Week 13 | Post B

Facebook ads have become a major player in the social media marketing space, and for good reason.  Boasting billions of users, Facebook has an extensive market of targets, and even more personal data on them to help refine ad targeting.

Facebook offers a variety of ad formats available for business pages.  They describe them as follows:

Image: We recommend using images of your product or brand.
Video: Adding movement to your ads can make them more eye-catching in News Feed.
Carousel: Carousel ads showcase up to 10 images or videos in a single ad, each with its own link.
Instant Experience: Instant Experience is a fullscreen experience that opens after someone taps your ad on a mobile device. Create an Instant Experience to visually highlight your brand, products or services.
Collection: The collection format features multiple products and opens as an Instant Experience when someone interacts with it. Your customers can discover, browse and purchase products from their phones in a visual and immersive way.
And, they also offer boosting of existing posts, which appears to simply feed your post into the newsfeed of your set target demographics.

For my business, I feel that an image or image carousel ad would work best, as stained glass is a very visual art and relies heavily on that connection between the piece and the purchaser.  Or, when considering my other target market of stained glass pattern purchasers, perhaps a video ad showing a time lapse construction of one of my patterns would help to get their interest.  We artists love to see works in progress and this could help to show that my patterns are accessible to all levels.  Or, if I were to ever have a studio and ran children's mosaic classes, I could show a time lapse of a group of kids constructing their projects (with appropriate model releases, of course).  Perhaps if I had a piece that I was proud of and wasn't having luck selling a boosted post would do the trick.

As for frequency of posts, I think that I would need to tinker with that and figure out what works, both for my finished stained glass buyers and pattern buyers.  I would start with ads once a week and check the response and adjust from there.  But!  It's important to not overdo it because then you're asking for more work than you can take on!  It'd be safer to market patterns more frequently, which is a nice bonus because if they are purchased through my Etsy site they require basically zero effort on my part, so there's no worries of overdoing it.

However, there's a factor to consider here - stained glass as an art caters towards an older demographic that isn't always tech or social media savvy or willing to purchase things online.  Because of that I would certainly start my marketing small and find where my sweet spot is.  However, I could certainly market my more modern finished pieces more aggressively since they cater to a younger demographic.

Ads are most effective when they're simple, memorable, and include a call to action, and Facebook ads are no exception.  My ads would likely do best when they're of a finished piece that's tastefully lit and beautiful.  In essence, I'd let it do the talking and let my copy support the image with something simple like "Bring the light in your home alive with custom stained glass from Shellebelle Designs."  Or, for my pattern buying market, "Unique, impressive, and accessible stained glass patterns for all levels - all with commercial licenses for resale."