How to increase your facebook advertising ROI by 450%

Thinking there must be more ways to make use of the fans on your branded facebook page? There is and its not about pushing content, promoting engagement or organising sweepstakes – it’s about advertising.

This post will show you how to use what seems to be a forgotten yet incredibly powerful feature of the facebook advertising platform, the ‘connected to’ button. The best thing is, employing this feature and reaping the full benefits of it only takes a few seconds to learn and understand.

You have a qualified, captive audience – use them.

Fans of your facebook page want to be there, they trust your brand and have opened themselves up to receive communication from it.   For most facebook page admins/marketers, regular page updates is where the engagement with fans starts and ends, this is simply not true.   Using the ‘connected to’ feature on facebook allows you to only advertise specific ad’s to your pages fans, the consumers you know most about, the consumer that will be most receptive to your message – the consumers that will return you the highest ROI possible.

How do I do it?

Step 1 – Access facebooks advertising suite by clicking the green ‘promote this page’ button or simply click the ‘Advertising’ link at the very bottom of the screen.

Step 2 – Begin creating your ad, make sure what you are advertising is relevant to your page fanbase and is something that they will want to know about.

Step 3 – Key Step – Targeting, before you start entering what specific age group, sex and interest’s you want to target, head down the page to the ‘connections on facebook’ section.  Here you will see three options:

- target users connected to

- target users who are not already connected to

- target users who’s friends are connected to

you want to focus on the ‘target users connected to‘ section.  Now add in the name of the page (you admin) who’s community it is you want to advertise to, almost instantly facebook should give you an estimate of how many people will be in that selected pool.

Step 4 – Start advertising.

The crucial thing to understand here is not the size of the market, it’s the quality of the market you are advertising to.  You’ve targeted them based on their connection to your brand page, so make sure the proposition you are pushing to them via ad’s matches up to the original proposition you offered them when they first encountered your page – the proposition they accepted.

Main Benefit’s of this Strategy

Generate incredibly high ROI on advertising – The market you are advertising to using this technique already know your brand and are willing to receive marketing messages from it.  For them, receiving relevant advertising from a trusted brand will likely be welcomed over most of the other noise on facebooks advertising platform.

You have the power to direct – Say your brand has a new website/microsite or online survey that has just launched, yet none of your consumers know about it.  Using this technique you can effectively drive qualified traffic to that destination for a fraction of what you have had to pay before.

Constant, qualified brand exposure – By varying your advertising daily/weekly you can expose new products/services to consumers who love your brand in an ongoing fashion.

Hopefully this small strategy will give page administrators out there another avenue which allows them to make the most of the facebook fan page communities.   It is also a great way to ’sell’ the idea of facebook advertising to others who would otherwise be skeptical on the subject.

From here, my advice to you is to give it a try and see what results you come back with, pay particular attention to the click through rate (CTR) of your ad’s, anything over 0.06% is considered solid.

See above, the bottom two rows show ad’s that were run through specific targeting without using the connected to feature.  The top row shows an ad that was run through the exact same targeting perameters, but did use the connected to feature.  Notice the dramatic rise in CTR when using the feature, it’s risen nearly 450%.  A healthier CTR means a higher ROI for advertising, also note the lower bid due to your ad targeting a selective audience, that only you have access to! Again, this contributes to a lower overall ROI.

I hope this post helps, if you do have success, or failure using this strategy I would love to know about it in the comments.