Meta Marketing

Table of Contents

• Understanding Meta Platforms

• Why Advertise on Meta

• How to Create Campaigns

• Winning Meta’s Game

• Key Takeaways

Understanding Meta Platforms 

Meta is a technology company that owns over 90 other companies including the largest social media platforms known as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger & Whatsapp. They all have a user base of over one billion active users every month. 

Meta’s Mission: “We want to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

Brief History of Facebook & Instagram

Facebook is a social media platform founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates in 2004. Over the years, Facebook has grown into one of the largest social media platforms in the world, with over 3 billion monthly active users as of early 2023. The platform allows users to create profiles, share photos and videos, and connect with friends and family. 

Instagram was founded in 2010 by Keven Systrom and Mike Krieger. It is used by individuals, businesses, and influencers to share their stories, promote their brands, connect with their audiences, friends and families and to discover new content. In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, and the platform continued to grow rapidly. 

In 2021, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, and as part of this change, Instagram was also renamed Meta. Meta announced plans to integrate its various platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp to create a more connected Metaverse. 

The Metaverse

“Meta is helping build a future where people have more ways to play and connect in the Metaverse. Welcome to the next chapter of social connection.”

The Metaverse is a virtual world that allows people to interact with each other through digital avatars. People can do a lot of different things like play games, talk to each other, buy and sell things, and even learn. It's essentially a parallel universe where people can escape reality and enter a world only limited by their imagination.

Meta's vision for the future of Facebook and its other platforms is creating virtual worlds where people can work, socialize and interact with each other in ways that feel more lifelike and immersive than other traditional social media platforms. 

Why Advertise on Meta?

Meta's advertising platform is one of the most powerful tools available to reach your target audience because it has vast amounts of user data, automated systems and proven algorithms to determine the most effective ads to display to each individual user. Here are 5 reasons you should already be using Meta to market your business:

Massive Audience Reach

Facebook is the world's largest social media platform in 2023, with 3 billion monthly users and ~1.8 billion users everyday! Instagram is the 4th largest social media platform with over 1.3 billion monthly users. Given its massive user base, Meta is the most popular social media advertising platform of our time and gives an excellent opportunity to gain significant exposure!

Extensive Targeting

Meta has one of the best targeting capabilities in the marketing industry due to its advanced machine learning algorithms and enormous amounts of user data. By default, the platform can determine users interests, behaviors, and preferences to deliver ads that are most likely to engage and convert users. 

Powerful Ad Analytics

Meta's ad analytics provide a comprehensive overview of various ad performance metrics such as reach, engagement, click-through rates, conversion rates, return on investment (ROI) and much more. These metrics enable advertisers to identify which ads, ad sets, or campaigns are performing well, and which ones need improvement in real-time! 

Eye Catching

Facebook and Instagram are known for being highly visual platforms where users frequently engage with photo and video content that are memorable, and drive user action. Visuals are often more effective at capturing people's attention and conveying messages than text alone which leads to higher engagement rates, with users often liking, commenting, and sharing content. 

Cost-Effective

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram can be very cost-effective for a variety of reasons. This means that you can effectively reach your target audience without breaking the bank. 

• Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Model: Advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad. This means that advertisers can avoid paying for impressions that do not result in clicks or conversions.
• Flexible Budgets: Meta allows advertisers to control their ad spend and adjust their budgets based on their performance and goals.
• Low Barrier to Entry: Compared to traditional advertising channels like TV or print, Meta Ads are accessible to businesses of all sizes. Advertisers can set their own budgets and can start and stop campaigns at any time. This makes it easier for small businesses with limited budgets to compete with larger advertisers.
• Ad Optimization: Meta's ad platform is designed to help businesses optimize their ads for maximum effectiveness. The platform uses machine learning algorithms to analyze ad performance and make recommendations to improve ad targeting, creativity, and messaging. This means businesses can continually improve their ads over time to lower costs.
• Return on Investment (ROI) Tracking: Meta allows businesses to track exactly how much they're spending on ads and how much revenue they're generating as a result. By tracking ROI, businesses can make data-driven decisions for maximum impact.

How to Create Campaigns

Step 1 - Create an Account

To advertise on Meta, you first need a business page. You can also run ads on behalf of someone else if you have permission. After that, create an ad account in the Ads Manager and add a payment method to get started.

