So we’ve built a concise, visually appealing graphic to communicate our message to our target audience. We know the best time to post it, but how do we actually ensure the people we want to see it, do? Assuming we’re going to go with traditional social media, we have a couple methods at our disposal:
- Post to our company account and rely on our organic reach (followers) to see and possibly share the graphic
- Boost the post
I’m going to use Facebook as an example as it’s the platform I have the most success with, but there are multiple guides out there for boosting/advertising on other platforms.
You can boost from either desktop browser or mobile – for ease of publishing this, I’m going to go through a browser. There are quite a few ways to create ads, but we’ll go with the simplest for this.
Create a new post, and select “Boost Post” at the bottom:
To start, select “Change” under “Goal”. Take a look, and select the one you think is most appropriate. I typically default to “Get more messages”. Facebook creates a “Send message” button under your ad, to make it easier for clients to get in touch with you.
Now for the fun part – moving down to Audience, select the pencil icon in the “Audience Details” box.
Thinking about my targeted demographics (service members) I can begin narrowing this down. As you change categories, you will see the reach graph at the bottom become more specific and target a smaller audience – THIS IS GOOD. You don’t want to waste advertising dollars and effort targeting people that aren’t who you’re looking for. So for me, I’m going to go:
- Gender: Both (although around 75% of my clients are female, I could conceivably switch to Women and that may be more effective)
- Age: 18 to 45
- Location: Honolulu County (base this on the area you expect people are willing to travel to you – or you to them, if you’re mobile)
Now we can move on to the “Detailed Targeting” tab – hit “Browse”.
Here you can break down your demographics by a significant amount – look around, and find ones that help target who you’re looking for. For my example:
- Education Level: High school grad (this will include higher levels of education)
- Employer: U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, United States Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard (can’t seem to find the Marine Corps, maybe Facebook lumps them in under Navy?)
So that’s now got me down to 57,000 people. The last step is to pick duration and budget.
As you change your duration and budget, it’ll adjust the number of people that are expected to be exposed to your ad.
Finally, you can choose whether you want the ad to appear on Facebook, Messenger, or both. I typically just go with Facebook, because I haven’t dug into how Messenger places ads. Plus that seems a bit more obnoxious.
Facebook Pixels is an analytics tool I haven’t messed with yet.
Select your payment method, and you’re off to the races!
Conclusion
I hope this series has helped you be a bit more deliberate in your communication efforts, and shows how being careful and directed can have greater impacts than acting on instinct. Please comment with any feedback or questions, and I’ll try to help where I can!