March 1, 2018
12 Facebook Advertising Tools to Improve Sales and ROI in 2018
If Facebook is the main source of traffic for your business, then it makes sense to optimize your marketing efforts with the right advertising tools. According to eMarketer, Facebook is considered the most effective social media advertising outlet by 96 percent of social media marketers.
In fact, there are many stories that show results of five times more traffic for both B2B and B2C companies. It’s never too late to learn more about the right Facebook advertising tools to improve your sales and ROI in 2018.
In addition, spending thousands of dollars on advertising only works if you know what you are doing. The good news is there are many effective tools available, and some start for as little as $5.
While anyone can create a Facebook business page, and attain a following, it’s important to do it right. So, you must learn how to use several tools to ensure you get the best bang for your buck. You’ll also need to manage your campaigns, know what content to publish and when, as well as track your analytics.
Are you ready to give your sales and ROI a boost this year? Keep reading to learn more.
Why you should advertise on Facebook in 2018
Since Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, you can’t afford to disregard its potential. Since Facebook attracts billions of monthly users, it is the perfect space for marketing and selling your products and services.
If you’re one of the 27 million small businesses in the U.S., you probably don’t have an arsenal of cash lying around to spend on advertising–this means you have to make every dollar count.
How can you effectively market your business when you’re already tight on funds? This is just one question businesses ask on a daily basis. Of course, you’re probably already aware of the advantages of connecting with your audience on social media.
Nonetheless, it costs money to get views. And, with Facebook, you can get insanely detailed with your targeting with demographics such as:
- Job title
- Marital status
- Age
- Religion
- Interests
- Politics
To illustrate, if you wanted to market to 35-year-old single women, who live in Nashville, graduated from UNC, work at a production company, vote Independent and love the Star Wars movies, you can. The best part is it takes less than $10 to start.
You can then use one, or several, of the tools below to measure Social ROI metrics including:
- Reach
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Click-through-rate
- Page likes
- Reach
- Impressions
Facebook wants to ensure their users only view relevant content and ads. Yet, this is used to your advantage. For example, someone might be searching for real estate in Nashville and be served an ad for properties within that area.
But, later, the person changes his or her mind and starts searching for trips to Knoxville. Facebook will respond to that change of inquiry and respond with an ad for a hotel in Knoxville. So, Facebook enables advertisers to reach people with the right message, at the right time.
With real-time analytics, you can see exactly how well your Facebook ads are performing. And, if they aren’t performing as well as you would like, you can use insights to adjust your ads as you see fit. With over half of professional marketers hailing Facebook as the most important social network they use, it’s truly time to start advertising on the multi-faceted platform.
Cost: Free
Image source
When 40 million businesses have pages on Facebook, you know that something must be working. Consider the fact that every minute, Facebook users like over 4.1 million posts–one of those posts could be yours.
With over a billion users logged onto Facebook every day, your business can’t stand to lose out on all these potential customers. You need to connect with these users. This is where the easy-to-use Facebook Ads Manager tool can help. If you’re a novice, then it’s really easy to get started on ads.
For some businesses, this is all they need and use. For starters, it is free of charge. Here are the steps for use:
- Use an existing Facebook page, or create a new one
- Add in the text and data you want to advertise
- Select your audience based on demographics such as country, state, city, age and more
- Choose your budget
- Manage your outcome
Another option is to collect users’ information. If you want your ads to become highly relevant, then it is important to personalize them based on segments of your target audience. To do this, you can create lead ads with a call-to-action button such as “sign up” or “subscribe.”
When your prospects have clicked on either of these buttons, they are redirected to a form that with instantly fill the data they have furnished to Facebook. Imagine what you can do with this information.
Also, your prospects don’t have to take any time out of their busy schedules to fill out forms. Plus, you get actionable and accurate information to help create ads that are hyper-personalized.
To improve your reach, it is important to drill down your details by location, age, gender, language and more. What’s nice is Facebook offers a barometer to let you know if your audience is too specific or too broad. Facebook will also share your estimated daily results reach.
Getting started is a no brainer. And, you’ll see detailed graphics of your results. So, you can tweak your campaigns to ensure optimized outreach and social media marketing potential.
Cost: $49/month for the Base plan; $149/month for the Premium plan; $299/month for the Elite plan; $499/month for the Diamond plan
If you would prefer not to have a learning curve, then AdEspresso would be the choice for you. Advertising on Facebook can be as easy, or as complicated, as you want it to be. The good news is you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to make money.
With Facebook, organic advertising is pretty much dead. For years, Facebook has been reducing the visibility of company pages in people’s news feeds. So, the only way to reach your target audience is through advertising.
And, you can be quite selective with who you target. If you work with AdEspresso, you’ll notice how straightforward it is. You can get started in minutes. Plus, the visual analytics tools are quite powerful and easy to understand.
Not to mention, you can customize your dashboards for a detailed view of your best-performing ads. If you want to go even further, you can get detailed metrics too. This is how AdEspresso describes its methodology:
Information is displayed in a clear, actionable way, making it simple to understand how your campaign is being optimized.
