So you heard that advertising on Facebook can yield great results and you want to give it a shot. The issue is that you don’t know how much to spend. Well, follow these 3 steps and you’ll have a budget in no time.
1)What is your goal?
The first thing you need to decide before embarking on a Facebook Ads journey is where exactly you want to go. What is the destination of the journey. Are you looking to build a bigger Facebook audience or do you want to drive traffic to a website/landing page? Are you looking for people to buy your product or do you want to generate leads for you business? What is it exactly that you want to accomplish with your Facebook ads?
Another aspect of your goal is in what timeframe do you want to accomplish your goal? You can’t expect to just turn on the ads and within minutes hitting your goal, it needs to be realistic. A 10% growth in leads/audience/etc over the next 3/4/5 months sounds like a realistic and attainable goal.
You need to define your goal and set yourself enough time to hit that goal
2)Who is your target market?
What are the demographics, interests and behaviors of the people you are trying to reach? Does your business cater to men, women, or both? Are your customers generally in the upper class, middle class or lower class? Is there a common interest that your customers share?
If you can determine the group/groups of people that are more likely to purchase from you then you can most likely target them with Facebook ads.
3)Finding the CPC (Cost Per Click).
Using Facebook’s Ads Manager you can find suggested bidding per the action that you are looking for your audience to take. Once you have that figure you can just multiply it by how many of those you want and over how long of a period you want them.
Let’s put it all together with a few examples:
Joe runs a service business that offers gutter and window cleaning. Joe’s best customers are wealthy people with big houses. The houses have many gutters and windows to clean. The customers can afford to pay for the above and beyond service which Joe tries to bring to every job. Joe feels that if his Facebook presence was better, the “higher end” customers would be more comfortable to contact him and use his service. He decides to run a Likes Campaign to build up his audience. He wants to add 1,000 likes a month over the next 4 months. He uses Facebook’s targeting to find homeowners in a certain location who are making over a certain amount of annual income. He finds that the cost per like for this targeting is about $1.5 and therefore needs to set a budget of $1,500 a month for 4 months to hit his goals.
Sally is a real estate broker specializing in rentals for college students. She has a beautiful landing page that she uses to collect leads for her business. Using Facebook she wants to drive targeted traffic to her landing page. Her goal is to get an additional 200 visitors per month to the page for the next 2 months. Using Ads Manager she determines that CPC would be $3.5 to target college students in the vicinity looking for a rental. At $3.5 per click that makes 200 clicks be $700 and for 2 months that’s a total budget of $1,400.
By determining your business’s goals, target audience, and finding the CPC you can estimate your budget with a little bit of math.
