While new social media competition seems to appear every year for the titan that is Facebook (this year’s new app is Vero), it continues to stay strong with roughly 79% of Americans still using it. However, MSPs of all sizes are still finding it hard to effectively advertise to their target audience on the platform. Facebook hasn't made it easy by updating its algorithm a number of times over the past few years, which resulted in organic content (ordinary free posts) reaching less and less of your followers. We can safely say that organic posts on Facebook are pretty much dead at this point, with your typical organic post reaching under 5% of your followers. Facebook has revealed that the reason for reducing the reach of the free organic content is that there is too much organic content being published on Facebook every day. And who can blame them, we hate seeing a barrage of pointless content. With this in mind, this blog will hopefully explain how to go about sponsoring your Facebook content and creating effective ads for your business to generate leads and raise awareness for your business.

First of all, you will require a Facebook Business Page which you can run as an administrator from your own personal account. From there you'll be able to login to your Facebook Ads Manager account and to your Facebook Business platform to create your ads.

Using this image you can see the different important features of your Facebook page.

This will be a large image that will more than likely be the first thing that will draw the eye of a potential customer. Use a bright image that maybe showcases your company’s USPs and why you stand out. Eye-catching imagery or unique company branding would be recommended here (820 pixels wide by 312 pixels height).

For a personal account, this is where a picture of you would go however that won’t work for a business page. It is recommended to use the company logo here (360 X 360 pixels).

The pages tab divides your Facebook Business Page into easy to find categories which you should try fill with content to make your page feel as complete as possible. These tabs can be moved around and changed to best suit your needs. You can have special offers, integrated HTML pages and even customer testimonials.

These buttons will be how new followers/customers will be able to follow the content and like your page. Without it, a customer would have to keep searching for your page every time they wanted to see that content and in reality that isn’t going to happen.

Depending on the business this is one of the most important aspects of your Facebook Business Page. This is our favourite button, this is where your potential customers can click to fill in a form or get in contact with you. You want to make sure you have a solid landing page with a clear CTA to really make the best use of this.

This will be generated when you set up your page. You will choose from a drop-down menu what industry/business category you fall under.

Here is a little place where you can describe and tell the world about what you do and how you are different. What makes you stand out from all the other MSPs in the area? What is your unique story?

Now that you know the basics to your business Facebook page you can now start advertising and promoting your content to generate leads. You’re probably wondering “why can’t I just post content for free?”, well the answer to that is that no one is going to see your post unless you somehow find fame in a viral post that gets shared by thousands of users.

Once you push a post it will go live on your feed, from the example above you can see that one of our organic posts has been pushed and only reached 66 people. Now the strange thing about that is that we have almost 8,000 followers. Meaning that organically we reached less than 1% of our followers. Hence why it’s critical to not only promote content to your own followers, but also to new potential prospects through targeting. On the lower right-hand corner, you can see the button to boost your post. This will get you started on increasing the reach.

Clicking this button will bring up the pop-up below. This is the final stage in boosting a post where you decide your objective, targeting and, budget. You can also add a call-to-action button if it is required if you want to lead them to your website or sell a service. Under the “Audience” section is where you will create an ideal audience of your target consumer or you can create multiple audiences for different segments and save them for use later. So have a think about it. Who are you targeting? What job titles? What interests? Make sure to experiment here with every promotion until you find the right combination. Lastly, you must decide the budget that you want to give to this promotion and select how long this budget will be stretched over for maximum effectiveness.

I would suggest that you start of pretty small with something like 20$ until you find the experiment that works best for you. After that you can really ramp up once you start seeing a return on investment.

Once all the above steps have been completed you are ready to hit the “Boost” button on the bottom right-hand corner to start promoting your post!

If you want to get more creative with your advertising then Ads Manager is where you want to go. This platform allows you to really get creative with your targeting. You can go in deep into the type of devices you want to hit, the operating system, specific radius on the map and much more. Luckily Facebook itself provides useful information about their advertising platform for you to better understand it. Below are the four main things that you will need to be able to create an effective ad for your audience.

Once you have set up your account and clicked to create a campaign you will be greeted by this screen below. This is the first step which you must complete in which you choose the objective of the campaign such as generating traffic to a specific URL or installs of your app. This will define which types of content you can use. So for example if you want a campaign to bring traffic to your website you would select the “Traffic” Consideration.

Next, you will be made to choose who you are going to target with this campaign. The targeting on the Ads Manager platform is very detailed allowing you to define your audience very specifically if required and if you only want to target local businesses then you can define your audience by location to help narrow down the customers you want. If you want to leave out people who are similar to your consumers but are not quite what you want you can add in exclusions making sure certain people won’t waste your campaign budget if you know they won’t be useful to your business. For example anyone that is currently a student or an intern, who don’t have budget or decision making power to buy your services.

Next, you have to decide what creatives you will use for your ads and what type of ad you can take advantage of to engage with your audience. Whether it is an image ad, carousel ads or a video ad it is always good to vary it up so potential customers don’t get bored of the same messaging in the same way. Facebook will indicate the size for each of the ads, and be careful not to include too much text in your actual image is you will be penalized by the reach of the campaign. The text on the image needs to occupy less than 30% of the space on the image. Try and use eye catching imagery to get attention of your service. You can use simple tools like Canva to create your design, it’s really simple and user friendly.

Lastly, you can decide to push your content out on the different platforms/apps that Facebook own.

Instagram is used by millions of people everyday and its focus is around visual content being able to post pictures or videos and use the Instagram stories to show different parts of your business but these only stay online for 24 hours after posting. You can also have a business account on Instagram which you can use in conjunction with your Facebook account.

Messenger is Facebook’s direct message service which is used by a huge amount of people ( see image below). You will be able to include ads in the app which people will see as they scroll through the different chats that they are currently a part of. Using messenger is a good way of targeting people as opposed to businesses because businesses will probably very rarely use the messenger app and would only use the desktop version to reply to customer queries or complaints.

Facebook’s Audience Network allows you to use ads that you create in Ads Manager and have them shown on a variety of different apps and websites outside of Facebook to increase the reach to your audience. These ads will appear more natively on these partnering websites which would hopefully lead to an increase in engagement if done correctly. Carousel ads and Video ads are the best formats for your content to be engaging for the audience network. The Audience Network is hugely beneficial if you know that the audience you are trying to target also visits the websites that are part of the network as it will allow you to streamline your advertising through this one platform.

If you are a business trying to increase your social media marketing then Facebook should be considered in your strategy. Unless you have a very specific niche then it is more than likely that your target customer is using Facebook and would check it regularly and advertising through the platform is relatively cheap in comparison with traditional marketing techniques. As an MSP you will be able to target your particular vertical through its extensive targeting abilities meaning you will be reducing the amount of marketing budget spent on useless leads.

Here is a quick example of a new feature we promoted on Facebook to our users. We reached almost 5,000 impressions at a cost of less than 2 cent for every video view.

If you want to know more about advertising on Facebook and all of its partners you can find all the information here.