How to Use Targeted Facebook Ads to Promote an Event

How Facebook Ads Drive People Down a Marketing Funnel

Marketing funnels are useful because they show how people go from hearing about your event to registering for your event. Your funnel is essentially a framework that connects content marketing, social media engagement, email marketing and ads into a functional strategy.

Below is an example of a horizontal funnel (using Facebook) that follows Jane as she goes from awareness of the event, to registering for the event, to telling her friends about the event.

Each stage of your Facebook marketing funnel serves a different promotional purpose.

Now let’s dig deeper into how Facebook ads support each stage of the funnel.

#1: Capture Awareness

The first phase of any campaign is awareness. Maybe someone finds out about your event because a friend was talking about it, or maybe that person subscribes to your email or reads your blog.

In the funnel example above, Jane signs a pledge to support, which is a mini-campaign designed to nurture interest for an upcoming event. Doing a mini-campaign like this isn’t always necessary, but it can be effective, particularly for paid events.

At this stage of the game, I suggest you use any of these Facebook ad options:boosted posts, event ads, post engagement ads or lookalike audiences.

Boosting a post offers a number of ways to target your Facebook ad.

I frequently recommend boosted posts, especially if you have limited staff, training or resources.

When you decide to boost a Facebook post, only boost your best stuff. That way you increase the likelihood that people who see the post will engage with it. To find the posts worth boosting, look at your Insights to find your top event-related posts based on engagement rate and how relevant it is to your current marketing goals.

There may be cases when your best-performing updates aren’t directly related to your promotion. If that’s the case, simply edit the status update, include a call to action (CTA) and link to your campaign landing page. Just make sure your edits feel natural, not forced.

I won’t go into the details about event ads, but I will say that promoting events with ads can be super-powerful, especially if you target the friends of people who have registered!

Page post engagement ads are another option. These are ads you create using a page update and the Advanced Facebook Advertising Tool. This tool gives you many more targeting options than boosted posts. (However, Facebook now lets you use the Advanced Ad Tool when boosting a post.)

Use Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool for excellent targeting options.

Or you can create and use a lookalike audience. A lookalike audience is a custom audience that shares the same likes and interests as your customers, email subscribers, volunteers or even people who attended last year’s event.

Creating a Facebook lookalike audience is as simple as uploading an email list. Who should be on this list? Why would they be interested in hearing about your event? The easy answer to both is anyone who registered for a previous event.

Once you create a lookalike audience with Power Editor, you can use it to target your boosted post by following these steps:

1. Find the post you want to promote and click Boost.

2. Click the Use Advanced Options link in the pop-up window. You’ll be redirected to Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool.

3. Scroll down under Audiences and type the name of your lookalike audience into the Custom Audience field.

4. Select the lookalike audience from the list of suggestions.

5. Select any other targeting options you want to include. You may not need to bother with this if your lookalike audience is based on a very specific email list (for example, previous event registrants).

#2: Nurture Interest

In our example with Jane, we’re using triggered email marketing campaigns. Triggered campaigns or autoresponders are email messages that are automatically sent in response to something the subscriber does.

When Jane signs the pledge, she is added to a specific email list. As soon as she’s added to that list (the trigger), a series of two to three email messages are sent to her, encouraging her to register for the event.

There are a few Facebook ad tactics you can use to support these email messages, but one stands out front and center: email custom audiences.

Create a custom audience to target people from your email list.

The constant challenge of email marketing is getting people to open your emails and click through your campaign links. We can send Jane triggered emails intended to nurture her interest in the event, but we can’t make her open or click. This is where Facebook email custom audiences come into play.

An email custom audience allows you to reach people on a specific email list with Facebook ads. In our example let’s say that Jane opens one of the triggered emails, but fails to click on links to learn more about the event—maybe she gets distracted or gets pulled away to a work meeting.

