What Are the Different Ways to Advertise on Facebook?

Choosing From the 10 Facebook Ad Objectives – What Are the Different Ways to Advertise on Facebook?

Have you ever advertised on Facebook?

If so, you had to choose from the many options for marketing on the world’s largest social media website.

Do you want your ads showing up on news feeds? Should you set a daily or monthly budget?

What demographics should you target?

There are plenty of choices you need to make if you want to get your marketing message in front of the more than 2 billion people who regularly use Facebook.

Whether you decide to boost a post, advertise with video or keep your marketing efforts restricted to your business page, there are currently 10 different ad objectives Facebook offers.

Facebook asks you to reverse your traditional marketing mindset by thinking about your intended result first and then working backward towards the type of ad you are going to create. In early 2018, here are the 10 different objectives you can try to accomplish by advertising on Facebook (listed alphabetically).

Application Installs – Choose this option if you are trying to get prospects to download one of your business apps. This option allows you to choose between desktop or mobile applications.

Brand Awareness – This is a good option if your goal is to introduce your business to the world, and boost the number of people who understand what it is your business does.

Conversions – If you want someone to click on a link, purchase a product, or join your email list on your website, converting someone from tire-kicker to action-taker, choose Conversions in the Facebook ad objectives menu.

Engagement – This is the option you should choose if you want to get the FB world to like, share, or comment on a post or page.

Lead generation – If you are trying to turn prospects into eventual customers, you have to fill your sales funnel with leads.

Reach – This option exposes your marketing message to as many targeted prospects as possible.

Product catalog sales – This is a relatively new option, which allows you to build and display a catalog of your products and services.

Store visits – If you run a brick-and-mortar business, getting people in your front door is crucial to your success. This is the Facebook advertising option that allows you to do that.

Traffic – For a virtual business, traffic is everything. Choose this ad objective when you want to direct traffic to a specific webpage.

Video views – This objective is self-explanatory. It helps boost the number of views your video receives.

As the initial step for advertising on Facebook, you must choose from one of the 10 options just listed. These options are updated from time to time, and can always be accessed from the Facebook Ads Manager.

Once you decide on the business objective or goal you are trying to achieve, you are then taken through a simple to follow, step-by-step process that allows you to create your ad, set your budget, and start advertising.

The Quickest Way to Advertise on Facebook – Boosting Facebook Posts

If you are on Facebook, you are certainly not alone. More than 2 billion Facebook users log in on a monthly basis. That means nearly 30% of the world’s population is frequently checking in on FB. No doubt in the past, while you were sharing funny-cat, crazy-baby, or “look what I am eating” pictures and videos on Facebook, you ran into a few advertisements.

Advertising is the way Facebook makes money. The world’s largest virtual social network does not charge for membership. It is free to join Facebook and engage with its many billions of members. You can create or join Facebook Groups, post whatever is on your mind as long as it is not inflammatory or hateful, and find others that enjoy the same interests. Because all of those socializing options are free, Facebook has to make money somehow, and it is through its advertising platform.

If you would like to take your marketing shot at the global Facebook audience, the quickest way to do so is to Boost a Post.

If you dive into the Facebook Ads Manager, you can feel a little overwhelmed.  (https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager)

There is a 4-step process you need to follow for any ad campaign, and each of those 4 steps involves multiple choices and selections. This ends up creating thousands upon thousands of Facebook advertising permutations. If you would like to get started quickly by sharing your marketing message on Facebook while you learn the intricacies of the Facebook Ads Manager, boosting a post is the way to go.

How to Boost a Post

Consider this the “bare-bones” option for advertising on Facebook. It is such a quick and simple process, you may want to keep an eye on your budget when you begin boosting posts. In just a couple of minutes, a
person entirely unfamiliar with Facebook advertising can select a post, attach a budget, and market on FB with only a few clicks.

Perhaps you are launching an event at your brick-and-mortar business. You have slashed prices, you are launching a new product line, your business is just entering its most important season, and you want to start that season with a bang. Consider promoting your event by boosting a post. This simple Facebook advertising process can also be used if you are trying to build an email list, develop leads for your business, or increase the number of likes or shares your business page receives.

The first thing you want to do is a locate a post you want to promote, or create a new post. If you are choosing from previous posts, find one that has driven a lot of engagement. Once you have a post you want to promote, look right below the post. You will see a blue button which says Boost Post.

Click on that button and you will be taken to options for setting up your ad. A new option added in late 2017 allows you to choose an objective. Click the blue highlighted Change option to see all available objectives. This allows you to use your promoted post to reach a very specific business goal. You can then add a call to action that links to FB Messenger or your website, and you can select the age range, location, and gender of your audience.

The final step is to choose a budget.

