Sara Dara, Software engineer and CEO of Programmers Zone, started her Abu Dhabi-based company in 2019. Her mission? Teach and train students, professionals, and tech enthusiasts programming languages including Python, JavaScript, Swift, and PHP. Her passion comes from wanting to educate and get more people interested in tech and software.
By experimenting with different small business marketing strategies Sara has managed to steadily grow Programmers Zone. One of the tactics Sara has had the most success with is social media marketing, specifically advertising on Facebook.
We spoke with Sara to learn how she uses Facebook ads to promote courses offered by Programmers Zone. Here’s what she had to say:
How to advertise on Facebook
Hi Sara! Let’s dive right in. How do you use Facebook for Business to market Programmers Zone?
When you think of social media marketing, the first platform that comes to mind is usually Facebook. With over 2.9 billion active users this social media platform has become very popular with advertisers.
You will need a Facebook Business Page to begin advertising on Facebook and gain access to the Meta Business Suite. This is the platform you need to use to create, run, and monitor paid ad campaigns on either platform.
Once you’ve set up your Page and have access to the Meta Business Suite, you’re ready to plan a campaign to run on either or both platforms.
What do you need to keep in mind when creating a Facebook marketing strategy?
Get your visual assets and messaging right
The first thing you need to focus on is the visual assets (images or videos) you’ll be using, and the accompanying caption. Make sure the graphics you select for your paid posts will both grab attention and resonate with your target audience.
Selecting the right visual requires that you thoroughly understand your audience. Do they prefer videos or static posts? Do they engage better with illustrations or photos? Is there a particular tone that will make it easier for your audience to understand your message?
We saw that our Facebook ads performed much better when we used static visuals, with images that include people. We created our designs by customizing school admission templates with our brand and program details. As a professional brand, we used a more formal tone to establish our knowledge, experience, and expertise. These tactics captured the audience’s attention. If your brand is more on the casual, fun side you could go for more of an informal tone and make use of emoji’s in your captions.
You may need to experiment with different type of ads before you know which one drives the most traffic and create engagement.
An essential part of Facebook marketing that companies often overlook is the need to maintain brand consistency. Make sure that you stick to your brand color palette, font typeface, and always add your business logo, when designing Facebook posts. This will also help improve brand awareness and increase ad recall.
Adopt a mobile-first approach
With more and more people using their mobile devices for, well, everything, the likelihood that potential customers will view your ads on their cell phones is very high.
To adopt a mobile-first approach you need to make sure your Facebook ads are optimized for mobile. The first way to do this is by limiting the amount of text included in your visuals. Facebook penalizes ads with too much type, and for a good reason. Too much text or fine detail that is hard to see or read on mobile screens – meaning your message won’t reach your audience.
In our social media marketing campaigns, we saw that striking design with minimal or no text, paired with a concise caption and a strong CTA, performed well in terms of encouraging the audience to click through to learn more about our classes.
When optimizing ads for mobile, you’ll also want to thoroughly inspect the landing page the user will be clicking through to. Test that it works properly and provides visitors with the information they need to take the desired action.
How did you go about running your Facebook campaign and measuring its effectiveness?
Test, analyze, evaluate, and re-evaluate
Running a paid campaign on Facebook is tricky. There’s no set rule, no one-size-fits-all solution, and the algorithms are continuously changing–so what worked for you once may not work again. Also, what works for one company may not work for another.
The best way to run a campaign is by continuous testing. Try running Facebook ads in various formats: – image, video, carousel, or just text. Facebook’s ad platform allows for A/B testing, a way to compare two versions of an ad against each to see which one works well. Not only can you test which ad format works for you, but also which visuals, messages, and offers resonate best with your audience.
You can experiment based on the goal you’re trying to achieve. Conversions, website traffic, app downloads, and page likes are some of the goals Facebook allows you to set prior to running your campaign. Our main goal was to increase brand awareness by boosting the traffic diverted to our website and increasing conversion by getting more people to purchase courses. We chose those goals and let Facebook do the rest!
After a specified time period (for us it was a week) you can view your campaign metrics and see if you’ve accomplished what you were hoping to achieve. If your goal was to increase your website traffic, you’ll want to check the link clicks, and cost per click to see if you’re getting a favorable return on your investment. If you were hoping to increase sales, you’ll want to analyze the conversions and the cost per conversion to double-check that the amount you’re spending to acquire each customer equals or is less than the goal you’ve sent for your company.
We upped our budget and daily spending for the campaigns that were performing well and had favorable metrics. We made some changes to the target audience to increase ad reach for campaigns that weren’t performing as well as we’d hoped. After a few rounds of testing, if we weren’t happy, we paused those campaigns.
Was there a campaign that worked particularly well for you on Facebook?
Try different discounts and offers
It’s no secret that everyone loves saving some money. Our target audience on Facebook in particular consisted of savvy savers. Using voucher template designs, we created special offers for discounts on our courses that customers could only take advantage of for a limited time. We ran these offers on Facebook.
These promotions were also run cross-platform on popular online magazines that specialize in the tech field, which also generated a lot of interest.
Amazing! Sara, thank you for sharing such insightful information about using Facebook ads to promote your business. We wish you and Programmers Zone the best of luck.
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