6 Reasons you should outsource your Facebook advertising

Facebook advertising is made so easy, that practically anyone can setup an ad. Interestingly enough, you don't even need artwork as your logo and a couple lines of text are merely enough to get you started. You go on and kick off your Facebook campaign, a certain time later, you are happy to have achieved a beautiful number of impressions, slightly less clicks and slightly less actions (# of followers).

You are surprised a little bit later, that your friend, who has outsourced this campaign, has achieved higher numbers (on all front) with the same budget you did. So what did you miss out on?

Here are 6 Reasons you should outsource your Facebook advertising:

1. Time and Spending: Your campaign might be bound by a short time limit, and Facebook hasn't credited you enough trust yet to allow you to spend as much as you want. For example, you would like to spend $1,000 on a 3 days campaign, yet your daily limit is still $50. Digital Agencies on the other hand have ran multiple previous campaign that has allowed Facebook to gain trust in them, and further increase their daily spending limit.

2. CPC Optimization: The Digital Agency will actively work on multiple ads simultaneously targeting various segments, or the same segments but in a different manner, allowing them to optimize the CPC, plain and simple: cut the expensive ads, and keep the cheap ones running. This is an exercise that can be done twice a day. Creating new ads on a daily basis need accessible designers and talented copywriters that would grab the attention span within that small area allocated to your ad (YES, your logo is NOT enough for your ad).

3. Reporting, Conversion and ROI: The Facebook reports are beautiful, they practically cover everything you need to measure and make you feel proud. NO THEY DON'T. 

What you actually need to measure from your ad performance is its impact on your wall (The %Feedback and %Social), on your daily views, tab views, how many followers joined your page and remained active VS. the ones that liked your page, and became dormant. You need to measure the impact of the ad on your website and other digital medium. Such reports would allow you to create a benchmark for your next and future campaigns.

4. Money: Digital Agencies do not seek profit out of advertising (Not to confuse digital agencies with media buying businesses), they are handling ads merely to increase the engagement on your Facebook page, to support a campaign or to create a snowball effect, which is part of a longer term strategy that you are paying for. Typically any digital agency would charge a small % on top of the budget allocated for ads to cover: The management fee, the credit card charges and the time spent on generating the reports. This small % is nothing compared to the time you would spend on it, while you should be doing something else.

5. Experience: No matter how you deal with it, digital agencies have done that same job much more often than you did; Which allowed them to get a better insight on targeting, ad bids and textual/visual content

6. Experience (Again): This time it is about the user experience and managing the whole digital medium. Users clicking on ads need to be kept interested, and this is done by creating the appropriate content, landing page (before/after LIKE), necessary tabs for explanations, matching your other digital mediums with the ad (Twitter, website, blog, LinkedIn...etc..)

In a nutshell, you can still do all of the above wonderfully, but unless you have a full fledged team that is handling your digital activities, you should outsource this and spend your time on something that is more beneficial for your business. (And companies that have built a digital entity within their organizational chart can be counted on your fingers - in Saudi Arabia that is).

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E-Newsletter 101

Now that people are engaging with your brand on a daily basis, you are more concerned about your newsletter and planning to send it out regularly, monthly, weekly or maybe daily if you generate that much content. Below is a list of items that you already know, but I just compiled them for you:

1. Starting with your "TO" field. People often select "no-reply" or "webmaster" as the "TO" field? Why? what is the purpose, is it like a "We talk to you, you don't talk to us" like approach? If you are asking people to enjoy your brand, then you are better off stating that you are ready to hear back their thoughts. "no-reply" isnt quite inviting. Go with something friendlier, choose a friendly name: Matt, Helen, Joan, Melissa...whatever you want, just make it sound human.

2. "CC" and "BCC", a definite NO for both fields. Keep them nice and clean, don't use them

3. Subject: Keep the subject short and self explanatory, avoid using characters or expressions that help in marking you as a spammer: All Caps subject, exclamation marks, question marks. Special keywords such as "Free, Win, Now!, Enjoy...etc..." are all a no-no for most spam engines.

Also keep in mind that some recipient would like to archive your e-newsletter (or quickly find it in their inbox), so make sure you introduce a certain pattern within your subject (or just a keyword maybe), that would simply allow the user to search for one term in the subject field and get all your newsletters.

4. Your email body: Start by stating why your recipient is receiving this email. Should be something like: You are receiving this email because you are subscribed to www.ourwebsite.com, a website description.

Afterwards start with the body of your newsletter, you usually put in whatever you want in here, just try to reduce the number of images as most mail clients don't allow much images to be sent thru, and outlook becomes really heavy when downloading a lot of images, and might result a deletion of your email by the user.

Finally, You must have added your social media links to the newsletter, and are asking people to follow you / join you, you'd better state why they should follow you. For example follow us on Twitter for regular news updates, Follow us on Facebook and be part of our competitions...etc...

In your email body, think about:

• Users who are opening up the newsletter on mobile devices
• Users who are previewing your newsletter (Either using the reading pane of outlook or any other email client, or the desktop notification of popular email clients)

5. Your newsletter footer: This is an area not to be disregarded, your footer should definitely include an un-subscribe link, I know you don't like this, but hey - give people the choice :) - Also, make sure that your unsubsribe page on your website pushes people to change their mind...don't just put in a message "Thank you for unsubscribing....blablabla..." It would also be a good idea to ask the un-subscriber: WHY? (Never too late to ask for advice  and compile more insights)

Finally, the footer should also include the physical address of your company, with the POBox number. This helps you in gaining more credibility (and decreases the chances of you getting marked as spam)

Some notes you should consider:

• If you opt for a full graphical newsletter, keep in mind that most email clients would block the image downloads. Make sure you have enough TEXT showing what the newsletter is about to incite the user to download the pictures...and why not inform the user that he needs to allow picture download to fully view the newsletter (This could be put in the image "ALT" attribute).
• Keep in mind that most email client do not support more than 50 images as attachment (In case you are embedding the images within the email), in case you are referencing the images from your server, make sure you keep old images, so that users archiving your newsletter can still have access to it
• Never forget to track: How many users are coming to your website via your newsletter, to your facebook page, and how many followed you on Twitter, what is the most "clickable" area of your newsletter...etc... Data Data Data help you learn, improve and target.
• Don't forget to add reference numbers for your e-newsletters. Help users organize themselves and quickly identify what they are looking for, whether in their inbox or on your website.

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