If our content reaches just one person and has the impact that we desire, then it’s worth it. Right?

Hmmm, it’s an idyllic situation isn’t it? But what if our business relies on our content reaching more people? I know mine does and when I’ve invested heavily in creating and curating content, then I’d like to get it in front of as many of the right people as possible.

Gavin’s guest blog shows you exactly how to do this using Facebook Ads.

If your content has an impact with one person, imagine the difference if it had the same impact to 2, 3, 10, 100, 1000 or more people?

You create a great piece of content. You share it. And…

Tumbleweed.

No engagement.

But what if there was an easy way to get your content in front of the right people?

Well, you can… it’s called Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising is the most powerful content distribution channel available today. And you don’t have to remortgage your house to make it work for you. You can see some good results from as little as £1 per day.

Related Content:

• Facebook Ads Guide: A List of the Best Resources

Ready to see how?

Content Promotion Using Facebook Ads

1. Create your content

We’re all content creators so this is the easy part – write an article or create a video.

When you’re creating the content, ask yourself – who this content is for? Why would they want to take time out of their day to consume it? Also, ask yourself where does it fit in your sales funnel? Is it an appropriate piece of content for someone who doesn’t know who you are? Or is it more geared towards people who are already familiar with you and what you do?

2. Post to your Facebook feed

Once we’ve created the piece of content, we want to share it on our Facebook page. Make sure this is coming from your business or public figure page and not your personal profile.

3. Boost your content out to selected audiences

This is where the real magic happens.

I would always recommend posting your content to your Facebook feed to see how it performs organically first (rather than creating a “dark post”). Organic performance is always a good indicator of how well something will perform once you amplify it with ads.

If you post a piece of content and see it’s performing well, we then want to add fuel to the fire.

Facebook may push us towards that big ‘boost’ button, but in this case, we’re going to go through the ads manager so we can easily test a number of different audiences, seeing which one performs best.

Related Content:

• Facebook Advertising Set-up: Three Things you need to do

– Building the campaign

First of all, jump into your ads manager and click on the green create advert button.

Then we want to choose the page post engagement ad objective. You can find that by clicking on engagement and then post engagement. Click Continue.

Then we want to choose our first audience. Like I mentioned above, we’re going to create multiple audiences, so we can test which audience resonates with our content the most. Go ahead and insert all the demographical, interests & behavioural information you need to.

Scroll down and choose your placements and budget. I will typically run ads to the mobile & desktop feeds. But you may want to test other placements like Instagram or the right-hand column too.

For budget, this is down to how much you have/want to spend. Bear in mind you will be running the ads to multiple different audiences. Click continue.

Once you’ve decided upon your targeting, it’s time to create the advert. Because we’re promoting a post we’ve already created, all we need to do is go and choose the specific post by clicking on select a page post and then selecting the post we want to promote.

Then simply hit ‘place order’. Facebook will review your ad and as long as it fits with Facebook’s policies, it’ll go live shortly.

– Creating Audiences

Now we want to go back to the ad set level within the campaign. This is where we can start to test the different audiences.

When you’re there, select the ad set you created and hit create similar advert set. That will duplicate the ad set and you can go and change the audience, allowing you to test which audience performs best.

Do this as many times as you feel necessary. You can see for this vlog, I tested 5 different audiences. You can put as little as a dollar per day against each ad set. This is great as it allows you to test lots of different audiences for little budget.

4. Review and Revise

Over time you’ll start to see which ad sets are performing best. It’s down to you to choose which metrics determine success for you. In this example, you can see the Shetland General ad set had the lowest cost per engagement and the largest number of views to 100%.

You then might want to think about switching off the ad sets that aren’t working and reallocating the budget to the best performers. If the content continues to perform well, you can leave it running as long as you want. That post will gather social proof (engagements) over time.

In Summary

If you do this strategy with every piece of content you have, over time you’ll reach thousands of people that you wouldn’t otherwise have reached.

Will you start to take advantage of Facebook’s incredible distribution?

Your turn

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic too.

1. Have you used Facebook ads to increase traffic to your own content? Has it been successful?
2. How often do you run Facebook ad campaigns? Are they a core part of your content promotion strategy?

Please share your experiences below and feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Related Content

• How important is timing in content marketing?
• Content marketing using video: 5 YouTube channels to subscribe to right now
• How can I make sure my content is found in Google?
• Guest Blogging: Why I’ve started a Guest Blog

About Gavin Bell

Gavin Bell is a 22-Year-Old entrepreneur and founder of the social media agency, Blue Cliff Media.

Gavin grew up in the Shetland Islands and lived there till he was 18, before moving to Manchester after being accepted into the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy.

In Manchester, Gavin launched a corporate wellbeing company, Alba Fitness.

When he moved to Edinburgh in 2014, he decided to launch into the social media space. He takes an interesting view of marketing, by focusing on psychology first and tactics (ie, social media, search, advertising) second. Gavin is a speaker, writer and vlogger. He creates content that inspires and educates on marketing and entrepreneurship – all to provide as much value to the consumer as possible.

• Download Gavin’s Beginners Guide to Facebook ads
• Check out his vlogs over on his Youtube channel:
• Connect with Gavin on Twitter: @MrGavinBell