In the world of Facebook ads, there are endless possibilities to market your business and promote offers. If you’ve ever tried to advertise on Facebook before, you may have run across some confusion. With all the different types of ads, design options, and the ability to boost posts, it can be hard to differentiate between them all and figure out which one is best for you. In order to create an effective Facebook marketing campaign for your studio, understand the difference between running ads and boosting posts.
Running Ads on Facebook and Instagram
Within your Facebook Business Page, you have the ability to run targeted campaigns to specific audiences. These targeted campaigns are called Facebook ads and show up on the desktop or mobile newsfeed of people who you’ve targeted it to. When running Facebook ads, it’s important to have a specific goal in mind, whether that’s post engagement, page likes, website clicks, or conversions. When creating a Facebook ad, you have the opportunity to select advanced targeting options to create a specific audience for your campaign. These targeting options include things like age, gender, occupation, income, hobbies, location, and more. Facebook ads also including setting a specific budget and a certain period of time you want your ad to run. There are several different types of Facebook ads you can run including:
- Link Click Ads
- Video Ads
- Facebook Lead Ads
- Page Like Ads
These different type of ads can help you achieve your specific goals for the campaign with things like lead forms and call to action buttons. For example, for fitness gym studios it's very important to focus on gym digital marketing ad campaigns. Once you’ve designed your ad with the video or image and message you want your audience to see, you can run your campaign and track how well it’s doing.
Boosted Posts
Boosted posts are also a way to advertise your business on the Facebook newsfeed. The difference is the delivery is much simpler and straightforward. Unlike Facebook ads, boosted posts are content that you’ve already created on your Facebook page. This could include posts, videos, or links to your website. When you boost these posts from your page, you’re amplifying it to a specific audience. This is to target it and increase the visibility and engagement of the post. Boosting the post will make it appear higher in the newsfeed of people who already follow you. An added bonus is that it shows up in the newsfeed of people who don’t follow you as well.The main difference between boosted posts and Facebook ads? Facebook ads give you much more control over the design of the ad and the targeted audience. Both boosted posts and ads show up on people’s news feeds as sponsored content, however. These ads and posts can be cross-posted to Instagram to increase visibility.
Which One Should You Choose?
If you have a specific marketing goal, you'll want to choose which is best, or determine a combo of both will suffice. Is your goal to encourage people to sign up for your email list or to spread the word about a specific class? Facebook ads may be the way to go. Running ads gives you the ability to include lead capture forms and call to action buttons that boosted posts do not.If you’re interested in creating general visibility for your brand and getting more eyes on the things you post, boosted posts can help you with that. Boosted posts are great for driving more engagement (likes, comments, and shares) to the content you would post anyway. The short answer: a combination of both works best for most businesses. Use Facebook ads when you have a specific goal in mind or a specific advertising campaign you want to run and give boosted posts a try to increase engagement and awareness of your business.