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With over 2.27 billion monthly users, Facebook is one of the top social media resources for you to utilize as a photography business owner. Learning Facebook boost post tips, such as how to boost a post in Facebook (and succeed), will help you grow your business.

Facebook Boost Post Tips

One of the main goals for marketing on Facebook is to share your message and attract your ideal clients. A simple way for you to reach potential clients is to boost your posts. Do you have your doubts about boosting on Facebook and its overall effectiveness? A lot of wedding photographers do. And, you might have tried boosting in the past, and not seen success. But, done right, boosting allows you to customize your settings to reach specific users who may be interested in what you have to offer.

In addition to helping you with your wedding photo editing, we love to give you tips that allow you to grow your business. Here are 6 Facebook boost post tips to help you successfully boost a post in Facebook.

1. Develop a Facebook Boost Plan

One of the biggest mistakes wedding photographers can make is to not develop a plan for their boosting in Facebook. And, unfortunately, Facebook makes it easy to publish a post and just hit the “Boost” button. But, without a plan, chances are your boost won’t have the effect you want.

Let’s start with the basics: social media is an important part of your marketing as a professional wedding photographer. Incorporating a little bit of money toward your wedding photography advertising efforts on Facebook can help you grow. What are you hoping to achieve with your boosting on Facebook? Perhaps you are looking to get in front of new clients, or you might be interested in re-engaging old clients. Are you looking to book new weddings, or perhaps run a portrait special in your local area? Making a plan for your Facebook boost post is the starting point to ensuring you will succeed.

2. Create a Custom Audience

Another mistake many photographers make when boosting a post on Facebook is to not set up a Custom Audience. Facebook gives you amazing insights and tools to target EXACTLY who you want and, in turn, not target people you don’t want. Why is this valuable? Well, for starters, the better your targeting is, the better your ad will be received. The better it is received, the cheaper it will be for you. And, most importantly, the better it is received, the more value you will get from it.

You might not know this, but Facebook charges you less for a boost (or ad) that gets better engagement. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Facebook is all about making sure its users have as good of an experience as possible. But, they also have to make money. So, they do that through boosting and advertisements. To maximize happiness and profit, they reward advertisers who present highly engaging boosts and ads by charging them less. So not only is it in your best interest to create an ad that performs well, but your budget will thank you as well.

The single best way to control who sees your boost is through building a Custom Audience. You can build the audience based on a whole host of factors. One of the first is you can focus on relationship status, location, age, and male/female. Your audiences can consist of people who already like your Facebook page, or you can build an audience based on past traffic to your website. You can even upload a list of your clients, and have Facebook build a Lookalike Audience, which is made up of target market clients that “look like” the clients you already have.

Quick Tip

Understanding who your ideal clients are will give you the chance to share applicable content, which will help you put the right message in front of the right people at the right time. Are your couples in their 30’s and all from your region? Or perhaps you attract young couples just graduating from college. This is a Facebook boost post tip that will help you be more precise and specific. The more precise and specific you are, the better your boost will do, and less you will spend.

3. Include Target Market Specifications

As you set up your boosted posts, decide what your goal is for each post. You may want to reach users who are engaged and looking for a wedding photographer. Or, maybe you want to reach couples who are just in a relationship and not thinking about getting married yet. As we’ve mentioned, Facebook allows you to use specifications such as age, gender, location, language, and relationship status to reach your target clients. Take something you know about your clients that is similar for most of them. For example, if most of your couples come from a certain location or area, refine your boost to that location.

Go even deeper if you can by setting up multiple audiences. For example, you can cater a specific post to a specific type of your target market. Have an audience of past customers, and a “lookalike” based on their characteristics. Try a different audience that is focused solely on demographics, such as “engaged” people who are in a certain age range and a certain region. Test your Facebook boost post across multiple audiences and see which one performs best for you.

4. Share Compelling Content

Once you choose the specifics for your target market, you can decide what type of content you will share with them. The benefit of limiting the recipients of the boosted post is you can share content specifically for that group of people. If you have content you want to share but it may not be the best for a custom audience you have already set up, consider creating a new custom audience to see if it gains more traction. For example, if you typically target women because they are the ones who reach out to you about booking but you have a great blog post on “10 Ways Guys can Prep for an Engagement Shoot,” try targeting men on with that post to see if it performs better than other boosted posts.

5. Learn The Benefits of Boosting

Since Facebook gives you the option to choose throughout the boosting process, you can decide whether you want to boost your posts per day or per campaign (one or more days). Keep in mind the longer you set a campaign, the less traction it may get overtime. This could cost you more money than if you were to boost for 1 or 2 days. As you create your boosted post, Facebook will tell you what your estimated reach is, informing you of who your content will be visible to. Once you choose how much you want to spend, you can see how many people will access your boosted post. The more you know about your target audience, the more cost-effective your boosts will be. And keep track of it. Don’t forget about an ongoing boost, only to find next month that you have a large bill from Facebook.

