In social media advertising, knowledge is power. Meta (Instagram and Facebook) have many options that are great salon marketing solutions, each with pros and cons. Two of the most used are boosting a post and creating a Meta ad campaign. But what’s the difference? Let’s get into it.
What is Boosting a Post?
Boosting a post with positive engagement is the easiest way to advertise on Meta. It involves taking an existing post from your Facebook or Instagram page and promoting it to a bigger audience. The goal is to get more engagement, likes, comments, and shares.
How to Boost a Post
- Choose the post you want to boost.
- Click Boost Post.
- Select your audience, budget and duration.
- Review and confirm your ad.
Benefits of Boosting a Post
- Quick and Easy: Boosting a post can be done in 3 clicks, perfect for beginners or those short on time.
- More Engagement: By promoting existing content, you can increase its reach and engagement and build your brand.
- Limited Targeting: Boosting has limited targeting options, which is unsuitable for advanced advertising.
- Less Ad Placement and Format Control: You have less control over where and how your ad appears.
What is a Meta Ad Campaign?
A Meta ad campaign is a more advanced way to advertise on Meta. You can create excellent salon marketing solutions with customised ads with specific objectives, such as driving traffic to your website, generating leads, or increasing sales.
Steps to Create a Meta Ad Campaign
- Go to Meta Ads Manager and click “Create.”
- Choose your salon marketing campaign objective (e.g. conversions, traffic).
- Define your target audience using advanced options.
- Select your ad placements (e.g. Facebook, Instagram).
- Set your budget and bidding strategy.
- Create your ad with custom creatives and copy.
- Review and launch your salon marketing campaign.
Benefits of Creating a Meta Ad Campaign
- Advanced Targeting Options: Advanced targeting tools allow you to focus on demographics, interests, and behaviours. Additionally, you can develop custom and lookalike audiences to refine the targeting in your salon marketing plan further.
- More Control Over Ad Placement, Format, and Budget: You can decide where your ads appear, how they look, and how much you spend.
- Ability to Create Multiple Ad Sets and Variations: This allows A/B testing of your salon marketing plan and optimization to improve performance.
Limitations of Meta Ad Campaigns
- More Complex Setup: Creating a salon marketing campaign requires more steps and a deeper understanding of Meta’s advertising tools.
- Requires More Time and Expertise: To fully utilise a Meta ad campaign, you must invest time learning and managing your ads.
Targeting
- Regarding targeting, boosting a post and creating a Meta ad campaign are light years apart. Boosting a post has basic targeting options whereas a Meta ad campaign targets prospects by age, gender, location, and interests. It’s a simple approach that works for broad engagement.
- But if you want to get more specific with your salon marketing campaign, a Meta-ad campaign is the way to go. Advanced targeting options allow you to create custom audiences from your website visitors, email lists, or app users. Lookalike audiences help you find new customers similar to your best existing customers. You can also drill down into detailed demographics, behaviours, and interests to ensure your ads reach the right people at the right time.
Ad Formats and Placements
- Boosting a post is like playing with a limited set of toys. You’re stuck with the formats of your existing posts, so you can’t experiment much with different ad styles. This can be a limit of your salon marketing campaign if you want to try more creative formats.
- On the other hand, creating a Meta ad campaign opens up a world of salon marketing solutions in ad formats and placements. From carousels and videos to slideshows and collections, you have many formats to choose from. You can also place your ads across multiple platforms, including Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network, to reach and engage more.
Budget and Bidding
- Budgeting and bidding are key to any ad strategy. Boosting a post is easy with simple budget options. You set a budget, and Meta does the rest, which is perfect for beginners or a quick boost.
- A Meta-ad campaign has flexible budgeting and bidding options. You can select daily or lifetime budgets and choose between bidding strategies, such as cost per click or per thousand impressions. You can even set bid caps to control your spending. The flexibility of these salon marketing solutions allows you to optimise for the best return on investment.
- Analytics and salon marketing campaign reporting
- Knowing how your ads are performing informs decision-making. Boosting a post gives you essential insights like reach, engagement and clicks. While helpful, more is needed for more advanced salon marketing plans and ad goals.
- However, creating a Meta ad campaign gives you full analytics and performance tracking. You can see metrics like conversion rates, cost per conversion, and return on advertising spend. This level of detail lets you tune your salon marketing campaigns, test different strategies, and get better results.
When to Use Each:
Scenarios for Boosting a Post
- Boosting a post is like giving your content a quick lift. It’s perfect when you need a fast way to get your salon marketing message out without investing in an entire ad campaign.
- Promoting a Time-Sensitive Post: Imagine you have a flash sale or limited-time offer you need to get in front of as many people as possible and fast. Boosting a post can help you do that. It’s quick to set up and will increase the visibility of your time-sensitive content so your audience doesn’t miss out on the urgency of your message.
- Increasing Engagement on a Popular Post: Sometimes, a post starts to gain traction organically, and you want to ride that wave. Boosting a popular post can help you capitalise on the momentum, reach a bigger audience and get more engagement. This is especially useful for posts already resonating with your audience so you can amplify your salon marketing plan with the positive feedback loop.
Scenarios for Creating a Meta Ad Campaign
- Creating a Meta ad campaign is like crafting a complete salon marketing strategy. It’s perfect for more complex objectives that require precision, control and multiple tools to achieve your goals.
- Launching a New Product or Service: If you are introducing something new to the market, you need more than just a quick boost. A Meta-ad campaign allows you to create ads tailored to your new product or service. With advanced targeting options, you can reach people interested and launch successfully.
- Running a Long-Term Salon Marketing Strategy: A Meta-ad campaign is the best option for ongoing salon marketing efforts. Whether you’re building brand awareness, nurturing leads, or driving conversions over time, the flexibility and control of an entire salon marketing campaign are unmatched. You can continuously optimise your ads, test different creatives, and adjust your strategy based on detailed performance data.
- Targeting Specific Audience Segments: If you want to reach a particular audience, a Meta ad campaign has the tools for you. With custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and detailed demographic targeting, you can target your ads so they are seen by the right people. This level of precision is crucial for salon marketing campaigns that require a targeted approach, like retargeting past website visitors or niche markets.
Both boosting a post and creating a Meta ad campaign have pros and cons. Boosting a post is suitable for quick, engagement-focused promotions, while ad campaigns are better for more complex objectives.
The key is to match your choice to your goals and resources. If you need a quick boost for a time-sensitive post or want to amplify a popular piece of content, boosting is the way to go.
A Meta-ad campaign will have the tools and flexibility you need for more complex objectives like launching a new product or running a long-term strategy. Try both and see what works for you.
Need an expert to give you a boost or design a campaign? The concierge is at your service. Ring the bell to get connected.