Why I love Facebook Ads

 

I talk to a lot of artists and craftspeople, many of whom have Facebook pages for their businesses. I'm always a little surprised that they don't do Facebook ads. I think to most people, the whole process is pretty mysterious. I don't claim to be an expert, but I can say after some trial and error... they are cheap to run, very easy to point at your specific target market, and have served me pretty well. 

Cheap you say? Yes. When I run an ad before a sales event, ie craft show, I usually spend $10-$20 for a week. The cool thing about FB ads is that you set your own daily spending limits. You do need to check that number each time you edit your ad, it will default to some ungodly number automatically. I believe the trick to keeping the cost down is to choose the Pay per Impressions option. This charges you each time your ad is shown 1000 times. Usually less than .50. Hey now! I did try the pay per click, and I found they only showed my ad a few hundred times or less per day. No bueno. I don't pretend to know exactly why that is... but I assume I'm competing with higher bids for the same demographic, not sure. All I know is when I set my ad for impressions, it is shown thousands of times per day for the same fee.

Since my ad will be shown a lot, I make sure all the pertinent info is in the ad itself... name, date, location of the event where I'll be selling. That way, even if they don't click, they have me in their brains. 

Probably the best thing about FB ads is the ability to point it toward exactly the audience I am trying to reach. I choose to target only women over 25, within a certain radius of the location of my event. In this example, I'm doing a show in Kelseyville, CA which is near Clear Lake. Since I've done shows there before I feel like this is a good way to target, keeping it within 50 mi of the town. By adding Santa Rosa, I could double the audience, but I'm not sure I'd reach people who might actually go the the festival. So I decided 98k was plenty. 

The last time I went to this area for a show, I ran a similar ad and spent about $10. I only got 2 page likes from it... but one of them came to the show and spent $150. Bam! This is why I tell my vendor friends to give it a try. It only takes one customer to make it pay off.

Also, since opening my little shop, I run ads off and on geared toward local ladies. I have added a couple hundred *local* likes to my page just by paying $1 per day. I'll do a week or two on, then off. Change garment photos and try again... focus on towns north or south of me, then back on my town. I usually get a few likes per day for my one dollar. Not a bad deal!

So, I encourage you to give FB ads a try. Set a spending limit, do some experimenting and see what works for you!