Category: PR Top Tips

Promoting the right content at the right time via Facebook advertising, with its powerful audience targeting tools, could be the driving force for your next lead generation campaign.

Despite recent criticism about its practices, Facebook appears to have weathered the storm and continues to be the most popular social media network among adults in the UK.

Teachers regularly access Facebook for personal and professional use providing a great opportunity for you to reach them.

However, creating a successful and well-targeted Facebook ad campaign takes time and there are many things to consider, from what you’re offering to how you can find the people who are most likely to engage with your content.

Here we share some top tips to make your next Facebook ad campaign a success.

Engaging and inspiring content

Teachers do not want to share their name and email address with just anyone, so you need to provide them with a good incentive to encourage them to do so.

Content is at the heart of any successful lead generation campaign and according to HubSpot, 96% of people who visit your website are not ready to buy so the best approach is to “give before asking” to capture leads.

If you offer valuable free resources, teachers are more likely to provide contact details to access it, providing you with an opportunity to engage with them in the future.

Here are some examples of the type of content that you could offer to teachers:

• Useful resources such as lesson plans or classroom exercises
• Webinars or training courses
• Free reports and guides providing tips and advice e.g. behaviour management
• Free trial of software

One successful content strategy you could try is to produce content that is aligned with a particular awareness week or time of the year. For example, you can produce back-to-school resources that you could promote in August/September or a Stop Bullying guide for Anti-Bullying week.

Landing pages that convert

Once you’ve decided and created the content that will incentivise teachers to share their information with you, you need to set up a landing page.

Landing pages are a critical part of your Facebook ad lead generation campaign and the start of the process from turning a visitor into a lead.

You need to make sure that your landing page has a single call-to-action e.g. fill in the form to download the content. Avoid additional links or other calls to action on the page as you don’t want to distract from the end goal – to capture their details.

You will also need a thank you page set up. Once someone has signed up, they will be directed to this page, be thanked for signing up and signposted to the content. It is also a great way for you to track conversions and create retargeting or lookalike audiences, which you will read about later on in this blog.

Ads that stop the scroll

You may have an amazing offering and a great landing page but if you don’t have an ad that stands out and grabs your target audience’s attention, then even with the best targeted campaign tactics, it’s more than likely that you will experience a low clickthrough rate on your ad. This will not only result in a low number of leads, it will be costly too.

A lead generation ad should use an image, video or infographic that makes someone stop the scroll and take action (click on it).

Here’s an example from Whizz Education who we worked with on their Mathvember campaign.  The ad successfully grabbed the attention of hundreds of primary school teachers.

Remember…

It’s important to keep the imagery and messaging consistent throughout the lead generation process from the ad to the landing page to the content, so your target audience is being exposed to core messages and visual creative, solidifying familiarity and trust in your brand.

Setting up an audience targeting teachers

Interest-based targeting

Facebook knows a lot about its users, including their location, job title, hobbies and interests. This offers you a valuable opportunity to fine-tune your audience so you can target people who are more likely to engage with your content.

If  you have created a persona of who you are trying to target, interest-based targeting is perfect for setting up an audience based on the persona’s demographics, behaviour and interests.

In the absence of a persona, you can target a broader audience like deputy head teachers (pictured).

You can also exclude interests that might not be relevant to your audience e.g. if you want to target Maths teachers, you can exclude other subject teachers like English teachers.

With an interests-based audience, the more you know about your target audience, the easier it will be to choose the demographics, interests and behaviour that is most closely aligned to who you are trying to engage with.

Facebook custom audiences

One of the most valuable tools for ad targeting is the ability to target people who have already engaged with your business before.

The custom audience option on Facebook ads enables you to target people who have visited your website, followed/liked your Facebook page and if you have one, engaged with your app.

What’s more, you can also create a lookalike of these audiences (see below) to find people who are similar to your custom audience, increasing the chances that they will engage with your ads.

There are two important caveats of using custom audiences:

• You must have the Facebook pixel installed on your site for creating an audience of website visitors
• You should ensure that your privacy and cookies policy includes details of your use of Facebook custom audiences for ad targeting.

A/B Testing

Once you’ve created and set up your content, landing page, ad and audiences, you are ready to launch your campaign.

While it would be great to launch the campaign and see great results from the offset, the likelihood is that you will need to test different elements of the campaign to find what is working and what is not.

A/B testing is a method of finding the most effective ad by changing one variable at a time, such as creative, audience, body copy or call to action. An example might be testing a picture of a report against an image of a student.

Sometimes it will be clear within the first few days of launch which ad is performing better so you can switch off the other one. Other times, you might want to keep the A/B testing running a bit longer to see a significant difference.

It’s very important with A/B testing that you only test one variable at a time. You can always test another variable once you’ve completed the first A/B test.

Retargeting and lookalikes

Once your ad campaign has been running for some time, you can set up a retargeting and/or lookalike campaign.

You may be familiar with retargeting if you’ve ever browsed an online shop and then gone on to Facebook to find an advert promoting the item you were looking at earlier.

With a Facebook pixel on the site, you can do exactly the same type of retargeting if someone goes to your landing page but doesn’t complete the download form. People who have already visited your website are much more likely to convert as our client PS Financials found when we introduced retargeting during their lead generation campaign.

A lookalike audience is another option to give your campaign a boost once you’ve reached 50 leads and above. This is a great feature in Facebook ads that allows you to create a lookalike of everyone that has engaged with your campaign.

If you have a Facebook pixel on your website, tracking everyone that visits the landing page and also who completes the sign-up process, you’ll have an opportunity to do a retargeting campaign.

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Thinking of launching a social media advertising campaign targeting school leaders and teachers? We can help. Please get in touch if you would like to find out how.