Hey @Yolanda Eiland , thanks for explaining! Assuming you mean Facebook / Instagram (it's the same ad platform, called Facebook Ads Manager), here's the few high level levers you have to work with:
1. Your Audience:
- There's many ways to "target" your ads to different people on social media. For example, if you have a list of emails you can do it that way through what's called a custom audience.
- You can also target based on geography, even down to specific zip codes if you know where potential sellers might be.
- The main goal here is to narrow down your audience so that your ads only appear to the most relevant potential audience, especially as you're typically paying on a CPM basis (meaning cost per 1,000 ad impressions). You want those impressions you're buying to be from the right people. This article here should be a good walkthrough of the basics
2. Optimization / Targeting:
- In essence, this is you telling Facebook's algorithm what your goal is, for example you can tell it to get you clicks to your website, or even get people to click into a lead gen form where you capture their information to reach out personally or via email.
- There's more advanced ways too, such as if you have conversion tracking set up, but assuming for now you just want to get names, emails/phone numbers you may want to drive them to your site or to a lead gen form which facebook can provide.
3. Your Creative (ads):
- This can make all the difference. Your ads don't need to be sophisticated but you should know that the average time a person spends engaging with a post on Facebook is 1.7 seconds. That means you need to capture their attention as quickly as possible through having an interesting ad.
- For things like lead capturing or traffic, I'd recommend you stick with the basics and create static ads over trying to do videos which are better for brand awareness unless you have some great 6-15 second video resources already available.
- The main thing to note is facebook will give you issues if you put more than 20% text in your ads , so it's best to use some compelling imagery, and limited text.
- If you've got limited resources, you can always find free stock images to use, as long as you ensure the commercial use is also okay, and do some basic editing to add a little text, for example, "we buy houses for cash!"
- Pexels and Unsplash are both really good resources for free stock photos.
4. Budget :
- Before you turn anything live be sure you've checked your budget and your campaign start and end date. You can add a budget cap to make sure you don't over-spend. For example, capping your campaign at $500.
- The important thing is to monitor your campaign and metrics closely to feel comfortable with the results you're getting. So if you want to get completely lead forms for $20, and you see that it's costing you $100 you may want to re-evaluate all of the above items and/or engage someone with expertise in optimizing ad campaigns (it's too complex to explain briefly here).
- That said, the other thing to be aware of is it takes facebook's algorithmn about 50 "conversions" to learn who to spend money against and who not too, so the initial investment will probably be the least cost effecient, but it will improve over time as long as you've given it a decent enough audience size and budget for the machine learning algorithmn to optimize off of.
I hope that helps to some extent and feel free to let me know if you have any questions! If you do decide to test it I'd love to here how it goes! It's definitely a faster, more controllable method than ramping up direct mail, but it runs the risk of being slightly less targeted, and potentially a steeper learning curve as well, depending on your background experience on if you've ever run an online advertising before.
Thanks for posting!
Noah
