Last Updated on January 30, 2021 by Santhosh Muralidhar

Facebook ads are still one of the best platforms to drive massive engagements for blog posts. 

I realized that it has got the ability to get lots of engagements for a brand at a very low budget provided that the brand is strong in targeting the audience, creating a well-crafted message for the ad copy, and so on.

Some time ago I thought of experimenting with Facebook to get more engagements for my own how to start a blog guide.

I ran the campaign for about 3-4 months targeting both Instagram and Facebook platforms.

I leveraged effective targeting methods and storytelling strategies to promote my blog post.

At the end of the campaign, I was able to get a massive amount of 10k+ engagements to my guide.

The best thing is that the cost per engagement was just 0.50 paisa.

So, now in this case study blog post, I would like to share the insights of my Facebook ads campaign.

Why did I promote my post on Facebook?

I wanted to know how social media platforms could help in boosting blog SEO. 

Seriously I used to wonder in my mind like “does social media has any significant impact on getting higher SEO rankings”.

I began doing my research. From my research, I found that many marketing gurus like brian dean and Neil Patel are using this tactic to improve their SEO.

In fact, Neil had written awesome content on using Twitter to improve SEO rankings

I understood that promoting a blog post and achieving a lot of social engagements (likes, comments, and shares) will positively impact SEO.

Hence after getting good clarity on this strategy I proceeded ahead to promote my content on Facebook.

I started with a small test budget of 500 rupees.

As a result of my collective efforts, the blogging guide started to get more visibility and clicks in Google search results after promoting it on Facebook.

Have a story in place to promote the post 

The first thing I did when setting up the campaign was to create a good story.

I did not have too many large resources. And I was not so good at video editing skills and all.

So, I thought It would be good If I focus on my strengths and write the story in textual format.

Initially, I was a bit skeptical and nervous. Because I didn’t know how this would work in an internet world booming with visual interactive content.

Yet I did not back up and went ahead to proceed with my work.

As they say, fortune favors the brave 🙂 🙂 

My story actually revolved around a reputed banker.

And I wrote about how he launched a successful blog and got a lot of fame by sharing his financial knowledge through his posts.

The story would inspire the aspiring new bloggers.

After I completed the story I proceeded further ahead to set up my campaign.

Creating a story has its own advantages. 

The concept of storytelling is completely different than that of just throwing out some sales-oriented ads and self-promoting ads from a brand.

Brands that leverage storytelling on social media will get more engagement from the audience.

It will leave a positive impression of your brand in the mind of the audience.

This helps a lot in nurturing the audience and moving them down the funnel to achieve conversions.

Because it is much easier to convert someone who already knows your brand and has a good opinion about your brand stories.

Whereas it is a lot tougher to get conversion by targeting some cold audience who don’t even know your brand name.

Leverage lookalike audience targeting

Lookalike audience targeting will target audiences that are very similar to those people who have interacted with your brand.

A lookalike audience will target similar people who interacted with your posts, ads, and content in some form.

This type of targeting is much more accurate and effective than interest-based audience targeting.

Use Detailed Targeting & Create Interest-Based Audience First

Initially, I used detailed targeting and created an interest-based audience for my campaign. I was basically targeting people who like and follow websites related to blogging, SEO, content marketing, and digital marketing. 

Also, I was targeting specific Job descriptions related to blogging careers and content writing professions like “Full-time blogger”, “Content Manager”, “Web content writer”. etc.

And I added a few specific targeting conditions. Because of the conditions, the audience having an interest in specific topics and particular job titles would be targeted and matched.

I decided to do A/B testing for the audience by testing it for different locations, age groups, and interests.

But in my mind, I knew that leveraging lookalike audience targeting for my campaign will give the best results.

Because my objective was to get more engagements at a cheaper price.

I knew that lookalike audience targeting will help in expanding the reach of my campaign and promote my blogging guide to more similar people.

After the post got a few hundreds of engagements I created a custom lookalike audience for my campaign.

I chose to target people who are similar to those who have engaged with my blogging guide.

So the source for the lookalike audience was the Post engaged audience.

I tested with various geographical location filters and audience sizes.

For example, I created a post engaged audience for Tier 1 Countries (USA, Australia, Canada, Britain).

And also in another audience set, I created a lookalike audience for worldwide locations.

Throughout the campaign, I decided to have my lookalike audience size to 2% itself. Because that 2% itself was creating an audience with over 200000+ people.

Usually smaller the audience size, the narrower, and more specific the targeting becomes.

Concentrate on locations that are giving more results at the desired cost

When it comes to Facebook advertising it is a well-known fact that first-world countries will have a higher ad cost as compared to some Tier 2 & Tier 3 countries which have a low ad cost.

From my campaign location breakdown reports it was very much evident that countries like the USA, England, and other European countries were having a higher cost per engagement. Whereas India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and African countries were having a much lesser cost per engagement.

Also, the low tier countries had given more engagements for the campaign due to the higher audience size as compared with Tier 1 countries.

My blogging guide is informative content and has no geographical restrictions for the audience to read or access. 

Hence I thought it would be better to focus more on countries that give more results at a low cost per engagement for my campaign.

So I decided to include and target those Tier 2 & 3 countries like India, Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, etc which we’re giving more engagements to my campaign.

This helped a lot in boosting the engagements for my campaign.

Apply proper bidding strategies 

From the reports, I could see that many of the lower-tier countries had a cost per engagement of less than 0.50 paise.

I set the cost cap bidding strategy with a daily budget of 40 rupees.

This ensured that my post gets engagement results at the lowest cost possible.

I had kept a cost cap of about 0.50 paisa per post engagement for this campaign.

This allowed me to bid not more than a maximum of 50 paise for an engagement result in my post.

Due to the less cost cap value of the campaign, Facebook decided to promote my post more in Tier 2 & 3 regions since the ad cost less for those countries. 

Hence the campaign got a lot of engagement from such regions.

Narrow your Audience but have a decent audience size

When it comes to Facebook advertising it is always good to be more specific in targeting the audience.

However, sometimes this could lead to restricting the reach of your campaign to a very small group of people.

As a thumb rule if you are targeting some cold audience then you should ensure that the audience size is at least above 100,000+.

Even for Facebook remarketing campaigns as well, it is good to have at least a few thousands of audience size. This will help in accelerating the ad delivery and get you better returns for the campaign.

If the remarketing audience size is less than 1000 the campaign might not see many results at all.

When I was promoting my blogging guide, I ensured that my audience group is exclusively related to content writing, content marketing, WordPress, and blogging niche.

Because this particular audience group was very much relevant to promote my blogging guide.

Also, the audience size was in the range of a few hundred thousand.

Hence when the campaign went live my blogging guide started to get hundreds of engagements daily from aspiring bloggers and people who work in the content writing industry.

Conclusion:

Integrating both blog SEO and social media promotion can give impactful results for a brand.

Also in some way, this helps in creating an omnichannel approach to promote a brand.

I hope you got good information on improving SEO by getting social engagements.

Don’t forget to share this content on social media sites with your friends.

Thanks