On March 5th, Facebook Blueprint invited some of the Return team to take part in a training day in Manchester, filled with activities, insights and top tips from the Facebook experts themselves. Blueprint Live is for anyone who is looking to enhance their knowledge in the inner workings of Facebook, including how to set up effective, smart and relevant campaigns to boost their advertising strategy. Whether you’ve been in the game for years or if you’re new to digital marketing, Blueprint isn’t a day to miss!
If you’re keen to learn more, why not check out our article ‘What is Paid Social?’ to give you a flavour of what you could achieve for your business.
Facebook is the hub of advertising for many eCommerce businesses, with a reach of almost 2.5 billion active monthly users – and it is becoming ever-important to implement a strategic Facebook advertising campaign that flourishes against the vast competition. Our day at Blueprint equipped us with knowledge on key marketing strategies and also some interactive activities on how to use Facebook to our advantage.
Buying Types, Objectives and Placements
Beginning the day, we started with an insight into Buying Types, Objectives and Placements and began mapping out a campaign structure for a client brief we’d been given. Working with other fellow advertisers to conduct an analysis on current and previous campaign strategies was both a challenging and interesting task. For someone who works in the Client Partner team and with a moderate understanding of Facebook, listening to the discussions was thoroughly insightful. Be sure to consider your ad placements as this can make a key difference with who you may potentially reach.
Moving through the day we discussed how to implement the Facebook pixel and also how the Facebook SDK allows you to move app event data to Facebook. The pixel is fundamental in allowing you to track conversions to measure success rates of campaigns and define your custom audiences to ensure you’re targeting those most likely to convert. For more insight into how to implement the pixel, see Facebook’s guide to get you started.
Audiences
Another crucial topic we considered was our target audience for our client in a module titled ‘Reach the Right Audience’. This for me was particularly interesting as our team were able to envisage our ideal consumer and filter down who exactly we wanted to target as we thought about the granular detail. On a surface level, Facebook allows you to find audiences based on age, gender, location, relationship status and life events.
However, there are many more granular ways of targeting and our Blueprint expert gave us further insight into building Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. The key takeaway from our session on audiences was to remember to give your audience lists a refresh at regular periods. Proactively keeping a check on audience lists can ensure you don’t miss any opportunities throughout the year (especially if you’re an ecommerce business!) to target the relevant people and lead them to that all-important final purchase. If it’s audiences that you want more information on, check out our article on ‘How To Reach Your Customers’.
Bidding
Bidding is another key aspect we were trained on and how best to set up your bidding strategies without burning your client’s budget too fast. Facebook has bid automation strategies in place that will take time away from you and eradicate the need for manual bidding strategies. But, be sure to monitor these, or you may risk Facebook having too much control!
Best Practices
No matter what your business is, taking the time to find out best practices for Facebook Formats and Creatives will be valuable for you. Dimension sizes, top-performing creatives and formatting are all of the utmost importance when looking to build a Facebook campaign. See Hootsuite’s blog, updated for 2020, with all the dimension sizes you need to be aware of when advertising on Facebook!
We finished the day with a short presentation where we shared our thoughts on how we would set-up our Facebook campaign having considered a vast number of aspects for our advertising campaign. Thank you to Blueprint Live for organising a great day of insights and top-tips!
For more tips on building the best campaign for your business, you can read more on the Return Paid Social page.