October 15, 2019
If you’re reading this, you’re probably already familiar with the Business Manager on Facebook, and perhaps using it to great advantage in your paid social strategy. For some, the next step is considering markets outside the UK… nope, I’m not going to mention the ‘B’ word!
Having attended Facebook’s recent “Breaking Boarders” event, we thought we’d offer a small selection of notes for you to consider if you’re looking to expand your reach into other countries:
Oh, the places you’ll go
If you have a hunch, or even a recommendation of the country you’re thinking of targeting, you can find out more about its potential by using Audience Insights on your Facebook page and Facebook IQ Cross Boarder Insights. The former will help you find out where your existing audience lives (it might surprise you!) and the latter goes as far as including a competition index – useful for checking whether another brand is dominating that market and you’ll therefore find it harder and more expensive to move into.
When in Rome
Gather local expertise and intel on the country you’re considering – if you can hop on that low-cost airline, do it! If not, check with any in-country experts, do some digging and make sure you uncover any potential risks such as trading & export laws, or competitors.
Secondary to this, you’ll need to consider what type of content you need to run to be locally relevant – not just the average temperatures, a humour guide might be useful! Use the competition index mentioned above to discover more about the brands and put together an audit showing what they are doing well and where you could improve on their content.
Try the local delicacies
If you are running successful ad campaigns in the UK or even another country already, create a lookalike audience which is targeted to your new chosen region to test out response. Ensure you’re using the right language… did you know you can use dynamic translation now? Facebook announced they were adding a further 48 languages to the tool – don’t forget to try it out on your local experts though, just in case
Plan your itinerary
The campaign set up when running multi-country campaigns can often be a debate – should it be one large campaign targeting all countries (using dynamic creative and language), or multiple campaigns, one for each country? Unless you need to weight your spend into any of the regions you’re planning to target, Facebook recommend a single campaign and single ad set, letting the algorithm work for you.
Another testing tool you should look into is the Test & Learn Lab – it’s now possible to run campaign level split testing.
If all this seems like a lot of work, you’re in luck… we’ll do it all for you! Just contact us now to understand how we can help.