Facebook advertising has become a significant ingredient for social media marketers, but New Zealand businesses are still making a number of mistakes that reduce the effectiveness of the medium. Here are seven common problems:

Mistake #1: Not paying to advertise on Facebook

New Zealand marketers are spending far less than their overseas counterparts on paid social media advertising — and, alas, it’s not because we are somehow smarter. Our organic (unpaid) social media posts are performing just as poorly as those elsewhere in the world. Too many Kiwi marketers just haven’t yet got the message that to get seen on Facebook we need to pay to advertise.

According to NZ Interactive Advertising Bureau figures, NZ expenditure on paid Facebook and other social media advertising represents around 10% of New Zealand’s total digital advertising expenditure.

That’s less than half of the ad revenue market share enjoyed by Facebook in the US or the UK.

Mistake #2: Selling Instead of Engaging

Facebook has told us for years that they’re just NOT going to share posts that are self-promotional in nature. And yes, Facebook’s algorithms can easily tell the difference. In fact, according to Facebook’s latest update, Facebook’s algorithm will now “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people”.

Yeah, it’s all pretty clearly laid out: create posts that engage your followers and Facebook will share them. Those are also the sorts of posts that perform best when you pay to advertise as well.

Why should you pay to promote posts that aren’t directly trying to generate sales? Think of it this way: if you were standing in front of a prospective customer, you (hopefully) wouldn’t start a conversation with a blatant sales pitch. Instead, you’d ask a few questions, exchange some opinions and generally get to know that prospect before trying to close a sale.

Too many marketers forget that the medium is called “social”. That implies conversations, not monologues.

Mistake #3: Posting Boring Facebook Content

Does your advertising stand out on Facebook? Or does it just blend into the background, just another easily-avoided sales pitch amongst the hundreds of posts on your prospect’s newsfeed?

Yes, yes, we know, creativity is in the eye of the beholder. But because there have now been literally millions of ads on Facebook, the data analysts have been collecting, curating and analysing – and identifying the elements of successful Facebook ads. We’ve collated many of those examples in our “Mastering Facebook Ads” course (see details below). Turns out that it is rocket science, but there are plenty of astronauts out there identifying the nuggets of gold amongst the worthless asteroids.

Mistake #4: Not Monitoring Your Competitors

The neat thing about Facebook is that it’s all transparent. You can see your competitors’ pages, both locally and globally. You can see the posts that they are paying to advertise, you can see the content that they’re using and you can see what engagement they’re getting from their followers – reactions, shares and comments.

It’s a goldmine of competitive intelligence, and if you’re not taking advantage, shame on you!

Mistake #5: Not Testing Strategically (or Not Testing at All)

Forbes Magazine notes: How do you choose what audience on Facebook should see your ads? What are the interests you should consider targeting? How do you scale up your campaigns? These are the questions that require a whole lot of space and time to think about before you decide.

What I have noticed with many inexperienced Facebook entrepreneurs, however, is they actually don’t have a methodical and clear approach towards testing. They jump around different interests and try out every option in the ad setup menu.

When it comes to testing, developing a clear, step-by-step approach and understanding what key performance indicators (KPIs) to analyze and why is key to avoiding a wasteful resource investment.

Mistake #6: You’re Posting Too Often (or Not Often Enough)

Frequency matters in social media. If you don’t post frequently enough, two things happen:

• your audience won’t see your posts (because of Facebook’s algorithms); and
• your audience will forget about you, because of all the other wondrous enticements flashing before their jaded eyes.

On the other hand, if you post too frequently, your audience just might get tired of all your messages (especially if the messages are creatively bereft and repetitive).

So how often should you post? Typically, once-a-day, at a time when the largest portion of your audience is visiting Facebook. How do you know when that is? The answer is in your Facebook analytical data, just waiting to be discovered. If once-a-day seems not enough, take a look at your competitors and see how often they are posting. Again, all that information is available for you to review and understand.

Mistake #7: Not Measuring the ROI

As Jeff Bullas points out: Arguably the most important part of your whole social marketing efforts is the ROI.

Did you achieve what you set out to do? And how do you measure that in the first place?

If you’re not following this step, then all your marketing efforts might as well go to waste.