Step 2 - Campaign Objective 

Choose your campaign objective, this will be the foundation of all the ads you run, so it is vitally important that you pick the right one. 

• Brand Awareness: Aims to increase the visibility of a brand and improve its recognition among a target audience.
• Traffic: Designed to drive traffic to your website or mobile app and optimizes your ad delivery for clicks and landing page views. 
• Engagement: Encourages people to engage with your ad by liking, commenting, or sharing it. 
• Lead Generation: Focused on generating leads and collecting information from people who are interested in your business. 
• Sales: Designed for businesses with an online product catalog because it optimizes ad delivery for product sales.

After selecting the right objective, name your campaign to stay organized. You can also set up A/B testing and specify if your ad campaign falls under special categories like politics or credit. But if you're a beginner, you shouldn’t touch these features.

Step 3 - Budget & Schedule

You now need to decide how much money you want to spend on Facebook ads. You can choose between a daily budget or a lifetime budget and set start and end dates. We recommend small businesses start off with $10 - $20 a day to learn what works and what doesn’t. 

Estimating Ad Performance: It’s vital to have a baseline estimate of how your ads will need to perform in order to be profitable. A minimum 2:1 ROI (return on investment), or you’ll be simply wasting money. 

Calculator:  Meta Ad Cost Calculator

Step 4 - Target Audience

Remember that one of Meta’s biggest advantages is the targeting and that Meta wants marketer’s to succeed because this is the main way that they make money.  

Define Your Core Audience 

We suggest not to target too specifically and actually leave it more broad. We want to rely on Meta's algorithms and machine learning to do all the hard work for us. We recommend only identifying a specific age range, location and language for beginners. Don’t include any interests until you are more of an advanced marketer. Click here to learn about Interest Targeting.

Dynamic Retargeting

Dynamic retargeting (custom audiences) can significantly enhance your Meta Marketing strategy by targeting individuals who have already interacted with your business, website, app, or Facebook page in the past. By utilizing the Meta Pixel and other tools, businesses have the opportunity to reconnect with potential leads, getting a second chance to convert them into customers. 

Lookalike Audiences

To create a Lookalike Audience, Meta analyzes the data of your existing audience, such as demographics, interests, and behaviors, and finds people who match those characteristics but may not have interacted with your business before. This increases your chances of reaching potential customers who are more likely to be interested in your business. 

Step 5 - Create Your Ad 

This is where the creativity and magic happens. Choose the ad format you want to use, such as single image, video or carousel. Then, create your ad copy and select a call-to-action button that encourages people to click.

Important Ad Tips!

• Eye Catching Visuals - One of the most important elements of any Meta ad is the visual component. Your ad needs to grab people's attention and stand out amongst the sea of other content in their feed.
• Use Video if You Can! - Video content is extremely popular right now, and short-form videos are the most engaging type of social media content. In fact, Meta is promoting the use of video after changing its algorithm. A video ad can be like a mini commercial that captures people's attention and used by almost any business.
• Compelling Ad Copy - The ad creative may catch their attention, but it's the copy that drives them to click or interact with your ad. Your copy should explain why your product is great and why they should take action now.
• Keep Your Message Concise - Your ad should be clear and to the point. Use short sentences and bullet points to convey your message quickly.
• Social proof  - Whether it's a customer review or photo, it can help build trust with potential customers who may be seeing your ad for the first time. Try incorporating social proof such as reviews, testimonials, or stats to make your ad more effective.
• Include a Clear Call-To-Action (CTA) - Your ad should include a CTA that tells people what you want them to do next. This could be to visit your website, make a purchase, sign up for your newsletter, etc. Make sure your CTA stands out and is easy to click on.
• Experiment With Different Ad Formats & Creatives - Use different formats, images or headlines to see what performs best with your audience. Meta's ad manager allows you to easily run A/B tests to compare the performance of different ad variations.

Step 6 - Hybrid Social Media Strategy

To maximize the benefits and return on investment of your ads, you should be producing organic content to post on your Facebook & Instagram pages and promoting these as engagement posts. These posts should provide value to your target market with no interest in selling to them. You can run them at ~1/5 the cost of your ads. This is crucial to building more data points for Meta to utilize because it is noticeably cheaper per 1000 impressions than your ads. This also helps to build a sense of familiarity with your brand.

