Can Facebook and Instagram advertising work for you? Yes, it can! During my time at a leading media agency, I worked with some massive brands. And in my own business now, helping solopreneurs, I still apply the same tactics I learned.
I’m sharing all 5 of these tactics which you can apply to your own paid ad campaigns across Facebook and Instagram.
Build Trust
The no. one tactic which big brands use is trust-building and you can adopt it in two ways:
- Use testimonials and let them do the heavy lifting. Actual customers talking about your products or services in your ads and organic posts, or written testimonials, give credibility to your service and reassurance to your target audience. I’ve recently included testimonials as a headline which immediately grabs people’s attention when they’re scrolling through the feed.
- Use social proof. In Instagram / Facebook ads language this means likes, shares, and comments. Like testimonials, this reassures other people looking at the ad, it means affinity, real people have got with your message and brand. Engagement is Facebook’s favorite objective, after all, it wants people to stay on its platform and when they’re spending time liking, commenting and sharing on your ad, it means they’re engaging with it for longer.
Frequency
With the rise of digital marketing and our attention span getting shorter, marketing gurus say the number of times your message needs to be seen is now 21 or even 28! Note: this is not the same as your ad frequency being at 21. It means the message i.e. on your site, on your facebook page and Instagram posts and across organic media should total 21.
Take advantage of the laser targeting options that are available when you create your Instagram and Facebook ad campaigns. Think about:
- What is the right time, the right content and the right audience to run ads to?
- Positive emotions in advertising like joy, love, inspiration, and motivation get shared a lot more compared to other emotions which will ramp up the frequency and add to your first tactic, building trust.
- What type of ad format works best for your target audience? Will you run a video ad, carousel ad or photo ad?
Measurement
Big Brands measure EVERYTHING. They can’t afford a leaky bucket, and neither can you. You can measure things as ongoing, benchmarking one month against another. Or focus on campaign-specific metrics. Make sure you look at measuring what you’re really after! You might focus on:
- Engagement – measure likes, comments, shares
- Awareness – measure reach, volume
- Traffic – measure cost per landing page and the actual volume of traffic
- Share of voice – measure what you can against the competition.
- Sales – perhaps the most important one. Are you having a good sales month? What have you done differently? Look at all the metrics.
Testing
Always reserve between 5-20% of your campaign budget for testing. The rule here is: the bigger your overall budget, the more you test. If you have £300 for media, you’d spend more in the region of 10%. For smaller budgets like this, testing doesn’t need to be vast: you could test a new audience, a different creative or a different call to action.
Right Foundations
If you’re feeling stuck, go back to basics. The saying goes that “you gotta slow down if you wanna speed up” and when you’re a solopreneur, a coach, or a personal brand, that often means taking some time out to develop yourself.
[bctt tweet=”If you’re feeling stuck, go back to basics. The saying goes that “you gotta slow down if you wanna speed up” and when you’re a solopreneur, a coach, or a personal brand, that often means taking some time out to develop yourself. #Youpreneur” via=”no”]
We connect with other human beings, we always have. From the circle around the fire to the glow of the mobile screen, it’s connections we crave. Thousands of years on, we are still the same.
We are at a pivotal moment in business history where we witness the rise of the solopreneur building personal brands. Everywhere you look, businesses are flourishing on social media and many of them are home-based companies. According to recent research published on the BBC’s website, more than 1.5 million people now work from home – an increase of 74% on a decade ago. And this is just in the UK, the figure would be much higher if it included the US and the rest of the world, and the trend is continuing.
If you take a look at many social media platforms, you can see plenty of solopreneurs trading under their own names and they have either established, or they are dreaming about establishing a personal brand. Creating a brand which reflects your ideal clients and generating trust is crucial and savvy use of advertising can bring the best results.
Chris and the team at Youpreneur have preached about the value of the personal brand for many years; looking at everyone from Oprah to Gary V to all who attend the Youpreneur Summit and masterminds. They have helped solopreneurs understand the strength of their own personal brand and this has had amazing benefits for lone business people.
The internet has made this growth possible by improving world communications, and by tapping into our individual qualities we can distinguish one brand from another and create a trust for our own.