AdEspresso can also:
- Integrate with Canva
- Upload images or videos to ads
- Add headlines
- Track your specified audience
- Create a carousel ad
If you want to go in-depth, you can still access every metric available on Facebook and many more available only in AdEspresso.
Cost: Free trial; $59/month for a 12-month contract; $79/month on a monthly basis; Pre-pay $589 annually
Image source
To improve the functionality of Facebook Ads Manager, use WordStream Social Ads. You can use this platform by itself or as one facet of the WordStream Advisor platform.
With the 20-mminute Work Week feature, you can access individualized recommendations with suggestions such as:
- What types of audiences to target
- When to boost your posts
- How to improve your ads
As you can see, the dashboard is also quite user friendly. What’s more is your ads are scalable. Once you get them in front of the right influencers, they will share your ads. As that happens, you get exposure to an even larger audience. This type of snowball effect is akin to winning a jackpot.
Cost: Premium, Business and Agency plans start at $149, $249 and $349 per month.
With over three million advertisers on Facebook, you need a tool to help you cut through the noise. Qwaya is one of the most popular platforms for optimizing Facebook advertisements. What makes Qwaya a true standout is the fact that it offers the ability to A/B test your ads. It is crucial to test every single option and idea you have in terms of promoting your products and services. This includes:
- Colors
- Text
- Font
- Message
- Product and service mix
With Qwaya, you can A/B test your Facebook ads to gain a true understanding of which ads are performing the best, and at what times. In addition, Qwaya can schedule your ads and campaigns to optimize for ROI.
So, you get to run your ads when your target audience is online and, in the mood to make purchases. As a result, you don’t waste any of your ad spend. With Qwaya, there is a bit of a learning curve. But, it is seriously worth it.
Other Qwaya features include:
- Enables easy handling of large campaigns
- Dashboard integration with Google Analytics
- Link tracking URLs to your ads
Facebook offers endless possibilities in terms of customizing your ads. It’s nice to have a lot of variety. Don’t be afraid to try these popular types of ads:
- Carousel–mobile-friendly; uses carousels to tell stories
- Video ads
- Lead ads–lets users download your content from Facebook
- Boosted posts
Cost: Starts at a Self-Starter package at $299 per month up to $700 per month, depending on your needs.
If you want to extend the capabilities of your Facebook marketing campaigns, then it might be worth giving KISSmetrics a try.
While KISSmetrics does not provide a specific Facebook advertising tool, it does take data from your ads and uses that to help you visualize larger data points and trends about your campaigns. For instance, you can break down traffic type by:
- Referrals
- Social media
- Direct
- Other
- Organic
- Menu
You can also view other metrics such as:
- Bounces by country
- Percentage of new visits
- Number of active visitors
- Number of mobile visits and page views
- Visit duration
So, you get a deeper understanding of how people are interacting with your campaigns and where they are coming from. With these types of insights, your campaigns become more fruitful. Now, you can make more informed decisions about how much you need to spend on advertising.
Cost: $79/month for a Pro plan; $139/month for a Plus plan; $239/month for a Large plan; $499+/month for an Enterprise plan
If you want to know what’s trending in your industry, then you need to use Buzzsumo. It seems pretty obvious why you would need to know what content performs best for your competitors. Even when you create an ad, you are still competing for your prospects’ time and attention.
So, it pays to create content that is what they are looking for and fits in easily to their particular news feeds. You can even find the right influencers on Buzzsumo so, they can reach a bigger audience by sharing your ads. For instance, you can get information on influencers such as:
- Average number of retweets
- Follower numbers
- Ratios of retweets and replies
You can also see which topics get the most shares and how users are sharing the content. Moreover, you can see how many articles have been posted on any topic and how many shares they have received.
With this information in hand, you can come up with relevant ideas for videos, blog posts, ads and more. You don’t have to figure out the right content on your own. Then, pick an influencer to help promote your ads and content.
Think of how this might impact your mobile audience. Recently, Facebook shared that $5.2 billion of its ad revenues came from mobile devices. Since most people use their smartphones to log onto Facebook, you won’t have any issues reaching a massive mobile audience.
Cost: Starts at $159/month per user
AdStage is a powerful tool that offers automation and closed-loop reporting. If you want to advertise on other platforms, AdStage makes it easy. Take a look at their tagline:
Create, Optimize and Report across your search and social ads in one place.
So, you don’t have to manage individual and separate ads. AdStage provides one dashboard to manage all of them. You can also take your preferred metrics to create advanced rules and alerts.
Through intelligence technology and usability, AdStage helps users make sense of their ad campaigns.
Cost: $9.99/month, prepaid annually; $14.99/month on a rolling basis; Team, Business and Enterprise plans are also available.
To bring in the traffic, and sales, your business needs leads. And, you need marketing tools to attract those leads to your site. Consider Hootsuite Ads.
You might have already tested out Hootsuite for their free social media scheduling option–you can schedule up to five accounts for free. Their platform, and features, have made it one of the most popular social media scheduling tools on the market. Yet, Hootsuite also offers features to optimize Facebook advertising.
