Here’s why you should do more than just throw money at the boost post button.

When Facebook first started rolling out digital advertising options for small businesses, many business owners were excited. They felt that they finally had control over their marketing efforts, and all they had to do was throw some money at their business account, press a magic button, and just like that they would double their sales and bring in 1,000 more customers.

While the “boost post” button makes it easy for business owners to generate more attraction to images, videos, or text posts, it isn’t a magic wand that will automatically boost your sales. In reality, there isn’t one magic button that will take care of all of your digital marketing efforts. After all, if it were as easy as paying to boost a post, why would digital marketing agencies still be in business?

Here are a few of the reasons why boosted posts could waste your money, along with our solution to help you bring in more genuine leads and boost sales!

The Problems with Boosting Posts

Limited Targeting Options

While your money isn’t completely wasted when you boost a post, your options are limited, and you could definitely get more bang for your advertising buck through other options. For one, when you simply boost a post, your targeting options are severely limited. With boosted posts, you only have three options:
• People who like your page
• People who like your page and their friends
• People you specifically choose via targeting

The first option is the most basic and surface level. Chances are if you’re like many industrial companies, you might not have the most quality likes on your page. If you spend all of your money advertising to them, you might be wasting a good percentage of your money since they might not really be interested in your services or products in the first place.

If you choose the second option, you’ll run into the same problem as the first except at a larger magnitude. In total, targeting the friends of people that liked your page could reach the millions. Facebook has no way of knowing which of these people are likely interested in your products or services, especially if you cater to a niche market.

The third option gives you the most control, but it is still very surface level compared to other marketing efforts you can use with the platform. You can’t choose just any specific interest or behavior, and you are left with Facebook’s general categories. While this will provide the most value of the three options, you can do much better.

Less Control

It might not seem like a crucial element of your Facebook marketing strategy, but ad placement matters a great deal. You not only want to target who sees your ad but also where they see it. When you simply hit the boost button for one of your posts, Facebook handles ad placement automatically. Facebook’s specialized algorithms will try to find the cheapest way to reach your objective. While this is friendly to your budget on the surface, you won’t get the best results. Here’s why:

If you choose to target multiple countries in your campaign, Facebook will ultimately show your ad to those with the cheapest click rate. This allows you to get the most exposure but your ad won’t be shown to the people you really want to target.

The same goes for the placement of your ad. Your ad could appear on both the Mobile News Feed and Desktop Newsfeed, and although they are both Facebook, the customers and leads you’ll get can greatly differ depending on where people see your ads.

Even if you’re getting the most leads and sales from the desktop newsfeed, Facebook could automatically spend 99% of your budget on mobile because it’s generally cheaper. For reasons like this, it’s always best to have as much control over your Facebook ads as possible.

A Smarter Approach

If you really want to get the most out of your Facebook advertising, you need to roll up your sleeves and create dedicated Facebook ads that engage your audience, and help you capture leads and sales—not likes, comments, and shares. While interactions with your posts is a good goal, it won’t help your sales as much as targeted ads will.

If you really want to quadruple your leads, you need to take the time and effort to craft a winning Facebook ad strategy. After all, you want to make sure that your marketing dollars are used to their fullest potential, right?

While some small businesses can afford to spend the time and effort to tackle their social media advertising themselves, most find it challenging to manage their ads account while also handling the day-to-day duties of running a business.

Setting up a successful Facebook ads account, doing the research, crafting a perfect message, and monitoring the campaigns on a daily basis costs time and money. That’s why many are coming to experts like us to help them.

Let Blue Atlas Help

Blue Atlas Marketing specializes in providing marketing solutions for manufacturers and other businesses of all sizes. We know how difficult it can be to do all of your marketing in-house while trying to run a business. Especially with increased competition in social media advertising, your strategy and campaign execution must be top-notch.

We’ve helped our clients generate more leads and boost sales quickly and easily with our efforts. In fact, one of our recent clients now has over 100 leads each month from Facebook! Before, they were only getting a dozen a month, but with our help, their Facebook ad campaigns are optimized, and they’re practically lead-generating machines!

Want to see what we can do for you and your business? Get in touch with us today and let’s create a marketing strategy that works for you!