After her long and stressful meeting, Jane opens Facebook during a coffee break. She sees boosted posts (or event ads) reflecting the same CTAs she read in the triggered email. She may click through the post and register for the event, or take the post as a reminder to register later that night when she has more time for email.

This tactic essentially creates a one-two punch—combining email marketing and Facebook marketing. In our example we’re using an email custom audience with the list of people like Jane who’ve signed the pledge.

You can create a Facebook email custom audience by following these steps:

1. Export the email list or segment from your current donor database, EMS or CRM and save it to your hard drive. You only need a single column (CSV or TXT) of emails. No other data is required (you can even remove the header row).

2. Select the Facebook page post you want specific email subscribers to see and click Boost.

3. In the pop-up, click Advanced Options. You will be redirected to Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool.

4. Scroll down to the Audience section and click Create Custom Audiences.

5. In the pop-up, click Data File Custom Audience.

6. Give your list a name and a short description, select I Agree to the Facebook Custom Audiences Terms and click Create Audience.

Fill in some basic information so you can use your new custom audience for later campaigns.

7. Complete your ad by selecting your email custom audience, your ad run dates and budget.

A quick note: When your list is uploaded, you can target Facebook users associated with that list. When you select the list in the Custom Audience field, you may notice that the audience number is smaller than the list you uploaded. That’s because Facebook only uses emails that are associated with a Facebook profile.

#3: Convert Prospects

If you’ve conducted any type of campaign that includes a landing page asking people to take a specific action, you know all too well that most people won’t do what you want them to do—they may lose interest, get confused, get distracted or even get back to work. Whatever the reason, they fail to convert.

But they did visit your landing page!

You can use that to your advantage by using Facebook website retargeting. The diagram below explains how retargeting works.

When you see Facebook ads for a site you’ve recently visited, you’re being remarketed to.

Facebook website retargeting allows you to target ads at people who have visited a specific page on your website. In our example it’s the event registration page.

To retarget registration page visitors, follow the instructions above for creating a custom audience, but this time when you click Create a Custom Audience, choose Custom Audience from Website. Jon Loomer’s article will help you complete the process from there.

Pay careful attention to the number of days you keep people in this custom audience. You don’t want to keep people too long because the recency effect wears off. For example, if Jane visited the event registration page 30 days ago, chances are she’s way past the point of losing interest.

Refresh your retargeted audience frequently so you’re not marketing to people who have lost interest.

Remember that the most important part of converting registrants is your landing page. If the landing page isn’t effective, retargeting visitors with Facebook ads won’t work that well.

#4: Increase Word of Mouth Shares

To encourage attendees to tell their friends about the event, you can reuse some of the tactics you’ve already implemented. For instance, you can create a new email custom audience based on the list you create from the event registration page, and then ask those people to share your event information.

I also encourage you to create another website custom audience—this time from people who have reached the thank-you page of your website after registering for your event. Next, create an unpublished (or dark) post encouraging registrants to invite their friends to the event and retarget the post to your new custom audience (your registrants).

Create a dark or unpublished post ad in Power Editor.

You definitely want to use event ads at this point, simply because of their strong social proof. Facebook users who are served event ads see which of their friends have RSVP’d to your event.

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How to Use the Facebook Pages to Watch to Track Competitors

Why Pages to Watch

The Pages to Watch feature in Facebook Insights allows you to watch other Facebook pages so you can compare their activity, engagement and audience growth to your own.

Pages to Watch is particularly handy if you want to see what’s working for your competitors or similar niche pages. You can see exactly what content they’re posting, how often they’re posting and when they’re posting—and the resulting engagement. Armed with that information, you can tailor your own updates accordingly.

You can watch any brand page on Facebook you want—you don’t even have to like the page. If you have 100 to 10,000 fans, you can create a list of up to 100 pages to watch.

Most page admins won’t need to watch that many pages, but it’s nice to have one place to keep track of your top competitors or brands that inspire you.

