If you’ve been using Facebook Ads and Boosted Posts to promote your aesthetic business or dental clinic, you may have already noticed that Meta Ads Manager has recently changed its advertising objectives. Previously, there were 11 of them. Now there are just 6. Today, we’re going to look at how this change may affect how you use Facebook’s promotional tools.
Whether you need a bit of help navigating the new Facebook Ads interface to achieve previous promotion success, or you’re new to using Facebook to promote your business, we’re here to help. Cosmetic Digital has been an online advertising market leader within the aesthetic and dental industries for many years. We know how to get great results when it comes to promoting cosmetic treatments, and brands, to potential and existing clients.
We’re going to outline the key differences that now exist between Facebook Ads and Boosted Posts with a view to advising you of the benefits of each. This should hopefully give you a good idea of when to use which option to get more website traffic, as well as increase client queries and sales.
Understanding Boosted Posts
A boosted post is a simple and easy way to promote an existing post on your Facebook Page’s timeline. It allows you to allocate a budget to increase the post’s reach and visibility among your chosen audience. For example, if you want your post about teeth whitening treatment to reach more people in the city where you’re based, than just those who have liked or followed your page, boosting it will do exactly that.
Targeting Options for Boosted Posts
When boosting a post, you have the freedom to choose the audience you want to reach. Facebook offers pre-set audience options such as people who like your page, people who like your page and their friends, and people in your local area.
Additionally, you can create custom audiences based on factors like gender, age, demographics, interests, and behaviours. This level of targeting allows you to reach the right people who are most likely to be interested in your brand.
Boosted Post Objectives
Boosted posts offer three primary advertising objectives to choose from:
- Post Engagements: This objective aims to increase reactions, comments, and shares on your post, fostering engagement with your audience. For instance, in the case of the teeth whitening Boosted Post – you might expect to get more ‘likes’ for your image of whiter teeth, as well as comments that might raise frequently asked teeth whitening questions. Interested parties may enquire as to the brand of whitener you use, how long the treatment takes, or how long the results last.
- Messages: If you want to initiate conversations and connect with potential customers, this objective encourages people to send you direct messages. This is an opportunity to give a personal face to your brand. By speaking directly to a potential client, you can answer their specific questions in more detail, and gain more trust.
- Link Clicks: This objective directs people to your website, driving traffic and potentially increasing conversions. This action will expose the person who clicked the link to more information about the product you advertised, but also all the other treatments and services you offer, that may also be of interest to them.
Boosted Post Placement
Boosted Posts can appear in various locations on Facebook, including the News Feed, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. This broadens your reach and allows you to connect with users across different platforms.
Boosted Post Limitations
While Boosted Posts offer simplicity and ease of use, they come with certain limitations. You cannot edit the text or image of a boosted post once it has been boosted. If you want to make changes, you’ll need to create a new post and boost it. Additionally, boosted posts must adhere to Facebook‘s advertising policies, including the 20% text rule for images.
Understanding Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads, on the other hand, provide more advanced and customisable options for businesses looking to run strategic campaigns. Created within Facebook Ads Manager, they offer a wide range of features and targeting capabilities. A Facebook Ads campaign for teeth whitening can be tweaked while it’s up and running, allowing you to experiment with it to see what works, and what doesn’t when it comes to achieving your brand awareness or sales conversion goals.
You can modify targeting, text, creative elements, and other parameters to optimise your ad’s performance. Plus, you can do this until you find your teeth-whitening sales Goldilocks zone! An example niche might be 50-55-year-old men, located 20 miles from your clinic, who are willing to travel because they don’t want to be seen by someone they know at their local dental surgery. Playing around with your Facebook Ad results, while your campaign is up and running can be a game changer. However, it’s important to note that any edits made to an ad will trigger Facebook‘s Ad approval process.
Facebook Ad Advanced Targeting
Facebook Ads provide extensive audience targeting options that go beyond the capabilities of Boosted Posts. In addition to pre-set audiences, you can create custom audiences based on website visitors, customer lists, app activity, or offline activity. You can even target users who have interacted with your Facebook page or specific elements on your page, such as videos. In addition to that, Facebook also offers “lookalike audiences” that allow you to reach people who are similar to your existing customers or followers.
Facebook Ad Objectives
Facebook Ads offer three main advertising objective categories:
- Awareness: These objectives focus on building brand awareness and reaching a wide audience. Why not become a go-to clinic for teeth whitening? (Or your chosen treatment) The more people who visit you, the more reviews you’ll get, and the more authority you’ll be seen to have as an expert in this treatment.
- Consideration: These objectives aim to drive specific actions, such as website traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, and messages. When your tooth whitening ad drives traffic to your website, it can easily become the beginning of a business relationship between you and a potential customer.
- Conversion: Ultimately, we all want our ad campaigns to result in sales. Facebook Ads have efficient functions in place to do a lot of the hard sell for you, before your potential client even speaks to you.
Facebook Ad Placement
With Facebook Ads, you have complete control over ad placements. You can choose to display your ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or a combination of these platforms. This flexibility allows you to tailor your ad placement to your target audience’s preferences and behaviour.
Bidding and Budgeting
Unlike Boosted Posts, Facebook Ads provide more bidding and budgeting options. Depending on your objective, you can optimise your ad for various goals such as impressions, clicks, or landing page views. You can set a bid cap, schedule your ads to run at specific times, and allocate a daily budget. This level of control enables you to maximize the efficiency of your ad spend.
Privacy and Visibility
Unlike Boosted Posts, Facebook Ads do not appear on your Facebook Page. They are designed to be discreet and are only visible to your target audience. This ensures that your ads have a dedicated space for engagement and don’t interfere with your organic page content.
Choosing Between Boosted Posts and Facebook Ads
Deciding whether to use a Boosted Post or a Facebook Ad depends on your specific marketing goals and objectives. Here are some considerations to help you make the right choice:
Boosted Posts:
- Boosted Posts are ideal for increasing audience engagement on your Facebook Page.
- They can help develop brand awareness and maximize visibility for your best-performing organic posts.
- If you’re looking to grow your audience of page likes or drive website clicks, Boosted Posts can be an effective tactic.
- Boosted Posts are well-suited for local business promotions or giveaways.
Facebook Ads:
- Facebook Ads are more suitable for specific campaign objectives, such as traffic, website conversions, lead generation, app installations and video views.
- They offer advanced targeting options, allowing you to reach highly specific audiences and create custom audience segments.
- Facebook Ads provide more flexibility in terms of ad placement, bidding strategies, and budget optimisation.
- If your goal is to achieve immediate impact and drive tangible outcomes, Facebook Ads are likely to be the better choice.
In most cases, a combination of Boosted Posts and Facebook Ads is the optimal approach for social media marketing. Boosted Posts help build brand reach and engagement, while Facebook Ads enable you to convert your audience into customers. By strategically allocating your social media marketing budget between the two options, you can maximize the impact of your campaigns.
There is another option to help you get the most out of Facebook’s promotional tools, and that’s to outsource your digital marketing to an experienced expert in this field. Everyone in our team here at Cosmetic Digital keeps themselves up to date with all new Facebook Ad and Boosted Post updates. We can assess your marketing goals with a view to making an informed decision on how you can get more traffic and sales. If you’d like learn more about how we do it, please get in touch for a chat.