If you don’t do any other advertising, you might want to consider a campaign on Facebook. After all, you know that Facebook targets your spa or massage practice customers and prospects because you are already engaged with many of them on the social media channel. Facebook ads provide a cost-effective way to reach more of your audience. You don’t have to commit to a huge monthly outlay and you easily can turn your campaign on and off to align it with your budget and promotional needs. For example, you might want to run an ad Mother’s Day to promote special treatments or massage.
Before you get started, you should refer to Facebook’s User Guide for the Ads Create Tool, which provides information on getting your account up and running. Once you are familiar with the basics of using the social media ads, get the most out of your campaign by taking the following steps:
Establish your Goals
Decide what you want your ads to do; increase your Facebook likes, drive traffic to your website or promote a special retail product or treatment campaign.
Establish a Budget
Facebook lets you choose a per-day budget or you can set a budget to run the life of your campaign. If you are running a special week-long retail promotion, you’d probably want to select the lifetime campaign. In "3 tips to Make Facebook Ads Work on Limited Budgets,” Karen Allen suggests “You can set your budget to as little as $5/day, but I recommend spending at least $30 if you can manage it.” During this time you should be seeing a return on your advertising spend (ROAS), but if not you can turn your campaign off.
Target
Be sure that your ad shows up on the pages of your prospective customers. Facebook audience targeting provides several methods for selecting your target audiences, along with the usual age, location, gender type of demographics. For example, you can segment your audience according to how they would likely become customers or their interests. According to Mashable, Facebook has a database of 8 million possible interests.
Create a Compelling Message
Your copy should be short and compelling and clearly understood by your targets. Always end with a call to action. You also want a powerful image – something that your audience will respond to. Keep in mind that the image is going to be small so it needs to be clear when viewed up close.
Consider Facebook Connections
Facebook Connections helps you extend the reach of your campaign. You can target ads specifically to friends of any of your connections – friends of your page, users of your apps, members of your groups and attendees of your events. When you select this option, friends of connections who see the ad also see a message about who of their friends is connected to the advertiser. For example, if Beth is a friend of BIOTONE, and we’re running, Facebook ads with “friends of connections” targeting, Beth’s friend Debbie would see the text “Beth is a fan of BIOTONE.”
If you are new to online advertising, Facebook can be a good way to get started without making breaking the bank.