Each step of the way, you need to be measuring and tracking the results so you know if a tactic is worth pursuing or not.

At the end of the day, you need a set of data or a number that says if your strategy was worth it or not. And no single metric tells you this better than the ROI.

So how can you avoid making such mistakes — and move on to make Facebook advertising work for you?

Check out our online training course, “Mastering Facebook Ads”.

In this nine-part online training course, we will take you step-by-step through what you need to know to understand and master Facebook Advertising.

Lesson One: Getting Started

In this lesson we introduce you to the principles and practices of Facebook Advertising, and take you on a tour through Facebook Ads Manager (which is the tool that most of Facebook’s six million advertisers use to advertise on Facebook). We also discuss:

• why you shouldn’t just boost your Facebook posts and expect to get effective results
• the key differences between Google Adwords and Facebook Ads and why they matter to you
• the limitations faced by New Zealand advertisers compared with our foreign counterparts
• how (if you’re not careful) you can end up competing with yourself and drive up your Facebook advertising costs
  
• an analysis of the New Zealand Facebook marketplace
• why mobile is so important with Facebook (and why that matters to you)

Lesson Two: Setting Campaign Objectives

When you first start an advertising campaign on Facebook, you’ll be offered a range of possible objectives for your advertising. In this lesson, we deconstruct each of the offers on tap, consider how they might help or hinder your campaign and review:

• the surprising importance of Awareness campaigns for your future success
• why you shouldn’t just go straight after Conversion and Sales objectives
• when, where and how you should trust Facebook to meet your objectives (and when you shouldn’t)

Lesson Three: Targeting

Facebook has such rich data about its users that you can use to laser-focus your advertising on the people that you most want to target. It’s both an asset and a liability, because if your targeting is based on assumptions, you might be advertising to exactly the wrong people. In this lesson, we explore:

• the comprehensive sets of filters available to you to segment your audience
• the enhanced capabilities that are NOT available to NZ businesses (and how you can compensate instead)
• how you can reach out to your own customers and prospects through Facebook Custom Audiences
• the surprising implications of Europe’s new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation, introduced in May 2018) for New Zealand targeting on Facebook

Lesson Four: The Offer

All offers are not alike on Facebook. To understand what works on NZ’s most popular social network, we need to review some of the key elements of social shopping.  In this lesson, we review:

• The 10 most important factors that consumers look for when deciding whether or not to buy from you (and how you can improve each aspect)
• The five most attractive offers that you can make, to close a sale
• The six factors that consumers are most likely to consider when comparison shopping
• The most popular items that Kiwis are buying online these days
• The four most-important offerings you can provide that will have consumers recommending you to their friends
• The five most likely reasons why consumers abandon their shopping cart in the middle of a purchase

Lesson Five: Advertising Creative

By now, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that all advertising is not alike on Facebook. In Lesson Five, we review the ads that work (and those that don’t) on Facebook. Included in this lesson:

• identifying the most effective types of visual elements for Facebook Ads
• when and how you should use video in your Facebook Ads
• determining the copy elements that will work best to meet your objectives
• establishing an effective Call to Action
• considering the most important components of the Landing Pages (where you send people after they click on your ads)

Lesson Six: Remarketing and the Facebook Pixel

Remarketing — adding a Facebook pixel to a website outside Facebook, so that Facebook can track the journeys of those who click on your ads — is the key to truly understanding and segmenting your prospects. In this lesson, we give you a solid understanding of the benefits of remarketing and share how you can:

• use remarketing to truly customise your Facebook Ads for your visitors
• reach out again to prospects who visited your website but didn’t buy
• follow up with prospects who made an enquiry or downloaded an ebook but have yet to buy
• avoid wasting money, by not advertising again to those who did buy
• remarket to visitors who have already liked your Facebook page

Lesson Seven: Measuring the Performance

Facebook Advertising creates a LOT of data, and the sheer scale of the information can be overwhelming. In Lesson Seven, we show you how to focus in on the key metrics that matter, and how to interpret that information to guide your future activities. In particular, we recommend that you track:

