4.1 Types of Ad Campaigns

We’re finally here. After helping you build an understanding of the fundamentals of business and marketing, we're finally going to get into the ads themselves.

And the best place to start is to tell you about the different kinds of ads you can run on Facebook and Instagram. As we mentioned in the last episode, you’ll come across a variety of different businesses that have different marketing needs. Let's talk about some of these different needs and the kind of ads that will help them.‍

E-commerce sales.‍

This is the ad campaign we talked about with our online flower store. A lot of businesses have online e-commerce stores where they will want to drive sales using ads. Here the job of the ad campaign will be to drive relevant traffic from Facebook or Instagram to the website. Now while it is possible to make ads that send you directly to the website, you can also run them for specific products that send you straight to the products page.

What's a product page? Well, if you go to a website that sells shoes and click on say a pair of boots, you are then taken to a page dedicated to the boots where you'll find more information about them. This is where you normally select your size and see buttons that say - buy now or add to cart.

Sales ads are meant to really do just the one thing–get people who are in the target audience to go to the desired page, whether its a more generic homepage or a specific product page, and make the purchase. You’ll want to get yourself familiar with these types of ads as a lot of your future clients may come to you for it.

Lead Generation.

Lead generation campaigns are a huge part of the online advertising world and they are typically used in cases where you want to get the contact information of the person so you can nurture them towards becoming a customer.

We talked about B2B businesses, remember? These are businesses that sell to other businesses and not to customers directly. Lead generation campaigns are particularly popular among B2B companies, since what matters most to them is the contact information of a particular prospect.

Take for example a company that sells high-end furniture to interior design companies, who then use it to service their customers. The furniture company is probably not going to sell directly to these interior design companies online. So they're likely to run lead generation campaigns where they get the name, phone number and email address of key executives at top interior design companies. They then contact these executives and set up a meeting with the aim of closing the sale. Makes sense?

And, lead generation is not just confined to B2B companies. Businesses that sell directly to customers might also want to generate leads. This normally happens when they know that customers are not going to buy from them on day one but if you send them a series of emails or messages, they may become a customer overtime.

Take for example a business that sells insurance online. This business would find it very beneficial to get the email addresses of interested people first and then reach out to them over email instead of just convincing them to buy insurance right away. That's because they know that insurance is not an impulse buy and they might need some time to convince their prospects.

By the way, converting leads into customers using e-mail marketing is huge in the marketing world and we actually did a whole course on it so you may want to check that out. ‍

Brand Awareness.

‍The third kind are Brand Awareness campaigns. Most businesses need this. The goal here is just to get the word out about the brand without really trying to push sales or leads or any specific agenda. The ads around brand awareness can be multifold. Businesses might want to send ad traffic to their websites or get engagement on their social media channel. There are specific ways to do both of those things which we will walk you through later.

‍Event responses

And then you have event responses. This is a specific kind of ad run by businesses that are hosting an event and want to get people to click and attend.

There are a few other kinds of ad campaigns that you will discover as you get deeper into Facebook and Instagram advertising, but these 4 are definitely what you’ll be dealing with the most. So, far so good? We’re on a roll here so let’s go straight into the next episode.