Brand pages continue to see organic reach shrink on Facebook, making engagement harder to achieve. Because of this, many brands are turning to promoted posts to reach more fans. Whether your business has the budget of a global brand or a local shop, you can use promoted posts to get your message out to targeted audiences.
Determine Your Budget
Start out by setting a weekly budget specifically for promoted posts. Once you know what you have to work with, decide how you want to split up the money. One method for promoting posts is to divide your available budget across all of your posts, to gain greater overall reach for your page. Another method is to pick one post that you think will have the greatest return and promote that post to the largest number of people possible. There is no right or wrong answer! Test both and see which works best for you.
Experiment With Different Campaigns
There are different styles of campaigns you can create to achieve your desired result. You can run a short-term campaign, focusing on the post itself and targeting the type of people interested in that specific post. In a short-term campaign, your desired result is to gain Likes, Comments, and Shares on that post. You may gain some Page Likes as well, but engagement with the post is the goal of this campaign.
A long-term campaign is the opposite. In a long-term targeted campaign, you are looking to gain Page Likes from followers who will continue to find your business interesting.
Take, for instance, the image above, of our post about the new IHOP logo. For a short-term campaign, we could target people who “Like” IHOP. They would presumably be interested in a post about the restaurant and engage with a Comment or a Like. However, that person wouldn’t necessarily be interested in what we do.
If we ran a long-term campaign on that same post, we could target people who are interested in “branding” or “logo design.” Those fans may not care about IHOP, but might want to “Like” our page so they can follow along with the design work we do in the future. We could then count on them for future engagements!
Continue to Evolve
Regardless of the kind of campaign you choose to run, remember to continue posting the content that your target markets came to see. If the user doesn’t see more of what they are looking for, they likely won’t stick around for long. But if you give them shareable content, they’ll spread the word to their friends who have similar interests—that’s called viral reach, and that’s ideal.
Finally, as you test promoted posts and analyze your results, continue to refine and expand your targets. Keep track of which groups aren’t engaging and stop targeting them. Use that money to either spend more on the targets that are doing best, or experiment with other target markets.
