When Mark Zuckerberg began work on Facebook as a Harvard student, little did he know that it would become the world’s largest and most successful social media platform. Less than a year after it was launched in 2004, the platform had one million active users. By the third quarter of 2018, this number had exploded to 2.375 billion.

The power Facebook offers advertisers

Facebook has fundamentally changed the way marketers connect with leads. As a healthcare digital marketing agency, we’ve seen this first hand. After all, being able to reach over 2 billion potential leads on a single platform is a complete game-changer.

Facebook is especially effective because it empowers marketers to target extremely specific audiences. You can configure your advertising campaign to connect with people based on specific interests, demographics, or geography.

It’s also extremely cost-effective as a marketing platform. On average, Facebook’s cost per click (CPC) is $1.72, but depending on your industry, the CPC can be as low as $0.45. This is often significantly lower than other social platforms.

Facebook marketing made easy

Before you get started, you’ll need to set up a Facebook Advertising account. Once you’ve completed this step, you click ‘Create Ads’ in the drop-down menu in the upper right to open Facebook’s Ads Manager. 

There are five sections in Facebook’s Ads Manager tool: 

• Plan – The Plan section contains tools that help you learn things about your audience and give you creative ideas for running your ads. With the Audience Insights tool, you can find out a lot of information about different audiences on Facebook.
  
• Create & Manage – Here you find tools for creating your ad and managing your campaigns.
  
• Measure & Report – When you want to analyze how your ads are performing, check out the tools in the Measure and Report section. For example, here you can create those custom conversions to track whether ads are meeting your business goals.
  
• Assets – This section gives you quick and easy access to key assets that you’ve used to build your ads, including audiences that you’ve saved for ad targeting, images you’ve used, your Facebook pixel, and more.
  
• Settings – The settings area is where all of your account information is stored. Go here to update payment information, your email, and so on.
  

From here you’ll be able to configure each aspect of Facebook’s 11 ad formats:

• Video
• Image
• Collection
• Carousel
• Slideshow
• Lead generation ads
• Offers
• Post engagement
• Event responses
• Page likes
  

Getting more from your Facebook ads

Here are a few Facebook marketing best practices to help you get off to a strong start:

• Define your audience – Traditionally, the more people you reach the better. With Facebook ads, it’s better to define your audience so that you connect with the people who are most interested in your product.
  
• Use Facebook ads to tell a story – Stories connect us. Brands that understand this and use narrative-driven marketing will see better results.
  
• Track ad performance and make adjustments in real-time – It used to take time to gather performance metrics. Today, you can go live, see how a campaign is performing and make adjustments in real-time.
  
• Identify key metrics – If your campaign’s main focus is brand awareness, don’t be alarmed if sales don’t see a large increase. However, if you’re pushing brand awareness and engagement and traffic doesn’t go up, you have more reason to be concerned.
  
• Focus on the long-term – Social media ads are not a quick fix. As with any other marketing channel, it’s important to understand how Facebook ads fit into your overall digital strategy.
  

Gain a deeper understanding of social media marketing

KBK is a healthcare digital marketing agency that works with clients in medical manufacturing and healthcare supply chain distribution. Our specialized team understands how to leverage each digital platform, including Facebook, to grow and close leads in the healthcare industry. 

If you’re interested in growing your understanding of digital marketing, our team of industry experts has put together an 8-week educational course that will equip you with the tools you need to boost your digital sales strategy. Register here today to secure your spot.