to target people who have visited your website or even viewed certain products before showing preset ads on that user’s social platforms, reminding them of what they’ve seen and encouraging them to purchase or revisit. It also works cross-device, meaning if somebody visits your website on their laptop and then goes onto Facebook on their mobile the adverts will still appear.

An effective way of utilising your paid advertising budget on Facebook and Instagram by being able to program your ad based on what you are looking to achieve. Some of the goals could be increasing web traffic, page likes, capturing email addresses for example, and you can select the users that will see these adverts based on their age, gender, location and much more. Preset ads are the most used type of paid advertisement and can prove to be very effective if used correctly.

Similar to preset ads, boosted posts are best used to increase reach amongst a target audience and generate engagement. There’s no point boosting a regular update, you may get a few extra likes, but nothing ground-breaking. Use this form of advertising to shout about exclusive offers, competitions, influencer features, anything exciting and easy to engage with! With competition boosts you can target your competitors to make the giveaway appear on their customers’ timelines, which will encourage them to enter and in-turn provide you with their email address which you can then use for future marketing campaigns, converting them into a customer of yours.

By installing the Facebook retargeting pixel, businesses are able to use a custom audience as a whole new starting point for new audiences that Facebook will generate to be similar. Essentially this means that instead of making an educated guess when attempting to target a new group, you can reach the perfect prospects like the ones in your custom audience in half the time.

For more information on our Social Media services and paid advertising campaigns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!