Not all social media teams have a huge budget to spend on Facebook ad campaigns. And even if you do, there’s always room to save money and increase ROI.

I sat down with three members of Moyens I/O’s social media team to find out what they could and would do with just $100 to spend on Facebook ads.

Read on to discover:
  • How to save time and money with precise audience targeting
  • Key metrics to track during a Facebook ad campaign
  • Opinions that can drain your budget
  • Number one Facebook ad mistake social ad managers make

Repurpose top-performing content

After you’ve been given your $100 advertising budget, the first thing to do is take a look at your current social media content.

“If we notice that something is performing really well on social media and has higher-than-average engagement, that’s a good indication that it will work even better with the budget behind it,” explains Amanda Wood, Moyens I/O’s social marketing lead. “For just $100, you don’t want to take risks with untested content or spend too much time creating brand new ads.”

See how many comments, likes, link clicks, or views your content gets organically in 24 hours (if it’s a video). If something resonates, it has a good chance of succeeding as an advertisement.

Once you’ve created your top-performing post, you can Boost it instead of creating a clear new ad. Facebook’s Boost Post feature lets you easily turn any post on your Facebook business Page into an ad. To get the most out of your campaign, you can customize your budget, audience, placement and shipping schedule and increase the value of every dollar.

Target existing or “similar” audiences

With such a limited budget, you want to make sure you’re targeting the best audience for your brand.

“Be realistic when it comes to your audience. Research it thoroughly so you can be as precise as possible. With a budget of this size, don’t waste your money trying to reach people globally. For best results, localize and dominate your targeting in smaller geographic areas,” says Nick Martin, social engagement coordinator.

A fundamental part of audience research is figuring out how people interact with your brand on Facebook.

“Pay attention to the type of device where you see the most conversions. At Moyens I/O, we’ve seen most of our conversions come from mobile users. That’s why we don’t target desktop users with smaller campaigns to increase efficiency and ROI,” explains Christine Colling, social marketing coordinator at Moyens I/O.

Once you understand who you’re trying to reach, be strategic about building your audience. Our team recommends two simple ways to optimize your targeting on a limited budget:

  • Create a custom audience and retarget users who have already visited your website or signed up for your email list. If they’ve already searched for your business, they have a better chance of converting.
  • Build a lookalike audience according to your existing customers. Facebook will identify common characteristics between users and find potential new customers with similar demographics and behaviors on Facebook. Learn more about creating lookalike audiences here.

“Because of the time and money required to build and test multiple audiences, you can expect the best ROI on a small budget from a retargeting strategy or similar audience,” Wood explains.

Pay attention to the indicator in your Facebook Ads admin dashboard to determine if your target audience is correctly defined. “You want your audience to be like Goldilocks. It’s very broad and not very specific,” explains Martin.

With a little time and adjustment, you’ll get to that sweet spot no matter what your budget is.

Know what success looks like

When building your audience, it’s important to have clear goals in mind.

“Your goals affect everything about your ad campaign,” explains Wood. “If your goal is leads or conversions, you can compare the two audience groups to see which is the most successful, and then reallocate your budget to that audience. It’s important to know how success is defined for your business.”

Define your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Next, make sure that all of your Facebook ad content tries to support these goals. Set your criteria and remember that how another company defines success may differ from your definition.

As we explain in our social media ROI guide, it’s important to use metrics that show you how social media is helping you achieve your goals.

These metrics can include:

  • To reach
  • audience interaction
  • site traffic
  • leads
  • Posts and conversions
  • Revenues

When determining your KPIs, pay attention to the “When Charged” feature at the bottom of the optimization page before placing your ad.

“This section allows you to choose between other content type-specific targets, such as impressions, link clicks, or 10-second video views,” Colling says. “Choosing the format-specific option has proven to be much more cost-effective than being charged per impression or link click.”

When placing your ad on such a small budget, you need to make sure that all components of the content work towards these goals.

“An actionable CTA is crucial,” explains Martin. “You want every part of your ad to work as hard as possible, so don’t waste conversion opportunities. Let your audience know what their next step is and point them towards it.”

Monitor and optimize performance

With such a small budget, tracking your ad performance is essential. The biggest mistake social ad managers make is forgetting or not knowing how to watch their ads. You want the best return on your ads, so you can’t afford to spend a penny on ads that don’t get results.

While an ad campaign with a larger budget can afford less rigorous monitoring, our team recommends checking your ad performance every two hours when you only have $100 to spend.

Our team recommends setting up the Facebook pixel to determine which ads get results. A Facebook pixel is a code you put on your website that helps you track data and conversions from your Facebook ads.

“When we started using a Facebook pixel, we realized that there were certain audience groups that were consuming our budget through clicks but never converting,” Colling says. “Once we realized that, we were able to recalibrate our audience and increase ROI.”

The Moyens I/O social team also recommends setting up conversion tracking with UTM parameters, which are short text codes appended to URLs that track data about website visitors and traffic sources.

With UTM codes, you can gain deeper insight into which content works (and which doesn’t). This data helps you focus your ad targeting efforts even more; so you can save money and improve performance. Learn more about using UTM Parameters in our tutorial.

If you’ve run ads before, you know that testing is another important part of any campaign. While $100 doesn’t offer many testing opportunities, our team explains that you can increase your budget to $200 for valuable A/B testing.

Test different copy, images and formats (video, static, carousel, etc.) and use the data you collect to create your future ad campaigns.

“Use or copy the same image but different messages to test two different ads with a $100 budget each. See which ad gets the best results, shut down the underperforming, and then re-allocate your budget to the successful ad,” says Wood.

No matter the size of your budget, it’s important to make smart decisions when it comes to running successful Facebook Ads campaigns.

Manage your Facebook presence along with your other social media channels using Moyens I/O. From a single dashboard, you can schedule posts, share videos, engage your audience, and measure the impact of your efforts. Try it for free today.

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