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    How to Determine Your Facebook Marketing Budget

    How to Determine Your Facebook Marketing Budget
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    Clients constantly ask us 'what is a good social media ads budget each month?' Now this is a tricky question, as some people might tell you to spend as much as possible! But really there are a number of factors you need to take into consideration when determining how much your credit union or bank should spend on social media ads.

    1) How big is your service or membership area?

    The first question you need to ask yourself is how many people can you possibly reach on social media. You can easily do this in ads manager.

    When in ads manager, click the hamburger menu on the top left corner and select 'audiences'. From there you can create a 'saved audience' of people in your membership or target service area and select them by county, city or state. 

    ezgif.com-video-to-gif (2)In the example above I pasted zip codes from an excel sheet. You can also manually enter zip codes, counties or states. This audience size is 1.5 million people, which is pretty large! However, this number is just the tip of the iceberg and needs to be broken down even further because Facebook may only show your ad to 10%-25% of your possible audience. 

    For example, you might want to reach only people on Facebook and remove all other placements, or you could narrow your focus to target specific age groups, or people with a narrow set of interests. Also, this larger starting audience size is just an estimate, there is no guarantee how many of these people will be online during the time the campaign is running.

    2) What types of social media ads will you be running?

    There are 3 main types of campaigns we run for clients:

    Engagement Ads: These help you reach new potential customers/members at the lowest possible cost. On average, cost per result for engagement ads are around $0.01! Yes, ONE CENT!

    Building a 'page engaged' audience does not take much budget... around $5 a day. We have seen that when targeting this previously engaged audience, costs per result can be up to 35% less than a 'cold' audience. Think of these ads as an introduction to a stranger, and make your ad content fun and relatable!

    Fan Growth Ads: These ads will help you grow your credit union or bank's social media following. The more fans you have, the more potential organic reach you have.

    With this type of ad campaign we usually spend $4-$6 a day, depending on our client's overall budget and goals... sometimes even as little as $2 a day. Again, this is a great way to introduce yourself to a potential member, make it fun!

    Website Click Ads - Now this is where you should be spending the bulk of your monthly budget. Website click ads are how your FI will start showcasing your products and services to users on social media.

    Create attention grabbing ads and feature your current special offers and promotions. If you have a blog, create ads to some of your blogs. 

    Here are two other campaigns we also run:

    Conversion Ads: This type of ad tracks a specific targeted action using the Facebook pixel. Once the Facebook pixel is added to your website, it can tell you when someone landed on one page and then landed on the thank you page, which, when configured properly, indicates the user filled out a form or clicked some other kind of submission button.

    We usually with run these kinds of ads for very top of the funnel offers, such as a downloadable budget worksheet or a checklist for buying a new car. These ads are great for growing your list of contacts and could be followed up with nurture emails or other marketing materials. 

    Businessman hand with loudspeaker and icons flying outBrand Awareness Ads: We typically use these ads to build awareness of a company's Instagram account.

    When creating the ads, you can select Instagram only placements and create custom Instagram ads. These work best when they are behind the scenes type photos or branded quotes. 

    Here is a monthly budget example break down:

    Total Monthly Budget: $1,500

    Budget Per Day: 1,500/30 = $50 a day

    Daily spend breakdown:
    Engagement $4.00
    Brand Awareness $3.00
    Conversion $15.00
    Page Likes $4.00
    Web Clicks $24.00
    Total: $50.00

    *Notice how a vast majority of this budget is focused towards conversions and website click ads. If you are not able to track conversions, I would suggest adding that budget to website click campaigns.

    3) If you are looking to increase your spending, make sure you look at past results FIRST

    If you have a website click ad or conversion campaign that you have run in the past, look to this for your inspiration! Say you have a broad campaign that was targeted to a good portion of your potential audience.

    Determine these 3 things to help you create a more accurate estimate on how much you can spend while still keeping the frequency of how often any one user sees your ad down to an acceptable level...

    1) How long did the campaign run?Modern clock with numbers on the side comming out

    Ideally you would like to have results over an entire month, but you can also look at campaigns after just 2 weeks. For the month, the ideal frequency is around 3.5 - 4 and for 2 weeks it would be 2, give or take. 

    2) What was the overall spend?

    Figure out how much was spent ONLY on the website click campaign.

    3) How high was the frequency?

    This tells you how many times people saw the ad in the given campaign. Again, be sure that this is ONLY in the website click campaign. 

    Say you pulled these numbers and got the following results:

    Ad Frequency for Website click ads were at 2.28 view last month and total spend was $460. Do the math... 460/2.28 is about $200 - so for around $200 you reached everyone in the audience once.

    To keep this number around 3.5 - 4 we can increase the budget by about $200 - $250 a month. This will bring a lot more traffic and keep this frequency low.

    If you are running conversion ads, you can use the same formula above!

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