Ads on Facebook are creating amazing successes for many different types of products and services. As a way for an author to connect with the desired audience, these ads are a great tool and well worth considering. The social network has been deeply mining data for years — on what people like, find amusing and interesting, along with users personal information and demographics — and the result is a gold mine for hyper-targeted advertising. Costs are flexible, options are infinitely customizable, and the results generate powerful data in real time that’s easy to track and work with.
Precision Social Media Advertising
The ads may look like a mystery — when you’re on the receiving end, it can be hard to determine their rhyme or reason. But actually, there is one — and it works. It’s precision advertising, is very much enabled by the way social media functions. In terms of targeted marketing, it’s the opposite of a billboard, where one very big, very expensive ad over a stretch of road catches the eye of only a fraction of those who pass it — the rest simply aren’t interested. Of those who do look at the billboard, there’s no way to know if that glance up actually generates any kind of further activity, either.
A Facebook ad campaign doesn’t require the cost commitment of radio, print and tv, traditional media outlets: those are purchased on the basis of audience numbers, despite the fact that only a tiny percentage of that audience even has the potential to turn into a sale. Statistics also show that viewers tend to break from a tv ad to do something on their computer or tablet — known as second screening — and that some people tend to mute the ads as well. Silenced and invisible, the ad is rendered useless.
On the other spectrum is the Facebook ad. For the sake of discussion, I’ll give you an extreme example: An author writes a non-fiction how-to book on the best way to train Aussiedoodle puppies. Facebook allows her to hyper-target the people who would want to buy and read this book. A skilled and creative Facebook advertiser drills down even further, hyper-targeting people in Minnesota who are between 40 and 46 years old, making over $100,000 per year, are Democrats, like sailboats, crave bacon, and like Aussiedoodle dogs — whether they own one or not.
The Facebook ad created for this specific audience segmentation will have an image and copy designed to immediately capture their attention, enticing them to click on the ad. That click will take them straight to a landing page, where the coordinated messaging is expanded — and where they can buy the author’s Aussiedoodle puppy training book. There’s nothing needle in a haystack about it.
Increase Book Sales at Minimal Ad Spend
While other forms of advertising may have a minimum cost amount or a set rate — often beyond an author’s budget, your advertising spend on Facebook can be whatever you want it to be. If you are a self-published author on the budget of a dollar a day, you can spend exactly that. The model is entirely different: with hyper-targeted ads that are only served to the people most likely to buy your book, you only pay for each time a targeted person actually responds to your particular ad.
Even with a minimal spend behind a very creative, effective, well-targeted Facebook ad, it’s on a place where people spend so much of their time. After your ad is served to a few thousand target Facebook-ers, you will likely receive at least a half dozen ad clicks every day in return. If one of those ad-clickers buys your book that day, that is certainly worth the dollar. But you can also have the spend ebb and flow, increasing it at certain times or on certain days (such as weekends, of Sunday afternoons), by programming that schedule into your ad placement. There’s even more flexibility: you can pause / alter / revise the ad at any time, and you can also change the targeting options.
Repurpose your Old Mailing List
You can also utilize that mailing list full of names and emails that it took years to develop. Upload it into the Facebook Ad Manager, and Facebook will process the list for you, associating the email addresses with each individual’s unique Facebook ID so you can target them with specific ads. This is your mailing list already: they already know you as an author, and they’re interested in what your write — and probably like your previous work. Appropriate ads can be created just for them.
There are endless possibilities: A skilled Facebook advertiser can filter that list to target sub segments, and design ads to reach smaller but valuable group of followers. Or ask Facebook to create a ‘Lookalike’ audience list, based on the profiles of the people on your mailing list. If your mailing list contained 1,000 name and emails – and Facebook found ID’s for 750 or them – your ‘Lookalike’ audience list will most likely contain many thousands of Facebook ID’s. These are all people that Facebook identifies as being similar to the core audience of your own mailing list. Now that list can be targeted as well.
Track the Results in Facebook Ad Manager
Activity on social media can be analyzed in endless ways and in real time: using Ad Manager or the more advanced Power Editor on Facebook, you can track how your ads (past as well as present) are working with data that can be viewed and analyzed in real time. You can generate statistics on how many people saw them, how many clicks each received, how much each click cost, and more. A new ‘Relevancy Score’ evaluates each of your ads for its effectiveness and messaging with regards to your desired targeted audience. Armed with these results, you can adjust: concentrate on the ad that’s most successful, pull back or stop ad spend on the ones that aren’t.
Facebook recently developed an even more sophisticated tracking tool: a conversion pixel that you can place on your website and add to a Facebook ad. It keeps track of exactly which ads lead to conversions — clicks on your website, and enables the social media site to then find those most likely to go to your website and purchase your book (a lookalike audience) — and show your ads only to them. Add a conversion pixel to the Thank You page your website generates after a sale (hint: always have a Thank You page), and you can also track how many people clicked on your Facebook ad, went to your site, and bought your book.
How to Get Started
If you’re an author with more time and computer savvy than budget, you may be able to start using Facebook ads yourself. You’ll need a bit of a technical mind, though there’s plenty of guidance out there. You need to be extremely creative — able to take, edit and enhance great photos and images, and to write engaging and catchy advertising copy. You also need to become your own media manager, as social media ad campaigns aren’t static (remember the billboard) but flexible and adaptable — and managing an ad campaign, making adjustments or refinements, and using the tracking data to improve your strategies will work to your advantage.
Since the advertising is scale-able, start small: with a small dollar amount ad spent. Track what the ads go and what kind of results you’re getting. As your skills increase, you can ramp up the effort, adding a previously released title to re-boost its sales, targeting different audiences.
For those releasing a new book who want to really do it right, you — or your publisher, agent, or publicist — might want to consider hiring the a social media advertising specialist. He or she will evaluate your goals, recommend the appropriate ad spend, determine the start and duration of the ad placements, and monitor and manage a professionally run social media advertising campaign. The campaign will target your prime audience as well as smaller but desired sub-set segmentations, will drive traffic to a transaction page, and should increase your sales.
In 2015, taking advantage of the tools available on Facebook is a powerful advertising strategy, and an entirely up-to-date way to help your new book be a success. However big or small, whatever the topic, it’s time for authors to jump on board.