How to Set Up Pages to Watch

To find the Pages to Watch feature, go Insights and click on Overview. Scroll down the page to the Add Pages section (it’s just below the Your 5 Most Recent Posts box).

Facebook Pages to Watch monitors other pages’ content.

To create your list, you have to choose at least five other pages to watch, but I recommend making a larger list. The more pages you watch, the easier it is to see trends (e.g., whether short text updates outperform updates with links).

To add new pages to your list, just click the blue Add Pages button and type the name of a new page in the search bar. Once you find the page you’re looking for,click Watch Page to add it to your list.

Add Pages to Watch to gain more insight.

If you can’t find the page you’re looking for, check the page’s name again. Some pages may change their name or have a different name from their parent company.

Facebook automatically suggests new pages for you based on your past choices. These appear both in your pop-up search window and on the original Insights page.

Suggested Pages to Watch finds pages for you.

If you want to follow any of the suggested pages, you should know that Facebook sends those pages a notification that they’ve been added to a watch list. However, the page will not know it’s you watching them.

If you want to get a broader sense of what your fans respond to, it’s helpful to find pages your current fans already like, even if those pages aren’t related to your niche. It’s an easy way to see what other kinds of content your fans are interested in seeing.

To find those pages, log into your personal profile. In the Graph Search box, type in “pages liked by people who like [your page name]”. The results show all of the other pages your audience has also liked.

Facebook Graph Search helps you find pages your audience likes.

Now you know what other brands are showing up in your audience’s news feed, and whom you’re competing against for their attention. Add them to your list to see how they compare to the niche pages you’re watching.

Graph Search may be more useful to pages with a large number of followers because it shows trends across your entire audience. If your page has a lower number of likes, your results may be less consistent because there aren’t enough fans to show trends.

Spot Tactic Trends

The best part about Pages to Watch is that it tells you exactly what kind of content works both on and off your page. If you see that your watched pages are having more success with images than links or videos, try using more images. If all the top posts have very little text, then focus more on one short message per post.

An important factor of increasing page activity is knowing when and how many times to post. Sure, there are a lot of studies and research that give you a basic idea, but does that advice really hold true for your page?

Follow the successes of other Pages to find trends you can use to adapt your own strategy. Image: Shutterstock.

The truth is that each page is different. Some pages’ audiences may be sufficiently active that they can post multiple times per day; whereas other pages may only want to post once a week to get the best results. You have to test and retest to see what works for you.

To help you along, watch how often other pages post and how it affects their engagement. What time of day are they posting? What time of day results in the most comments, likes and shares? Experiment with your own page and post at those times as well to see if it affects your own page’s engagement.

You’ll likely find that some pages are more useful for helping you spot content and engagement trends. Don’t be afraid to add and delete pages from your list as necessary.

Compare Engagement

The Insights Overview page shows you the high-level numbers (e.g., total likes, number of posts and engagement, etc.), but to see the specific posts that are doing well, you’ll need to dive a little deeper.

Go back to the top of your Insights page and click the Posts tab to the right of the Overview tab. On the Posts page click Top Posts from Pages You Watch.

Posts this Week shows you what content works best.

Now you can see the top five posts for that week from the list of pages you watch. Even though you may be following more than five pages, Facebook only delivers the top five posts that received the most engagement. That means you may see multiple posts from a single page and no results from another.

Facebook shows you the exact post, the date it was published and the engagement it received. Click on the text of the post to see the full update and how many likes, comments and shares it currently has.

The information is useful because you want to track the content that’s working, not the content that’s mediocre.

If five posts per week aren’t enough for you, you have another option. You can like other pages using Facebook as your page (instead of your personal profile) to see the full stream of their posts in real time through your page’s news feed.

To switch from your personal profile to your page profile, click the down arrow at the top right of the Facebook toolbar. Under Use Facebook As, choose the page you want to use to like the new page. Go to each page on your Pages to Watch list and like their page.

