If you’re like most business owners, you’ve dabbled in promoting and boosting posts on your business’s Facebook account. You might have sponsored posts on Instagram. You’ve paid money to share your content on these platforms, but you’re not certain that it makes any real difference to your business’s bottom line.
It’s frustrating to spend money and not know how it’s impacting your business. You need to be able to determine that when you spend money, you make money. Otherwise, you’re simply burning money.
In a nutshell, yes. Facebook and Instagram advertising can be a very powerful tool. That said, you have to properly leverage the platform in order to ensure that you’re generating real revenue for your business off of your investment. Follow these guidelines to ensure that you are getting the most from your social media advertising investments.
What does success look like to YOU, the business owner?
Before launching any marketing initiative, it’s imperative that you determine what a successful result looks like. This is something that you, the business owner, should determine. It’s not something that an agency or management company should determine for you.
You don’t have to know a thing about Facebook or Instagram or their ad platforms to answer this question. In fact, it’ll only complicate matters if you define success in overly technical terms.
Perhaps you’re a plumber, and you want to increase your emergency plumbing leads by 30%. That’s a completely appropriate goal. Or you’re a fitness influencer on Instagram, and you want to increase your followers by 30% while maintaining your engagement rate of 5%. This is also a fantastic goal.
It’s important to first determine what a successful result looks for your business. Then you (or the agency that you are working with) can structure your campaign to support your goals.
Before you pay someone to run a Facebook or Instagram campaign, ask to see how they measure results
Listen, Facebook and Instagram do not require that you know what you’re doing to spend money on their ad platforms. It’s easy to spend thousands of dollars on a poorly structured campaign that does nothing for your business.
There are plenty of people out there who are ready and willing to take your advertising dollars and burn through them on a poorly structured campaign. How do you find someone that you can trust when you know nothing about social media advertising?
This is perhaps the most important piece of advice in this blog post. If you take one piece of information from this article, please let it be this. Before you agree to allow someone to spend your money on a paid social campaign, ask for a sample results report.
The sample report shouldn’t be a bunch of jargon that you don’t understand. It should make sense to you even though your not a social media expert. It should clearly outline how your campaign is performing in regards to the results metrics that are most meaningful to you.
For example, here is a snapshot of a portion of a Formada digital marketing results report. You can easily see that the client is spending $1100 per month, and for that investment the business received 24 leads.
Don’t resign yourself to thinking that Facebook and Instagram advertising is a necessary evil that you’ll never understand
We’re not suggesting that you need to understand anything technical about the Facebook or Instagram advertising platforms. But do choose to work with an agency that values and prioritizes communication.
You deserve to work with an agency that wants you to truly understand how your investment is performing. Your agency should make you feel empowered to ask questions, make suggestions, and provide critical feedback.
The best digital marketers welcome questions. They want their clients to understand how their social media investments are performing and they omit unnecessary industry jargon from their client communication.
Questions about Facebook and Instagram advertising? We can help!
Have questions about Facebook and Instagram advertising or maybe you think we’d be a good fit to help you achieve your business goals? Reach out to us! We love to meet new people and help business owners break down walls when it comes to social media advertising.