As part of marketingSHOWCASE Online – April, we were joined by James Urquhart, Nick Boddington & Matt Rubas for a live Q&A on Facebook Ads.

James, Nick and Matt also present the popular Lets Run Facebook Ads podcast, where they dive into great deal about how brands can achieve real results through advertising on Facebook. So it was brilliant to have their time, joined over 100 marketing pro’s in attendance, to go through and answer a range of questions on Facebook and Instagram advertising.

We started the session with a poll to assess where businesses were at with Facebook Advertising?

– Never tried Facebook ads: 49%

– Tried it and it didn’t work: 10%

– Want my Facebook Ads to work better: 38%

– I’m a Facebook Ads expert: 3%

Our first question, posed to James, asked whether marketers should focus more on organic vs. paid social. “Less than 2% of your audience/followers see your organic content on social” James says, so you shouldn’t necessarily favour one or the other. Both are important but can you afford to leave paid out completely?

One of our visitors then asked for a B2B SME, what’s the minimum spend for a facebook ads campaign?

Nick explained that B2B targeting tends to be more specific the cost per milli (CPM) is simply higher for these. It can range from £100’s per lead to just £15 per lead. “You need to flip it and think, ‘what’s the most you can afford to acquire a customer? If that’s £40, you’re not going to spend £10 per day as it’s going to take a week to get one lead, which means the data isn’t coming in quick enough to see success/failure and adjust accordingly”.

Nick then goes on to comment; “Is the whole funnel in place? After acquiring a lead via facebook, is the marketer doing everything right to convert that lead. Often that isn’t the case but the blame is placed solely on the Facebook campaign.”

We then shifted the conversation to how we convert leads generated through facebook. “Most clients are sending traffic to a landing page on their website” says Matt. “We are finding that better quality leads are found after confirming details on a landing page rather than a pre-completed form on Facebook”

With around 50% of visitors having not tried Facebook ads, many more were even less familiar with advertising on Instagram, so we asked Matt to give us an overview of Instagram Ads, their format, who it works for and why you may want to try it?

“Instagram is owned by Facebook and therefore works in a similar way to the Facebook Ads platform. There are multiple ad formats: static image; carousel posts; video posts. The key to understanding what works is to test! But not just one creative to one audience, increase your chances of success by building different ad formats to different audiences. We find that Facebook ads generally offer a better cost per conversion, whereas instagram ads offer greater brand awareness and engagement (comments & likes). So a strategy could be building an awareness piece on instagram but re-target for the conversion on Facebook.”

Another question came from the floor: “When choosing an audience for an Ad is it better to go broad or narrow?”

Matt’s answer; TEST! “Facebook is a very clever machine and can achieve great results with a broader audience but it really does vary from client to client. Finding a happy medium with a combination of campaigns with broad and narrow audiences. With the arrival of the iOS 14 update and people opting out from targeted ads, you may want to start to build larger audiences to account for his.”

Towards the end of the session we discussed “boosting posts”.

“Boosting a post is a waste of time” says Nick Boddington.

The 3 guests went on to explain the issue with boosting posts is that there’s no set goal, apart from showing it to more people. You might find some success comes with that but, Let’s Run Social prefer to run specific campaigns that are optimised to the clients objectives, be that awareness or conversions. James then asked “Why are you boosting that post? Is it for a dopamine hit off a couple of likes or is it to actually create revenue for your business?”

Matt closed the session by summarising how the new Apple iOS 14 update will affect advertisers on Facebook. The update will force users to decide whether they want personalised ads served or not. It’s a whole other topic, however, he implores businesses to research further and prepare your accounts, as it brings significant change.

If you wish to find out more about Lets Run Social head to; https://www.letsrunsocial.com/ or for their consultancy arm, The Ads Clinic, head to https://www.theadsclinic.com/ where you can get a free Facebook Ads review.