Facebook news feed works for pages too.

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How Big Brands Keep Their Social Media Audiences Engaged

#1: Host a Video Contest

For the last seven years, Doritos has run its “Crash the Super Bowl” contest asking customers to create commercials for its crunchy treats. The incentive that really caught attention? The winner gets his or her commercial aired during the Super Bowl.

The response is huge. Hundreds of commercials are submitted. The company narrows it down to a pool of five, and then asks everyone to vote for their favorite.

The result is a viral campaign driven by finalists sharing their entry with friends and encouraging them to vote, as well as customers and fans who want to see the best videos (which are usually the funniest).

In 2013, Doritos brought the video contest to Facebook (they had previously used a microsite) and went beyond the success of all previous years.

Facebook increased entries for Doritos’ yearly video contest.

If you take a look at the Doritos Facebook page, this contest supplied content for months and generated a lot of conversation. Customers started watching videos, commenting on the commercials and asking about the rules.

This one post alone has almost 50,000 likes, 1,800+ comments and about 3,000 shares.

Doritos drums up votes for its video contest.

Use this idea: Create a video contest with a public voting aspect to draw people to your page. You can cull the entries down, and then ask the public to vote for the final winner.

While you may not be able to pay to showcase a video during the biggest sporting event of the year, do make the prize as appealing as possible.

Creating a video is a lot of work. If you ask customers to put in the time, they’ll need a reason to do so. You don’t have to go overboard, but the bigger the incentive, the more participants you’ll have.

#2: Share Customer Stories

Dunkin’ Donuts asked its Twitter audience to tell a story about how the company’s popular coffee fit into their everyday lives. The catch, of course, was that the story had to fit into 131 characters (entries had to include #mydunkin and that took up nine characters).

After combing through tens of thousands of stories, the company selected several winners and asked the tweeters to star in their own Dunkin’ commercial. The company shot the commercials, uploaded them to YouTube, shared them on Twitter and then asked for more stories.

Winners of the #mydunkin stories on Twitter got their own commercials.

Use this idea: Learn how customers use your product by asking them to share their story on Twitter (using a hashtag so you can easily track the entries).

It’s a challenge to tell a story in 140 characters, but the results are fun and usually witty. Since people love entertaining content, you’re likely to reach even more people who want to join in or comment.

Incentives always increase engagement, but the prize doesn’t have to be huge in this case. Offer a prize related to your business or something a little quirky to catch attention.

#3: Add an Element of Fun

You don’t always have to offer a prize in exchange for comments. Coca-Cola hosts a trivia question of the day to boost interaction. There are no prizes, but the tactic works.

General trivia questions work fine, but Coke uses out-of-the-box questions like, “Which of the following is worth the most Scrabble points?”

The company takes advantage of their fans’ curiosity by posting two updates: one with the trivia question and one with the answer.

Coke entices engagement with fun questions.

The result is that fans comment with their guesses on the first update, then come back to find out the answer and comment on the second update as well. The more fans interact with a page, the more likely it is to show up in their news feed.

With each trivia update, Coke is subtly promoting their product, getting double engagement and showing up more in their fans’ news feed.

Use this idea: Use trivia questions to share a little about your product or service. For instance, ask customers to guess what year your business started or what your top-selling product is. Be sure to give the answer in a separate update to bring them back!

#4: Ask for Customer Ideas

Nissan recently asked customers to tweet ideas about what kind of technology should be in the special version of the Juke NISMO (using #Jukeride). Since people love to share their opinions, suggestions started rolling in.

To keep the momentum going, Nissan uploaded behind-the-scenes videos showing customers how the company was using their suggestions.

Nissan asked fans for input, listened and showed the results.

Use this idea: Ask your customers and fans to help you improve one of your products, share ideas about products they’d like to see or come up with a name for a new product you’re about to roll out.

Nissan used Twitter, but the idea works on any social platform. Wherever your fans are most active, that’s where you want to start.

