5 Facebook Ad Tools That Will Make Your Content Stand Out | Social Media

The rumors of Facebook’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Nearly every year someone predicts that Facebook is dying, soon to be replaced by the next shiny new social media platform, yet it continues to grow and thrive with over 2.2 billion monthly active users as of January 2018. However, with Facebook’s recent emphasis shift from page-to-person to person-to-person interactions, many businesses are struggling to adjust.

Under this new system, posts have less reach than before and many businesses have responded by posting more content, hoping something will get through to their target audience. Unfortunately, recent studies have found that the additional posts have actually resulted in lower engagement but this doesn’t mean that Facebook is not a great marketing and sales platform. Instead, stand out from the crowd and find sales success using these great Facebook tools.

Facebook Ads Manager

If you’re new to the platform, Facebook ads manager is a great place to start because it’s free and easy to set up and you can establish your marketing budget for any amount you choose. To get started go to the Ads page and follow the instructions which will walk you through setting up and activating your campaign.

You can skim the surface of this tool or drill deeper to improve your reach by tailoring who views these ads by location, gender, age, and more. For some businesses, this tool is all they need to increase sales and for others, it’s a piece of a larger campaign, but every company advertising on Facebook should take advantage of this resource.

Hootsuite Ads

Hootsuite began as a free scheduling platform that allowed you could create posts and schedule them to be uploaded on to your social media platforms on a specified date and time. They still offer this service, which makes managing your content calendar a breeze, but now offer Hootsuite Ads service that brings more traffic to your website so you can generate additional leads and sales.

This tool comes with traffic and analytics reports, ad filters to narrow the reach and increase the effectiveness of your ads, and Facebook ad support. If you’re nervous about wading into Facebook ads alone, this is a great solution. There are two program levels for this service, $9.99 per month and $14.99 per month.

AdEspresso by Hootsuite

In February of 2017, Hootsuite acquired AdEspresso, a full-service ad creation, and management program.  AdEspresso is a Facebook Marketing Partner that removes the learning curve many businesses experience with Facebook ads so they can achieve a faster ROI. It is also Instagram and Google Partners, which allows you to create and manage all of these campaigns from one location. This system integrates with Canva, a popular graphics program, and allows you to upload images and videos, create carousel ads, and add headlines.

With AdEspresso you can broadly or narrowly define your target engagements and track the success of your campaigns with ease. This allows for great A/B testing so you to try new approaches on different groups and tweak the best ones to achieve better outcomes. Costs for this service range from $49/month for the base plan and up to $499/month for their Diamond plan, with others in between.

Buzzsumo

If you have experience advertising on Facebook, you may want to up your game by using services such as Buzzmo. Beyond simply running ads, influencer marketing is important to engage certain market segments, especially millennials, and this program helps you identify and utilize the right influencers for your products and services.

This service helps you identify industry trends, tracks competitor content and identify appropriate influencers based on data that determines the range of their reach. Buzzmo also identifies which topics are of interest to your target audience so you can create content that engages this key demographic and delivers the analytics you need to track your success. This service takes the guesswork out of knowing what everyone is talking about and who is influencing them, so you can use this information to promote your products and service. Plans start at $79/month.

Heyo

A great way to engage your audience is through direct Facebook interactions such as contests, giveaways, quizzes and coupons, and Heyo makes it easy. If you can click, drag and drop, you can create mobile-optimized Facebook campaigns, complete with a countdown, and track your results.

With this service, your campaigns can run on a minimum of three and up to 50 Facebook brand pages so you don’t need to worry about coordinating the process over multiple pages. There are three plan levels, from $25/month to $199/month, and all are Facebook-focused with other social media and third-party integrations included.

Bottom Line

Facebook is alive and well and offers multiple opportunities for businesses to engage their consumer base. Whether you are a newbie or experienced Facebook advertiser, these tools can help take your campaigns to new levels.

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