Step 7 - Track & Improve Performance

Monitor your ads - Once your ads are up and running, keep an eye on the key performance indicators (KPIs), like click-through rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC), cost per 1000 impressions (CPM), return on ad spend (ROAS), etc. These metrics are used to see how your ads are performing and to make data-driven optimizations.

Optimizing - This includes tweaking your targeting to reach a more specific audience, adjusting your budget to allocate more funds to top-performing ads, or changing your ad creative if it's not resonating with your audience. It's crucial to set clear goals for your campaign and track the metrics that align with those goals. 

Step 8 - Profitably Scaling

After identifying a winning campaign, you can then begin to scale. Scaling ads while keeping performance is one of the most difficult parts, because what works at $10 a day isn’t guaranteed to work at $20 a day. 

All scaling should be done by duplicating a successful ad set and making any new modifications to the duplicate. This preserves the successful ad set, minimizes risk and you’ll always have something to go back to what was working before. 

Double Scaling - Duplicate ad set, disable original and double the original budget.

• Ex: Take $10 a day ad set, change the budget to $20 a day and if the performance is stable/improves after 4 days, repeat the process.

Winning Meta's Game

Ad Algorithm

Meta’s algorithm decides who, when and where to display ads on its own. Our goal with Meta ads is to lead the algorithm in the right direction and let Meta’s machine learning do its thing. 

Meta prioritizes their user’s experience. So you will be rewarded for creating cool, creative content and punished for annoying, unappealing ones. The more successful your campaign does & the more data points we feed into our campaigns, the better it will improve over time. 

Respecting Meta’s Policies

Again, Meta's main goal with advertising is to ensure that users still have a positive user experience. Meta ads that are obviously ads will decline in performance over time and running poor quality ads will severely limit reach & lead to expensive ads.

Familiarize yourself with Meta's advertising policies:  Meta's Advertising Standards

When testing new ad copy/creatives that may be ‘borderline’ on what Meta allows, only test 1 at a time. So if an ad gets disapproved it’s 1 instead of 4 or 5. Too many ads disapproved = Account flagged. 

Ad Relevance Scoring

Meta's relevance score rates the quality and relevance of your ad to your target audience. The relevance score is rated on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best score. 

Meta calculates your relevance score based on the positive and negative feedback it receives from users who see your ad. This feedback can come in the form of likes, comments, shares, clicks, and other engagement metrics. The more positive engagement your ad receives, the higher your relevance score will be which can lower the cost of your ad and can lead to better overall ad performance. 

To utilize the relevance score to your advantage, it's important to create ads that are highly relevant and engaging to your target audience. You can accomplish this by utilizing captivating visuals, compelling ad copy, a clear call to action and continuously optimizing your ads to improve their performance over time.

Simplified Marketing

You now know how to start and run Meta Ad campaigns. It will still take a lot of luck, hard work, practice and trial and error before any of your campaigns are wildly successful. If you want to shortcut your success and save a bunch of time and money, hire Simplified Marketing.

Our main goals are to deliver exclusive & highly qualified solar leads, profound client results and build long-term working relationships dedicated to fighting Climate Change. We strive to be very simple, energize your pipeline and help you win new clients consistently every month. Click the image below to learn more!

Key Takeaways

• Meta's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
• Meta's vision is to create a future where people have more ways to play and connect in the Metaverse.
• Meta has a massive audience reach with 3 billion monthly users on Facebook and over 1.3 billion monthly users on Instagram, making it the most popular social media advertising platform of our time. 
• Meta has extensive targeting capabilities due to its advanced machine learning algorithms and enormous amounts of user data.
• Meta's ad analytics provide real-time comprehensive performance metrics for ads, ad sets, and campaigns.
• Meta is cost-effective for businesses of all sizes due to its cost-per-click model, flexible budgets, low barrier to entry, ad optimization, and ROI tracking.
• Meta's algorithm uses machine learning to decide who, when & where to display ads all on its own.
• The goal with any campaign is to lead the algorithm in the right direction and prioritize the user experience. 
• Creating cool and creative content will be rewarded, while running poor quality ads will severely limit reach and lead to expensive ads.
• Hire Simplified Marketing to save a lot of time, hard work, luck, trial and error to generate qualified and exclusive solar leads as simply as possible.

It's important to credit the AI language model ChatGPT by Open AI because it has helped me write this article and my two previous articles titled: 11 Powerful Marketing Strategies and Digital Marketing. The rest of the information is from my knowledge, notes I’ve taken or Google. All stock images are from Dreamstime.