#5: Provide Recurring Content

Remember when your favorite journalist had a weekly column? Estée Lauder adapted that idea as a social media tactic.

Every Tuesday, the company’s creative makeup director, Tom Pecheux, offers a makeup tip on Facebook. The #TomsTuesdayTip campaign offers advice, features a picture of a related beauty product and links to a purchase page or blog article about recent trends.

Estée Lauder consistently offers makeup tips.

Estée Lauder created their own hashtag, but there are established hashtags that achieve similar engagement.

The weekly column receives a lot of comments and questions and the company responds to them as quickly as possible. The weekly tip format, along with company interaction, gives fans confidence that the company is listening to them, which results in more conversation.

Estée Lauder talks to fans who comment.

Use this idea: Come up with a weekly feature using a consistent hashtag. You can create your own or ride the wave of an existing hashtag to get things started.

#TBT (Throwback Thursday) is a popular one. Just post a picture of the early days of your company, product or a related topic. Funny pictures tend to have the most comments and shares.

Whichever option you choose, be consistent and offer valuable content on a regular basis. If you set the expectation of a weekly share and don’t come through, fans lose interest.

To make it easier, use an editorial calendar to gather ideas, then use a tool like HootSuite or Facebook’s scheduling option to post updates automatically.

If you start a weekly topic, begin by posting on your most popular social profile. When the feature is established, use it to push fans to another platform where you’re offering a new weekly feature. You can grow your conversation and fan base on each social channel.

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How to Drive More Facebook Traffic to Your Website in 5 Easy Steps

Getting Facebook fans to your website (and then hopefully onto your email list) is even more critical with Facebook’s recent announcement of decreased organic reach for pages.

Use these five steps to help you get more traffic Facebook to your website.

#1: Make Sure You Have a Steady Stream of Shareable Content on Your Website

If you have a website that never changes, you’re going to struggle to get much traffic to it. Posting links to the same page on your site over and over is as futile as Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill.

These days, the name of the game is content marketing and you had better figure out how your business can participate.

The fresh, new content you post on your site is important—not only for social media marketing, but also for search engine optimization. Google rewards sites featuring fresh content with higher ranking. But you don’t have to post epic blog articles three times a week to win at the content marketing game. Posting something new and helpful once a week or even once a month can benefit your website traffic.

Here are some ideas that can help you brainstorm how you can add new content to your website:

• Post a weekly tip about your niche. It doesn’t have to be long; a paragraph or two with a nice photo will do just fine. Start with the frequently asked questions that come in from your customers.
• Post a weekly news bite with a photo about what is happening in your business. This works well for businesses that have events.
• Curate a list of top 10 helpful articles from around the web that you found that week. Add a short sentence about why you liked them.
• Interview someone in your office or in your industry. The interview doesn’t have to be live or with video (but that makes it even better). You could send the interviewee a list of 5-10 questions beforehand.

Roth Heating & Cooling posts quick tips that benefit their audience.

Not only will you increase the keywords on your site (which benefits you on search engines), you can use this material for social media postings and in your email newsletter. A win-win-win!

#2: Make it Easy to Share Your Content to Facebook on Your Website

Once you have fresh content, you need to make it shareable. Your first step is to add a social share plugin and/or Facebook Share buttons.

Use the Digg Digg plugin because it has all of the buttons you want to display and it floats along the side of the post as the reader scrolls through the article. But you may also want to consider adding static share buttons at the beginning and end of the post that are inline with the article. You can also do this with the Digg Digg plugin.

The Digg Digg plugin has the floating sidebar and inline sharing buttons.

Don’t ignore share buttons on the individual pages of your websites. While people may not be sharing your “Contact me” page, you may have good content on a resource page of your website that you want to allow people to share easily.

