Although it's my first blog, I think it's useless to point out how important digital advertising is in 2021. If you don't believe me, just check out how much brands like Coca-Cola spend on digital advertising or advertising in general. Do they need it? Do you know a person who hasn't heard of Coca-Cola? Congrats if you do, it means they spend more than 4 billion $ to reach your friend and tell him how good their product is. :)
Jokes aside, we live in a world where everything is online. Almost 3 billion people today have Facebook accounts. Almost 5 billion people are using the internet. And those numbers will only grow. Those numbers also show something - if your brand is not online, it's like it doesn't exist. Pretty much. Customers love to see their brand online. But also, customers are picky today. They like to see original content from brands. And they like to see some special offers. All the time! Are you serving all that to your customers?
If content is the king, then advertising is the queen
They say content is the king. Yes, it is. You can reach billions of people, but if you reach them with an average ad, you will have an average result. But, if you have amazing content aligned with a proper advertising strategy, that's the jackpot. So I guess I'm not wrong when I say that, if the content is the king, advertising is defo the queen that makes the royal family work together. Oh yes, and let's not forget about the prince aka your product ;)
Choosing the proper KPI
So, we already concluded that together with original, next-level content and straight-to-the-point offers, you also need a proper digital advertising strategy. It must be adjusted with your business goals. But do you know how to adjust digital advertising goals and KPIs with the bigger goals? In general, the first thing you need to think about is one main KPI. You can't have 5 KPIs and run campaigns like, “I want to increase sales, get more Facebook followers, reach 5 million peoples and I also want engagement, 1500 likes on every post and increase brand awareness”. That just won't work. You need to focus on one goal that's most important for you at a certain point your brand is at.
That might be brand awareness if your brand is new on the market, that can be increasing sales, but it can also be something specific like reaching out to as many people as possible to tell them that your new store is open or something like that.
Now, if you ever tried to make a Facebook ad, you probably noticed that optimizations are classified in 3 columns - awareness, consideration, conversion. I would also bet that 9 out of 10 people didn't pay much attention to the logic behind it, but that's the essence of picking the right optimization adjusted to your business goals. So let me explain those classifications for you.
Awareness contains two possible optimizations - reach and brand awareness. In general, this is the first step in your funnel and some kind of a starting point. You want to make people aware of your brand or product, so that eventually you would make them buy it. Makes sense, right? This is the reason why good advertisers always recommend all campaigns to last at least 3 months, so you can go through all of the phases. One good piece of advice is - use brand awareness if your brand is not so big and famous because your frequency will be a lot higher, and you want your ads to be shown as many times as possible to people so they would remember it. Reach optimization is good in specific cases, like if your brand is really well recognized, or in case you want some ads to be delivered to as many people as possible, but you can't expect much interaction here.
After you worked on awareness, it's time to make them consider your brand or a product. Here you can choose more optimizations, such as traffic (you want to take them to your website to read some blog or article), engagement (you want them to interact more with you, but this is also a tricky one and will write about that in a separate blog), app installs (in case you have an app, well, you want people to install it as many times possible), video views (if you invested in a cool video, you want people to see it and remember it), lead generation (you can collect many leads for your newsletter), and messages (you want to interact with people via direct messages). I guess you have the picture now - you increased awareness of your brand, you made them consider it, and now it's time to start selling with conversion events.
Conversion is the final, but also the most important part of your funnel. Facebook algorithms offer so many options, and that's the reason why I will dedicate one blog to this topic only. But if you take all of the steps explained above and optimize your conversion campaign properly, I am certain you will make some proper ROI and deliver amazing business results.
But in that case, your main KPI is - ROI. Not number of likes or number of people reached. And this logic works for all of the optimizations. Focus on one goal, prepare content accordingly, optimize your campaign for that goal, and let the algorithm do its magic. Sounds good?