Related: Blogging for your Wedding Photography Business provides fantastic content to share on Facebook. Don’t have time to blog? Fotoskribe, a ShootDotEdit Company, can take blogging off your plate. Learn more about Fotoskribe!

6. Test Your Facebook Boosting Process

When done correctly, boosting your content can be an effective way to reach potential clients. To know whether your boosts are working for you, it is important for you to test the process. Start by tracking the progress on your current boosted post. If you notice you are reaching a larger audience and they are clicking on your content, then you can continue to use the same custom settings for a majority of your boosts.

On the other hand, if you boosts are not reaching as many people as you wanted (and if they are costing you more than you budgeted for), consider changing your settings to receive different results. This differs for every photographer, so testing the boosting process is key to capturing the attention of potential clients.

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Bonus: Additional Facebook Boost Post Tips

When you first started to build your unique brand message for your wedding photography business, you may have had specific clients in mind you wanted to reach. For you to find and book those wedding clients, you have to market your business in a way that captures their attention. Sharing your content on social media allows you to find clients you may not have reached before. As a wedding photographer, you have thousands of images at your disposal, meaning that you already have content to share.

Above, we discussed how to use Facebook boosts to curate custom audiences and attract your ideal client. One of the most important parts of boosting is selecting the specific qualifications of your ideal client. In Facebook, you can use advanced targeting to reach a particular audience. When you narrow down the specifications you are looking for, it will be easier to share relevant information with your ideal clients. Here are some tips on how you can use advanced targeting as a marketing tool on Facebook to attract more bookings.

1. Target Engaged Couples

One of the first qualifications to target by is someone who is engaged. Facebook assists you in reaching these clients by providing the option for you to choose to share your content solely with this group of people. As engaged couples prepare for their wedding, they will be searching for their wedding photographer. This is a great time to attract them to your photography website through your content. Create content that would interest engaged couples, such as “The Top 10 Tips for Planning a Wedding.” As you target your specific market, they will be more inclined to click on this because it is content that pertains to them.

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If you find couples who book you typically followed and knew about you before they were even engaged, change your targeting to couples in relationships. Create unique content for couples who are in the pre-engaged stage, so when they do become engaged, they will want to use you as their wedding photographer.

2. Include Age, Gender, and Location

Though there maybe thousands of brides who are engaged and looking for a wedding photographer, they may not all fit your vision of an ideal client. The targeting you set up in Facebook can be customized based on what you are looking for in a client. Before you begin to create your custom audience, be sure to do some research on your past and current couples to see what the common demographics are.

If you find that the clients who reached out to you, in the beginning, were all female, age 25-30, and live near your location, you will want to add this to your settings. If the majority of your interested users are female, you can make your content specific to them. Some of the topics you can cover include choosing a dress, booking a venue, or hairstyles for the wedding day. Without this information, you may send content to people who are outside of the demographic and will not engage your content.

Quick Tip

It can also be valuable to know when your target audience is online. This can ensure your boosts are effective and reach your ideal clients at the right time.

3. Focus on Facebook Page Likes

On your Facebook business page, be sure you are following the various vendors you spent time nurturing a relationship with. Some of the vendors in your network may share similar values and beliefs as you, and potential clients who like their page may also have the same qualities. Try looking into the type of clients who like these vendors’ Facebook business pages. As you are researching, if you notice there are clients who fit your criteria, you can add them to your custom audience. This is one of the reasons it is so important to spend time and work on your connections with vendors because they can be endless referral sources.

4. Upload a Current Customer List

While many of your followers may be non-clients, your past and current clients could also be following your page, especially if that is how they found you. Using Facebook is a great way for you to continue to nurture the relationship with them during and after their wedding. Since they are already customers, though, there may be content you do not want to share with them because they have already seen it or are no longer in that stage of the wedding process. For content you create specifically for harnessing new clients, upload a list of your current and past clients. From here, you can exclude this list from your boosted posts that target engaged couples.

The idea behind using Facebook’s advanced targeting is to create relationships with your clients that tell them how invested you are in their wedding day and, most importantly, in THEM. Sending your current couples irrelevant content could suggest you are not actually invested in them and their journey, risking the chance of a continuing relationship after the wedding day.

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With these Facebook boost post tips, you can add an additional way to grow your business through social media. To learn more ways to use Facebook for your photography business, download our Facebook for the Wedding Photographer Guide! Click the banner below to grab your copy today.