Also consider asking for a Facebook share if you feel you have a particularly helpful blog post. Remind readers at the end of your article by saying something like, “Did you find this article helpful? Feel free to share it on Facebook by using the buttons below.” Remember that people are mostly going to share something that is useful to them. When you’re creating content, always keep your customer’s benefit in mind.

#3: Optimize Your Facebook Posts

The next thing you want to do is make sure to optimize the way you post. There are basically three different ways you can post a link to your website, and depending on your audience (and how Facebook’s algorithm happens to be working at the moment), you can get different results.

The traditional way to post a link is just to cut and paste the link into the status section and allow the link to pull in the photo and metadata. The issue with this method is the photo that is pulled in can show up smaller if it isn’t a 1.91:1 ratio.

If the photo on your website is not sized optimally, the link won’t pull in a large photo.

When you have a photo that has the 1:91:1 ratio on your website, it appears larger in the news feed.

And when you have no photo or description at all on your article, the fields are blank.

Another way to post a link is to post a photo and then add the link into the status update with a little blurb about the link. The nice thing about this is that the description travels with the photo when it’s shared so you’re then controlling the message a bit more. The other nice thing is that photos can show up larger in the news feed.

Post an image with the link in a status update.

One technique that has been popular in the past to get greater reach is to post your link in the status section and then “X-out” the link data that is pulled in to change the post to “text only,” even though it has a link in it. The benefit of this in the past has been that text-only posts were getting more reach.

But Facebook recently announced that the new Facebook algorithm will show fewer text posts from pages. So we will have to watch how the effectiveness of this strategy changes.

Changing the post to a text-only post with a link may not work as well in the future.

With all of these approaches, you need to test which one gets the most engagement and drives the most traffic for you.

Once you post the content, you may want to consider boosting it with some advertising. See #5 for more information on advertising on Facebook.

#4: Optimize Other Places on Facebook to Add Links to Your Website

To drive more traffic to your website, make sure you have links in other parts of your Facebook page that people may be visiting.

Use your About page to direct people to different areas of your website.

Add links to your About page to direct people to different areas of your website.

Add links to your milestones.

Milestones stay on your About page and can have links in them.

Add links in your photo descriptions.

When someone clicks on your photo, they will see the photo description.

Use links in your photo descriptions—especially your cover photo, which will be clicked on more often.

Use custom tabs with links to your website.

Consider using an application like NetworkedBlogs to bring in links to your blog posts into the tab automatically.

People can easily access your most recent blog posts.

Optimize your personal profile.

Don’t neglect your own personal profile when considering how you can drive more traffic to your website. Make sure you’re sharing your blog posts to your personal profile and optimize your own About section with links.

Add links to your personal profile About section.

#5: Advertise

Advertising on Facebook can be a great option to get targeted traffic if you have a budget. And with Facebook’s recent announcements about decreased organic reach, advertising is going to be even more critical for marketers.

To drive traffic to your website, you can either create an ad from scratch with a link to your website, or boost content  that you’ve already posted. When you boost content, remember to post something that doesn’t have a photo that has more than 20% text in it or it won’t get approved by Facebook. You can use Facebook’s text overlay tool to measure the amount of text.

Boosting a post with a link in it can be a good idea.

One issue that I’ve found with boosting a post is that it doesn’t usually result in a lot of link clicks. You typically get more likes and comments on the post, which boosts the engagement of the post itself. However, if you truly want clicks to your website, you’re better off using the Ads Manager and choosing that objective.

For a better click-through rate to your website, use the Ads Manager.

Remember to use the news feed ads to help you improve your click-through rate even more because the ads in the right column do not get clicked as much.

Guide your website traffic to achieve your goals.

Finally, make sure you know why you’re driving more traffic to your website. If your website isn’t giving a call to action once your visitors get there, you’re missing the point.

Each piece of content on your website should do something to escort your potential customer further along your sales funnel. You might ask for people to comment on your blog post to engage with them, or tell people to sign up for a freebie so you can get them on your email newsletter list or even pick up the phone to give you a call.

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