Avoid These Facebook Ads Oversights

Facebook is easily the most popular social media platform, with more than 2.4 billion monthly active users and almost 1.6 billion visiting the site every day. This makes it the perfect opportunity for businesses to connect with an audience and find people interested in their products.

Unfortunately, Facebook marketing isn’t always that simple, and the majority of small business owners say their Facebook ads don’t reach their goals. However, if you’re not currently partnered with an agency but are looking for some quick tips to avoid simple errors that hold your campaigns back and hurt results, this article can help. Here we will cover a few of the most common Facebook marketing mistakes and help you develop more effective strategies.
 
Failing to Create a Clear Plan
Small business owners are typically responsible for a wide range of tasks, and this makes it difficult to give Facebook marketing the attention it deserves. If you advertise on Facebook without a clear vision for each campaign, you probably won’t achieve your marketing goals.
It’s important to match each goal to a relevant statistic that can measure the success of each ad. If you’re looking to increase brand awareness, for example, you shouldn’t focus on conversions when evaluating your results. Instead, look at metrics like impressions and cost per impression to determine how successful you were in reaching out to new users.
 
Failing to Target the Right Users
Facebook allows you to pay for each ad based on either impressions or clicks, but these numbers don’t always reflect the value of your content. If you target users who aren’t interested in your brand’s product or core message, impressions and clicks probably won’t lead to many sales.
Since Facebook’s audience is so large, it’s critical to use every tool at your disposal to target the right users. Targeting small audiences with granular similarities allows you to create personalized content that responds to that group’s needs and desires. Personalization is one of the most important factors in digital marketing on any platform.
 
Failing to Consider the Customer Journey
Sales are the goal of every campaign, but you can’t expect each ad to lead to an immediate sale. Customers often need to interact with a brand a number of times before they feel comfortable enough to make a purchase, and trying to sell products to cold leads almost always leads to a poor conversion rate.
Rather than pushing sales with every ad, start the sales cycle with engaging, interesting content that keeps your audience’s attention. From there, you can start moving each lead toward a conversion.
 
Failing to Retarget Existing Audiences
You should also take advantage of Facebook’s powerful retargeting features to market to users who have already interacted with your brand. Retargeting ads convert much more often than ads targeting cold audiences, and you can personalize retargeting campaigns to respond to customer behavior. It’s important to build your Facebook ads for long-term engagement in addition to short-term sales. 
You can create retargeting audience based on website interactions by setting up the Facebook pixel on your site. Facebook also allows you to develop audience using other factors like app activity, customer profiles, and previous Facebook engagement. Start building retargeting audiences by accessing the “Audiences” section in Ads Manager.
 
Facebook marketing is a complicated process, and it’s easy to make these simple mistakes that decrease sales, engagement, and audience retention. Addressing these issues will help you improve your Facebook results and achieve a higher ROI on your next campaign.

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Thanks to Rae Steinbach for contributing this post today. Rae is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing (of course). You can follow her on Twitter - @araesininthesun

Staying Relevant As An Author

For many writers, the day comes when you think, hey, this is more than a hobby. More time goes by and you decide, you know what? This writing thing is serious business.

You put yourself on some kind of schedule and you decide you’re gonna be disciplined if it kills you. You might get close to all out catatonia as you balance work, family and your writing regimen, but you stay the course and begin to release books.

Without a promotion drive, those books will sputter and sales fizzle. Exposure is critical when you’re unknown and trying to build a readership.

The internet provides unlimited research material that helps us to decide what to do and how to find the best deals.

• Say you need book covers? Fiverr has a host of cover artists that provide service starting at – you guessed it – five dollars. Be warned, that you're hardly likely to get anything for that price, so be prepared to spend more. 

• Need a blog tour host? Google is your go-to unit and if you want to get close and personal, Facebook is a great place to find people who provide this kind of service. Type in book promotion or cover art and potential sellers will pop up.
  
• Looking for someone to run your promotions or host a book release party? Use any search engine or Facebook. Your writing buddies are also a source for checking out service providers. 

• Want to find book clubs to expand your base of readers? Facebook is a good source as well. 

• Have people who like reading your books? Start a group on whatever platform you like best and encourage them to share your work and add others to the team.
  
• Include a free book as a gift for joining your mailing list.
  
• Last, but by no means least, this website is a powerhouse of materials on every aspect of the publishing world, so make use of it.

Gone are the days when we can afford to keep our nose to the grindstone and ignore the reading public until we have a new book for sale. It’s not necessarily the best writers who have repeat readers, but those who find a way to keep themselves relevant and in front of those who are buying books.

Have you made the decision to take your publishing efforts to the next level? Are doing enough marketing? What has worked well for you in selling books?

Don't forget the IWSG Anthology Contest is coming up. Here are the details:

Word count: 3500-6000

Genre: Young Adult Romance

Theme: Masquerade

A Masquerade can be a false show or pretense, someone pretending to be someone they aren't. It can be a ball, a fancy dress party, it can be a mask. Open to interpretation.

Submissions accepted: September 5 - November 4, 2018

How to enter: Send your polished, formatted (Double spaced, no page numbers), previously unpublished story to admin @ insecurewriterssupportgroup.com before the deadline passes. Please include your contact details, your social links, and if you are part of the Blogging, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter IWSG group.

7 Ways to Grow Your Blog

Most of us have recovered from the frantic, sometimes exhausting, challenge of the A to Z Blog hop. Hopefully during that time some new readers found your blog and you found a number of interesting sites to follow. But perhaps the numbers on your blog have stagnated. Are you picking up new followers on a regular basis? If not, what are some ways you can do that?

1. Bring readers to you. Announce your post on Twitter, Facebook and on Google+. Remember to use an attention-grabbing title on your post. (Use those numbers.) And add a short description to your link so readers want to check it out.

2. Another way to bring readers to you is to join in smaller blog hops that are a one and done or a monthly or weekly happening. (Like IWSG!) Recently I joined in The Then and Now Movie blog hop. Not a huge group and easy to visit everyone during a really interesting hop.

3. There are other ways to go out and find some great blogs. Most of them will follow you back. Check out the sidebar of your favorite blogs. Chances are they will have a list of their favorite blogs there. Click on them and you'll find some blogs you might want to follow. You can meet some nice people from my sidebar on Susan Says.

4. Many times when you're reading your favorite blogs, the poster will also be guesting on another site. Follow those guest post links to find other interesting blogs.

5. And when you're posting your announcements on Facebook and Twitter, don't forget to click on the links other bloggers are sharing in those same venues. They're searching for soul mate bloggers too.

6. Read the comments when you're commenting on someone's post. If you see a comment that is insightful, supportive or perhaps just entertaining, find that blog. You might meet someone interesting.

7. And remember all the rules of blog etiquette. Return comments, post regularly, make your content interesting and relevant to your blog theme.

Don't forget, Wednesday is the monthly posting for IWSG. A great time to grow your blog audience. What suggestions could you add to the above list? Have you found interesting blogs through Facebook or Twitter? Do you have an interesting blog hop that isn't the massive event of A to Z that works well in introducing you to new bloggers?

Don't forget IWSG Wednesday!

Susan Gourley writes epic fantasy and romance as Susan Kelley. Find her blog at Susan Says.