• who saw your Facebook Ads
• who clicked on those ads
• the percentage who then took the desired action
• the comparative Costs Per Click and Costs Per Conversion (and how to evaluate the effectiveness of your ads as a result)
• the Lifetime Value of your Facebook-generated customers

Lesson Eight: Testing

Testing should be an essential part of any Facebook Advertising campaign. In this lesson we explain how to set up robust testing procedures for your campaigns and what represents appropriate sample sizes for each test. We also discuss:

• which elements you might test (and why)
• how and why you should only test a single element at any time
• how to determine which variant is working and which is not (hint: it can be more complex than you think)
• how much data you need to determine the outcome of a test

Lesson Nine: Creating Effective Facebook Posts

Finally, we review the types of posts that you should consider promoting with Facebook Ads, accompanied by a wide range of examples, including:

• Plenty of stories from local and international businesses who are using Facebook effectively
• The hotel chain that has twice as many people talking about it as the chain has followers
• The radio station that has truly mastered the art of Facebook
• Examples of posts that really tug at the heartstrings
• The Facebook page that had 247,756 Facebook likes but managed to get 775,600 people talking and 160,000 people sharing
• Practical posts that get people sharing

COURSE CREATION AND TUTORING
This course has been created and is tutored by Michael Carney, longtime marketer and author of six books (including the top-selling book “Trade Me Success Secrets”, now in its Second Edition). Michael is also the creator of a number of other online courses and consults on many digital business initiatives.

This is an online course, conducted on a web-based e-learning software platform, enabling course participants to proceed at their own pace, accessing materials online. This particular eCourse provides content in a variety of multimedia forms, including videos, slideshows, flash-based presentations and PDF files. No special software is required to participate.

Course lessons will be provided in nine parts, for participants to access in accordance with their own timetables.

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

Feedback from previous Social Media Marketing online training course participants:

• “this was the best professional development course I have done in many years” – Mark R, senior Agency Exec responsible for social media
• “thought the information within was outstanding” – Ed P, General Manager
• “What I loved was that I started with a fairly rudimentary understanding of social media but have learned a lot – including where to find more information as I need it.” – Fiona W, Marketing Manager
• “I found it relevant, informative, topical, insightful and a bloody good read. It’s never evangelical, too techy, patronising, assumes that you know too much or too little about digital and has a warm sense of humour in the communication throughout which helped faciliate the learning process for me.” — Adrienne B, new media senior executive
• “Thanks for pointing me in the direction of this course! It’s been extremely enlightening” — Shayne P, design agency director
• “Rapt with what I have seen of the course” — Julia R, fashion editor
• “I’m really enjoying the course – learning a lot – and I know the two friends I persuaded to join us are also loving it.” — Lavinia C, designer
  
• “Am thoroughly enjoying the content!” – Kara B, magazine co-ordinator
• “I completed the first lesson today and found it really interesting and love the interaction already! I am so looking forward to the second lesson already …” — Annette B, public relations director
• “I was already engaging with social media and have been doing so for about 6 years or so. But, did I know how to use social media in a marketing and business sense? No, I simply did not. This course was a great way to show me how to do that.” — Sheryl K, online marketer

WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE
Any Business Owner or Manager, Marketing, Advertising, PR or Communications professional who, while they may have a fair knowledge of Facebook, realises that they need to know more about Facebook Advertising.

TIMING

This course begins on Thursday 02 January, 2025.

INVESTMENT

This nine-part eCourse is available for $697+GST. However we offer a $100 Early Bird Discount for bookings received and payment made by midnight on Thursday 26 December, 2024. Pay only $597+GST for this course!

Bookings are confirmed on receipt of payment, which can be by bank deposit or credit card. We can raise an invoice in advance if you need it.

To reserve your place in this course, please pay by credit card through PayPal by clicking here.

If you would prefer to pay by bank deposit, or require an invoice before making payment, please send an email to info@socialmedia.org.nz with details of your request.

(The service provider will be shown as Netmarketing Courses in your transaction and on your credit card statement).

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Your booking will be confirmed by email (if you have not received a confirmation within 24 hours, feel free to email info@socialmedia.org.nz).

On the first day of the course you will be supplied by email with login details and Course Notes for Lesson One.

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PS You might also like to check out our other Facebook courses:

Facebook Accelerator Programme