Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
10 Facebook Advertising Tips For Small Businesses with Cham Tang
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On Small Business Talk Podcast with Cathy Smith Episode #041 my special guest is Cham Tang and he’s from Authentic Education.
Listen to this episode to get 10 Facebook Advertising Tips For Small Businesses.
Background
Cham Tang is the Head of Marketing and Co-founder of Authentic Education, a BRW Fast 100 Company. Cham is a marketing and client attraction specialist and shows people how to get a 500% return on every marketing dollar they spend (even if they’re starting from scratch).
With over 12 years of experience in the Business and Personal Development industry, Cham has worked with Anthony Robbins, Dr John Demartini, and over 350 businesses here in Australia. Having spent over $600,000 in Facebook ads for over 8.5 years, Cham has been personally mentored by Facebook and is a Facebook Certified Professional Planner. Cham is passionate about helping people attract more prospects, sell meaningful products & services and get rewarded for it.
10 Facebook Advertising Tips For Small Businesses
Show Notes
1. What is the Competition Doing?
It sounds counterintuitive, but one of the first things you should do is to see what the competition is doing when it comes to Facebook ads. And there’s a very little known but an extremely useful thing that Facebook brought out. So, Facebook was pushing for more transparency on who’s placing ads and what people are advertising and they created this thing called the Facebook ads library.
If you go to Facebook.com/ads/library, you can type in the Facebook page name of any Facebook page all around the world. It doesn’t matter if it’s Donald Trump’s page, if it’s Coca-cola, and you can see what ads they’re placing. You could also look at different topics like you could type in custom suits, you could type in health pills or something like that, and you could look at all the different types of ads in the world that people are placing. And that gives you a good baseline to start instead of kind of scratching your head wondering what kind of ad you’re going to place.
That’s excellent because then you could look at what other people in other areas of Australia or America or the UK are doing, and then get some tips from that. It’s also like market research but without having to travel, without having to spend time flying to another country or anything, just do it in your pajamas so to speak.
2. Who Is Seeing Your Ad?
Tip number 2 is before we even start writing the ad or anything, people need to look at who is seeing the ad. Who sees the ad is just as important as what the ad says. And when it comes to audiences, that’s where Facebook wins the game because they’ve got so much information on you. It’s like they know what pages you like, what music you like, even job titles and things like that. A lot of people put in. There’s a really tricky thing that Facebook allows you to do what is called look alike audiences which means if you’ve got an existing Facebook page, an existing website, an existing list of clients, you could upload, let’s say, a list of 150 email addresses to Facebook of your best clients and then say to Facebook, find the similarities of these 150 people and then show me 150,000 people that look like them in Australia. That’s kind of just duplicating your best customers. It’s really powerful what they can do.
It gives Facebook a really good idea of where you want to target so you don’t end up selling maternity things to teenagers, which might be a bit awkward for their parents. That’s is the old school way of marketing. It was more of a shotgun approach before. Like you had to spend $10,000 for a radio ad but if your radio ad was for health equipment, you’d be spending it on a seven-year-old, a 70-year-old, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t too targeted. But these days you can spend the money just on your interested clients.
3. You Don’t Need A Website To Place An Ad
Tip number 3 is, there’s a common misconception. A lot of people won’t place a Facebook ad because they think they need a lot of things. One of the things they think they need is a website. You can actually place Facebook ads without a website being called lead ads or also known as lead forms. You can place an ad that appears on Facebook itself. Let’s say you’re a financial planner and you’re trying to give away a free initial consultation. Your ad could state, “Are you stuck with your finances and don’t know where to turn to? Get your free consultation here.” People just click yes to learn more or to book now. Then there will be a form that pops up asking for their first name, last name, mobile, email. But that form will still be on the Facebook platform and it will pre-populate the form with the person’s details. Because Facebook already knows your first name, last name, mobile and email. So, all the details will be there, and they just have to hit submit, and then you can grab their details and call them or email them or anything you want to do. So you don’t need to have a website to place ads. Don’t let that stop you if you think, “Oh, my website’s not perfect.” Or anything like that.
Sometimes, a good way of making easy for people so that they don’t actually then have to get off the Facebook platform because as we know people don’t like to do multiple clicks. Even if you do have a fantastic website, sometimes it’s still a good tactic because it doesn’t take the audience off Facebook.
You could be thinking what does that mean? Which one’s better? Should I use this lead generation ad that you talked about or should I use a traditional ad where they click to my website? The common question I get is, sometimes people say, “What’s better Cham, an image ad or a video ad?” It’s not that which one is better. It’s that there are different types of people out there. There are people that love video and there are people that love images because they don’t have time to watch a video or they’re not going to turn the sound on. Therefore, we like to have both. So have the lead generation ad for people who don’t want to go to a website and wants something quick and easy and have the ad that goes to the website because that’s for the people who need a bit more detail. I understand, as a business owner, we’re quite busy. If you don’t have time to create different ads, just do the lead generation ad.
4. Make Your Images Square
The fourth tip would be, in this day and age, all of your images and videos that you place whether it’s on social media or doing Facebook ads, they really should be square right now. They shouldn’t be rectangles anymore because square videos take up 78% more real estate than rectangle videos when someone’s watching on a mobile phone. And because it’s the image and the video that grabs people’s attention more than the headline, you want to maximize that real estate. Think of it like a shop-front window, you don’t want to have a small space, you want to have a big as space as possible. Square videos and square images where possible.
In the next, 6 to 18 months, that’s going to transition to not even square, it’s going to be more full-screen images, full-screen videos. Just to get a bit technical, the ratio will be 9:16 which means nine across and then 16 down because most people hold their phones in portrait mode on their hand so you want that image or that video to take up a full screen like you kind of see with Instagram stories or Facebook stories. The only reason to mentioned Instagram, a lot of people don’t know, but Facebook owns Instagram. When you’re trying to place a Facebook ad or Instagram ad, you do it almost identically. If you were to place an Instagram ad right now you go to Facebook to start placing that ad. Tip number four would be, use square video, square images.
On top of that images and videos, they need to be really good quality, making sure that there’s not a lot of background noise and that they’re not blurry or that we’ve used really small images because on Facebook we can upload them full-size so they need to be high-quality images so people can see them.
There’s more of a shift in this day and age to more authentic style images and videos, so not necessarily ones where it’s like the perfect lighting, the perfect shot, someone standing in front of a camera delivering their message. People want to see things that look like it’s very personal. Doing selfie images, doing selfie videos, works well on social media because it doesn’t look too corporate, it looks quite personal. That’s really good news for small business owners because we don’t have to have a big budget. You don’t have to get the lighting, the make-up, the shot, a professional SLR camera, and all this stuff. If you’re just using your mobile phone and you have a half-steady hand and you talk straight into it, that’s okay these days.
