Should Your Blackpool Businesses Be Using Meta Ads?
If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve seen Meta Ads (previously known as Facebook Ads). And if you’ve seen them, your customers could be seeing ads for your own business on FB and Insta too. But why are they so important? What could Meta Ads do for your Blackpool business? And what’s the difference between ‘boosting’ a post and running an ad campaign? Nikki Hesford, leader of the Blackpool Growth Business Academy, explains.
If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve seen Meta Ads. You’ll have seen them in your news feed as you scroll down your timeline. You might have seen them in the Stories sections of both platforms. You’ve probably tapped on them from time to time, because they’ve got a brilliant knack of hooking you in.
And if other advertisers can do that, so could you.
4 quick reasons to use Meta Ads
- With the right ad (that is, one that encourages lots of clicks or taps) you could reach a vast audience.
- More importantly, you could reach a much more targeted audience who are likely to be interested in your products or services.
- You can even segment your audience into different groups, matching products (and ads) to each segment.
- And you could do it all for a much lower spend than with other forms of advertising, including Google’s Pay Per Click.
What other cool stuff can you do with Meta Ads?
Let’s talk about retargeting. Often, prospects look at different websites as part of their research and quickly forget which ones they have viewed. A well-timed ad which pops up to remind them of you might be all that’s needed to nudge them over the line to a sale. This is retargeting.
Suppose you’re an accountant and you have a page on your website that’s about bookkeeping services. Meta Ads lets you show an ad specifically to the people who have viewed that particular page, because if they’ve viewed it, we know they’re interested in bookkeeping. Retargeting takes loads of the guesswork out of advertising because you know you’re advertising to people who are already in the market.
You can also target people based on their engagement with your Facebook and Instagram profile, the videos they have watched, or even with data that you supply. For example, if you have an email database of businesses who have bought from you in the past but haven’t engaged with you recently, you could target them with a specific campaign to re-engage.
Is a Meta Ads campaign the same as ‘boosting’ a post?
No. You might know that when you post something, Meta gives you the option to boost your post to engage a wider audience. It’s still classed as an ad because you pay for it, but it’s not the same as a Meta Ad. Many businesses have probably dabbled with ‘boosting’ the occasional post, but creating and running campaigns is a very different kettle of fish.
What happens when you boost a post?
When you ‘boost’ a post, you get a degree of choice over the audience you target but not much choice over your objective (that is, what you want the post to achieve).
When you boost, Meta will effectively set the objective as engagement (that is, likes, comments, shares etc). In fact, you might have boosted a post in the past without even being aware that you could generate ‘leads’ from your ads, because this option was never presented to you.
Whilst ‘likes’ may be nice, small businesses would usually prefer something more commercially meaningful, that will actually result in increasing their revenues!
That’s what Meta Ads will do. Here, you can set the ‘objective’, and while that might be likes and comments, it could also be sales, traffic, leads, video views… things that could make a real difference to your business.
Are Meta Ads easy to set up?
They can certainly be quick to set up. There are not many advertising routes that you can have up and running in minutes and generating sales and leads within hours.
BUT you need to know what you’re doing. First, you need an ad that grabs the attention and a powerful call to action that drives that crucial click.
It’s also the case that without an understanding of how the advertising ecosystem works—and without knowing the basics of planning a Meta Ads campaign— you can blow your budget quickly. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll lose lots of money (because you can set and control your own budget); it just means your campaigns might not deliver the results you need if your ads are not set up correctly.
And that would be a real shame, because right now, Blackpool businesses are generating very healthy turnovers simply by getting their Meta Ads right.
You can too.
Learn how to run a Meta Ads campaign
If you run a growing Blackpool business, the Blackpool Growth Business Academy is here to help you with fully funded support, and that includes marketing and social media support.
Discover how Blackpool Growth Business Academy can help your business get better results from its marketing.