If you’re new to Facebook advertising, consider using Hootsuite Ads. It’s quite easy to use since you can fully automate the workflow of your ads. Hootsuite will then evaluate which ads are performing the best.
From there, it helps you to create new ads based on the software’s findings. So, you will always get the right ad out, to the right audience, at the right time. That is so much better than playing the guessing game. It also helps to note that the best times to post on Facebook are between 1 and 3 p.m.
Here are other Hootsuite features:
- Track engagement with analytics reports
- Offers Facebook ad support
- Filters interactions from followers based on location and language
- Creates automated responses
- Add team leaders to your marketing account
Cost: $79/month for the Essential plan; $159/month for the Premium plan; $399+/month for the Enterprise plan
Now that you are getting a better understanding of Facebook advertising, you also want to ensure that your prospects stay on your site. If they leave, your ad spend would be wasted. Enter Unbounce.
This tool helps you to test, publish and create landing pages. If you’re not a designer, Unbounce comes with a wide variety of outstanding templates you can use.
They are all designed for multiple industries and genres–you can then customize the templates for a perfect fit. Even after your landing pages are published, you can make quick and easy changes with just a few clicks. Furthermore, you can use Unbounce Convertibles to add customized CTAs that populate when a prospect visits your page.
These CTAs, also known as overlays, can be targeted based on audience type. Additionally, you can integrate Unbounce with WordPress, HubSpot and Google Analytics.
It’s hard to beat the power of targeting based on demographics, interests, connections, location and more. You might even get creative with holiday targeting, life-event targeting and more. The possibilities are endless.
- AdRoll
Cost: AdRoll offers dynamic CPM pricing where you pay for ad space, and they keep a small percentage of the spend.
If you’re ready to advertise, then you probably already have dreams of building a massive online presence. Yet, that is only half of the battle. The other half can be accomplished through retargeting your Facebook ads–this lets you show relevant ads to your target audience once they have entered your website.
This is especially helpful for prospects who don’t convert right away. Of course, your ads must be tailored to fit the needs of your target audience. Since people are so busy, your ads may not get as many clicks as you would like.
They might open your ad, go to your site, then go back to Facebook. Instead, retargeting helps to remind them of your promotions while they are browsing through their newsfeed.
Plus, you really need to show your marketing messages multiple times before a prospect is ready to convert. There must be a frequency to your Facebook ads.
Moreover, retargeting can help make your business look larger than it really is. When your ads are everywhere, consumers start to think that you must have a huge company. Retargeting also helps to build trust since your company will never be forgotten.
Retargeting lets you market to an audience who have already interacted with your brand such as those who have:
- Visited your website
- Purchased on your website
- Subscribed to your email list
Just by “being there,” your prospects will start to familiarize themselves and trust your brand. They see your ads on their newsfeed daily so, you start to become like a familiar friend. This is what AdRoll can do for your Facebook ads.
AdRoll offers built-in contextual, behavioral and site retargeting. Their interface is user friendly with visual conversion tracking. You get true transparency of all your campaigns. And, AdRoll offers cross-device reach. AdRoll’s targeted remarketing can also help to improve brand awareness.
- AdSpringr
Cost: $399/month for a corporate plan; $699/month for an Agency plan
If budget is a major concern, and it is for most companies, then AdSpringr can help to lower your overall costs. AdSpringr claims to make your ad spend much more efficient. With an easy and clean interface, AdSpringr is easy to use.
You can view all your campaigns through AdSpringr’s designated portal–this is true whether they are paused, pending, active or completed. AdSpringr also conveys useful charts and graphs so that it is much easier to glean for useful insights–you don’t have to pore through mounds of text.
According to AdSpringr, you can:
Increase the scale, performance and ROI of your Facebook ad marketing campaigns through our advanced product and services.
Another feature is the ability to create custom campaign rules based on frequency and conditions such as wanting 80 percent of ad clicks to become “likes.”
So, you ensure you aren’t draining money on clicks that don’t convert to likes. If your campaign does not reach your conditions, then the campaign will be paused.
So, this is a bit different from other Facebook ad tools and it can work to tweak your campaigns.
Cost: N/A
We’ve included Social Ads on this list since this is a Facebook Marketing Partner for business owners. You can use Social Ads to convert massive amounts of data into usable business insights. So, you save time and money.
Plus, Social Ads comes with an agile dashboard you can customize based on your needs. It also offers a multi-language user interface, and you can create a new campaign in minutes. Other features include:
- Social ads quickly incorporates new Facebook features, as they’re released.
- Offers hourly, ad, audience and keyword analysis reports
- Calculates bids based on CPA, ROI and CPC
- Conversion tracking
In conclusion
If you’re wondering whether you should advertise, think of starting with Facebook. Becoming an expert in Facebook marketing is not the easiest endeavor, but the potential rewards are incomparable.
Plus, you can create your own budget. With $50, you can reach up to 10,000 Facebook users. You can also choose how long you want your ad to remain active.
The more people you reach, the higher your probability for conversions. And, if you pick the right advertising tools, you can make a serious impact on your sales and ROI in 2018.