Facebook's Premium Ad service - what value to brands?

However, the 2012 Facebook Ads Report from Social Fresh, in partnership with Buddy Media, suggests that despite this continued growth, many marketers are missing a huge number of opportunities to enhance their paid strategy on Facebook. There are lots of brands which understandably view an increase in fans on their Pages as encouraging, but it’s time for marketers to spend more time and money on engagement to really understand what makes their audience tick.

It’s not entirely surprising that 44% of respondents said they spent most of their Facebook ad budget on audience growth, especially when we consider the infancy of marketing on Facebook if we compare it to more traditional mediums. However, Facebook has designed new ad units and made premium ads available with engagement optimisation in mind. The budgets of marketers are not reflecting these new opportunities, with only 7% of respondents spending most of their ad budget on engagement.

Marketers need to invest in posting great content to generate significant engagement for their brand. The ability to turn that content into an advertisement will allow them to significantly amplify the number of interactions between users and content. Turning current fans into brand advocates with ads focused on engagement can also do more for community building than many advertisements designed to collect fans.

Additionally reviewing the report, I was surprised to see many marketers are not embracing the power of word of mouth marketing, with 55% of marketers not using Sponsored Stories on Facebook. These are even more engaging than call-to-action advertisements and use ad creative produced by consumers or brands.

These findings also suggest that targeting connections and friends of connections are seen as far less important than it should be, as 37% of marketers utilise connections, while just 33% target friends of connections. This stems from a lack of understanding and use of Sponsored Stories. Many marketers do not know how to truly leverage their users and users’ friends, when in reality, these are some of the most powerful criteria that marketers have at their disposal.

Another area marketers need to improve on is managing ad campaigns, particularly when key messages need to be communicated across a variety of channels. This is emerges as a weakness and is not surprising given that 85% of the marketers who took part in the research are not using ad management software to aid the monitoring process. Marketers can certainly create as many campaigns as they want without any software, but they need to ask themselves if they can actually manage 1,000 (or more!) different ad units and ensure that budgets are spent effectively.

We have reached a point in social media where marketers no longer need to throw advertisements against the wall to see what sticks. The tools and tracking capabilities exist to help brands create comprehensive campaigns that can be quickly adjusted to make the most of advertising budgets. This will only become more important as Facebook drives its premium ads offering.

When marketers do not take advantage of the possibilities provided by the Facebook ad product, they are neglecting one of their biggest resources, not to mention wasting money. By serving the right content to the right people at the right time, advertisers can most effectively reach their business objectives without stretching their budgets beyond their means.