Do you feel like you’re investing too much time and resources into your social media efforts - without seeing any real results?
If you’re posting day after day and not feeling any real payoff from your efforts, it could be time to consider investing in Facebook ads. With 93% of social media advertisers relying on Facebook ads, it’s clearly the king of social media ad platforms.
Here are 4 ways you can utilize Facebook ads to help you market your insurance business.
Build Your Audience
One of the easiest things you can do with Facebook ads is accelerate the growth of your page audience with a page promotion campaign, also known as a “page like” campaign.
Page like campaigns help grow awareness and visibility of your business.
Page promotions are one of the easiest campaigns to create; the perfect way to get your feet wet while acclimating yourself with Facebook ad creation. Page like campaigns can be an inexpensive investment, with minimum budget requirements as low as $5 per day.
The benefit of growing your Facebook audience is twofold.
First, you increase the number of people who may (possibly) see your posts show up in their Facebook feeds.
Secondly, the number of people following your page can act as a trust signal. Potential leads and prospects may look at your audience size when determining whether or not to do busienss with you. While your business shouldn’t be a popularity contest, 2,000 page followers can make you look more legit than 20 page followers.
Promote Your Content
Did you know that not all of your followers see your Facebook posts?
According to Social Media Today, a post’s average organic reach is only around 6.4% of a page’s total likes.
In other words, only 6 out of every 100 of your followers are likely to see any given post.
Facebook ads are your tool to get your posts in front of a larger audience. You can do this in one of two ways:
- Boost Posts: quickly create a Facebook ad directly from a published post.
- Content Promotion Campaign: create an ongoing promotion featuring your content.
Boosted posts are a simple way to get more eyes on your content for a time duration of your choice.
- Go to your Facebook Page
- Find the post you want to boost.
- Click the blue Boost Post button.
- Select an audience you want to reach.
- Select a budget for your boosted post.
- Choose a duration for the ad to run.
- Select a payment option.
- Facebook will review your boosted post and then run the “ad” if it’s approved.
You can also create an ongoing promotion campaign to get your content out to a larger audience. An ongoing campaign runs continuously until you decide to stop/ pause it. With an ongoing promotion you can choose your own daily budget and customize the image and wording that goes along with each ad.
Some insurance marketers choose to create a new ad to highlight a brand new blog post, for example, within an ongoing blog post promotion campaign.
If you’re going to pay to promote content, choose carefully. It typically makes more sense to put your ad dollars behind content that brings potential prospects back to your website, rather than paying to promote content that would instead send a future client to someone else’s website.
Drive Website Traffic
These first two types of Facebook ads – page likes and content promotion – are great for increasing awareness of your insurance business or niche.
But Facebook ads can also be an incredibly effective tool for bringing new prospects to you.
With the traffic objective, you can create ad campaigns that send people to your insurance website. This is useful if you’re looking to get a specific audience to visit a landing page on your site to collect lead data, such as a "get a quote" form or newsletter subscription page.
Collect Leads
If you don’t have a dedicated landing page on your website for collecting leads, or just prefer to segregate your Facebook leads from other sources, you can choose a lead ad campaign.
Lead ads allows you to collect information from potential customers, such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and more. You can ask custom questions, collect sign-ups for newsletters, price estimates, and business information, as well.
When you choose lead ads, your audience is prompted to fill out a short instant form to send your their contact info. You can easily download these leads from Facebook, or integrate them into a CRM such as Mailchimp or Salesforce.
A Word About Audience Selection
One of the biggest benefits to advertising on Facebook is the ability to target your ads to the people you care about.
You can create an audience based on:
- Locations
- Age
- Gender
- Languages
You can also choose more detailed targeting, which includes or excludes people based on demographics, interests, or behaviors. This type of detailed targeting can be based on ads they click and pages they engage with.
In order to effectively target the right prospects, it’s important first complete the legwork and know exactly who your ideal audience is. Refer back to your documented insurance marketing strategy when creating your Facebook ads - it should give you insight on who your ideal customer is, what their demographics include, and what pain points they’re trying to solve.
Don’t waste your advertising dollars trying to cast a large net. Instead, take advantage of the main benefit behind Facebook ads and target the specific people who will want to click on your ads.
If you’re going to use Facebook to advertise your insurance business, be sure to supercharge your efforts with ads, too. When you combine a smart social media strategy with targeted advertising on Facebook, you have a powerful tool that can increase awareness of your brand, drive more traffic to your website, convert qualified visitors into prospects, and transform those prospects into loyal customers.