We had a great time attending the Boost with the Facebook event in London in October. The event was aimed at professionals who want to get the most out of Facebook and Instagram to boost their businesses, which was perfect as we help our clients do this every day. Read on for a rundown of the event and what our key takeaways from each session were!
Workshop Session 1: How to Build An Effective Advertising Strategy
In this session, we were walked through how to define your advertising goals and objectives, reach your target audience, and learn how to measure a successful advertising campaign.
The first thing you should determine before running a campaign is what your objective is. This could be to raise brand awareness, generate leads or convert sales. Then you can move onto choosing your demographic’s interests, needs, age, and location. From there you can choose your creative in your ad, whether it is an image, carousel or video. In your ad you should also think about what would motivate your desired customer to click e.g offering a discount or free item.
Here’s a good example:
A newly opened restaurant wants to raise their brand awareness and get bookings.
Objective: brand awareness and footfall into their restaurant.
Demographic: 20-35 year olds, no kids, students or young professionals, interest in food, cocktails, cooking TV programmes, socialising, etc.
Motivators: promotions
Workshop Session 2: Build Your Audience Using Facebook Pixel
In this session we were walked through how to install the Facebook pixel to the back end of a website, and the importance of why you should install it, even before you start Facebook ads to help you track, build and understand your customer base.
Having a Facebook Pixel in the back end of your website is essential when using Facebook advertising. It will help to track conversions on your website that come through Facebook or Instagram, build target audiences by storing data from your page visitors, and remarket to customers who have visited your website before. The pixel will also help you track where your visitors come from, whether it be desktop or mobile.
Workshop Session 3: Understand Your Facebook Advertising Results
This session was insightful as our Facebook expert explained each level of ads manager and how to fully understand ad results in the account overview tab. In this tab you can see each result column, which will let you know the reach, impressions, cost per click and result. You can also see which gender and age group responded best to your advert, and can use this information to whittle down your audience for next time, and use your budget more effectively.
There are three levels on ads manager: campaign, ad set and ad. Campaign level is where you set your campaign objective, ad set level is where you control targeting, budget and scheduling and ad level is where you control the creative. We looked at the different metrics available on ad manager, and how to easily create reports from completed campaigns.
Workshop Session 4: Identify Facebook Tools That Work Best For Your Business
This session was fantastic for small businesses and entrepreneurs to learn how to use their Facebook business page to the fullest.
We learnt that from your Facebook page you can:
Create Facebook Stories: Like Instagram stories, you can upload a picture, video or boomerang to your Facebook stories and add additional text and gifs over the top. These are great as they only last a few hours and can give your Facebook audience a snapshot into what your day to day activity is.
Add a call to action button: This is so important as this will help customers get in touch with your business on your own terms and increase click through rates. You can choose from a range of button messages such as book now, call now or shop now. These buttons should have the correct link attached as they will help deliver your Facebook users to your website where they will continue their consumer journey.
Create engaging posts: You can make a text post a lot more engaging by adding a picture or even better, a video! This will help your post cut through the vast amount of content on your follower’s newsfeed.
Post job vacancies: If you are looking to fill a vacancy on Facebook, you can create a job post on the Jobs tab and receive applications in here. You can enter details about the role, contact applicants, schedule interviews and boost your job post to reach a larger audience.
Overall we learnt a lot of new tricks and shortcuts, brushed up on our advertising knowledge and would recommend small business owners to attend (it was free!). We even got to sit in the Instagram bathtub for an Instagram photo opportunity!
