Online advertising is like a fuel or catalyst for most businesses to reach their ideal customers and convert them into paying customers. The Meta platform (Facebook and Instagram) is one of the most used online advertising platforms and it is used by most small to medium businesses even those who are just starting and are yet to have a website. One common practice among many businesses using Facebook and Instagram as their advertising platform is boosting posts.
Boosting a post helps to reach more people beyond page followers by paying a certain amount daily. The more you pay the more available people you can potentially reach. Quite simple right? This is exactly why it is the preferred advertising method for most business owners and is quite easy to set up. While there is nothing wrong with boosting posts, it has some limitations that could impact the outcome of the ads. In this blog post, we will be looking at some of the benefits and limitations of the two approaches.
It is quite useful when you want a post about your brand, product, or services to reach more people outside of your page followers. The people who come across the boosted post can be driven to take action like ‘Send A Message’, ‘Visit Website’, and so on. This is very effective for small business owners who run ads for their business while they also manage the business. They would usually be on the ‘go’ and don’t have the time to set up a campaign from their computer or effectively monitor ads performance. The major limitation of this approach is the absence of advanced measurement and targeting features.
The ads manager is the recommended tool for advertising on Facebook and Instagram. It comes with more advanced targeting, measurement, and optimization features that make it the ideal advertising tool for businesses dedicated to effective advertising and intend to spend more on online advertising. Unlike when you boost a post on Instagram or Facebook, you can use advanced targeting options such as a retargeting audience, a lookalike audience, exclude certain audiences you don’t want to reach, and many more. It is also more flexible for optimization in a way that allows for multiple ad variations to an active campaign, tweaking an underperforming campaign, and even targeting a new audience when necessary. After a campaign ends, there is a reporting tool that can be used to break down and analyze the campaign performance, and get insights on which audience demographics, regions, and platforms were cost-effective. These insights can significantly improve future campaign performance.
The major ‘limitation’ of using the ads manager is that it requires constant testing, monitoring, and evaluation, making it difficult for some business owners who usually wouldn’t have the time. Another limitation is the interface. It can be confusing and complicated for beginners to set up simple campaigns, select the audience, placement, performance goals, etc.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to use, whether you are boosting posts on Facebook and Instagram or you are using the Ads Manager, the important thing is to know when it is more suitable to boost posts, for what type of campaign, when to use ads manager and the basics of how to set up difference kinds of campaigns and utilize different targeting options. It is also important to always test, reevaluate, and optimize your advertising strategies to set up your business for long-term success.