When you select a budget, you will instantly see an approximation of how many people you will reach with that budget, according to the age, location, and gender filters you have set. Click the Boost button to begin your ad. One really neat feature with the post-boosting option is to save previous audiences for use later. Once you go through the process a few
times, you can find yourself promoting posts in under a minute, with this quickest and probably simplest of all the Facebook advertising options.

The Power of Pain

Let’s talk about human nature for a second. If I were to offer you a succulent, moist, still warm-from-the-oven piece of triple chocolate cake…

…while simultaneously slamming my heel into your toes…

…which one would you notice?

Which one would you react to?

And which one would you still be thinking about tomorrow?

People will spend an enormous amount of time, money and energy to avoid pain. They’ll avoid confrontation with bosses, neighbors, spouses and kids to avoid emotional pain. They’ll take drugs to suppress physical pain.

Your job as a successful marketer – whether you like it or not – is to use this pain to help them find a solution.

Some might call this exploitation – digging around in the pain and agitating it to motivate people to take action. You’re making the pain worse before you finally prescribe the cure.

But it’s the pain that makes people take action. And if you can help people, then it’s your job to do it. And to help people, you’ve got to use the best method possible to motivate them to take action – which is aggravating the pain and making them feel it until they cry ‘uncle.’

I know what you’re thinking – you won’t make their pain worse to sell them the solution. Instead, you’ll motivate them with a positive picture of what their life will be like once they have the solution. Well, you’re half right. Understand this – Humans will do far more to avoid pain than to receive reward. They’ll run as fast as they can away from the stick, but they’ll creep up on the carrot and many times never even reach it.

Most people cannot clearly describe what they want, which is why they never get it. But they can tell you exactly what they don’t want. By rubbing their noses in what they’re trying to avoid, you momentarily make the pain worse until it’s unbearable. They want to take action now. They NEED to take action NOW.

And then you motivate them with the positive picture of all the benefits they’ll receive from doing this thing you want them to do. The niche doesn’t matter, either. Whether you’re selling software, information, washers and dryers or stocks and bonds, agitate the problem, then offer the solution.

Examples:

Software
– how much work are they having to do, and how much business are they missing because they don’t have your automated solution?

They’ve already wasted tons of time and lost a fortune. Their competitors are ahead of them, and soon their business will be on the scrap heap.

Unless… unless they grab your software now, because then they can get x benefit and y benefit and z benefit, etc.

Health Information
– they’re overweight, tired, catching colds and at risk for serious disease. From here, it only gets worse
– much worse. Sick, in pain, bed ridden, in the hospital, heart attacks and chemo and drugs and …

but wait. They can turn their health around, starting right now.

Washers and dryers

– think how much extra they’ve already paid in water bills because they don’t have energy efficient models.

Plus, the wear and tear to their clothes from inferior washers and overheating dryers, their shoddy appearance wearing these clothes, making a lousy first impression at work because of how bad their clothes look. But you can solve it all today…

Investments
– they’ve already lost a fortune by not using your services. Just look at the returns your clients have been getting, look at how much money they started with versus what they have today.

If only they had started with you sooner, all the time and money lost. But right now you have perhaps your best investment advice yet, but it’s a super hot market and timing is critical…

Okay, you get the idea. No matter what you’re selling, you can agitate the problem and then offer the solution.

Remember, in movies the hero doesn’t arrive to save the day until things look completely bleak and desperate and the cause is all but lost. Effective marketing is no different.

Big Fish, Small Pond

Your target market must be small enough that the resources you’re able to commit will have a big impact.

Imagine carrying the heaviest rock you can hold and dropping it into a small pond. The splash would be huge, loud and noticed by anyone around, and the ripples would cover the entire surface.

Now imagine dropping that same rock into the middle of the ocean. No one would even notice. Imagine dropping a rock 100 times that size in the middle of the ocean. Again, no one would notice a thing.

The rock, of course, is your resources.

When new marketers come to me looking for advice, I ask them who their target market is. Nine times out of ten, it’s, “Everyone who wants to ___.” It might be everyone who needs to lose weight, make money or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Their market is too big and they’ll never get noticed.

But if they target teachers who want to make extra money online, or nurses, or fast food workers, they’ll probably make a killing.

Still not convinced? Think of the pond versus the ocean, and the rock as being your marketing. How much marketing will you have to do to get noticed in the ocean? You’ll need the resources of a Coca-cola to do it.

Now imagine getting noticed in the pond. Heck, if you just stand up and say, “I’ll teach everyone in the pond how to lose 10 pounds this month, or how to make $1,000 a month online,” you’ll get noticed right away.

When someone describes their market too broadly, I know they’re going to fail. But when they know exactly who their audience is and how they’re going to reach them, I know they’ll do fine