Engagement campaigns get your regular Instagram and Facebook posts out to a wider audience. Ordinarily, your posts go out to a small fraction of your followers at best. If they like, comment, and share, Meta will put the post in more of your audience’s feed, and if they engage with it, Meta will show it to people like your audience.
An Engagement Campaign speeds this up. Unlike boosting a post on IG or FB, the engagement campaign allows you to more specifically target who you’re boosting your posts to, and give you insight into which ones are most impactful.
The benefit of an engagement campaign is a low cost way to reach more potential clients, which builds your know-like-trust factor. You can also prompt people to message with you or visit your website. The drawback is you can’t tell if new leads come directly from the campaign.
To create an engagement campaign, click Create – Campaign – Manual Engagement Campaign in adsmanager.facebook.com
At the ad set level, select the conversion location to “On Your Ad” and the Engagement Type to “Post Engagements”
Typically your budget will be $1-5/day total. Unless you have a large number of ads running in this campaign, you can get good reach with a low budget. Select your geographical and age range as you would any other campaign.
For the ads themselves, and indeed all your social media, ask yourself “What would my ideal client need to see one week before joining a gym?”
My ideal client is Linda, a 46 busy working mom of 2 kids when she joined. She hated gyms, always felt intimidated by them, and never stuck to anything because she never got any encouragement or saw progress.
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Side bar, to help you get inside your client’s mind, here’s the day in the life exercise:
- Who are they? How old? What lifestyle?
- What time do they wake up?
- What’s their morning routine? Rushed or relaxed?
- What’s their commute like? Do they pass by the gym? Public transport or private? Walk or cycle? Do they drop kids to school?
- What’s their daily routine? Do they work from home or in the office? 9-5 of odd hours?
- What’s their daily routine? What’s their weekends like?
- Do they currently exercise? Or are they out of the habit?
- What’s their social life?
The benefit of the day in the life exercise is it gets you into the mindset of the client, so you can write content in their language, and not yours.
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Your social media should speak to your ideal client 90% of the time. The examples below are to Linda above:
- Goals: Tone up; feel healthier; more energy; get strong; look better.
- Fears: Non judgmental gym; no fitness required; can work around injuries. (Here we’re negating the fears)
- Objection: Short classes; don’t need to be a gym rat who trains every day
- Proof: Examples of people just like you train here and achieving the results you want with the objections/fears you have.
- Direction: Here’s exactly how to start (DM us; Phone us; Book an Intro…)
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At the ad level, use an existing post, and select a post. Pick a post from your Instagram feed (if you pick from IG, it will boost on both if they’re connected. If you only pick on FB, it will show only on FB)
You can change the call to action on your post. We suggest “Learn More” and your gym’s website.
Publish the post, and the quickly duplicate it, selecting 3-5 different recent posts that speak to your ideal prospect.
Every 14-28 days, review your posts. Discontinuing the unpopular posts and replacing it with a new post. Please note that while reels will get much more engagement in terms of views, images will get more people clicking through to your site. So it’s a good idea to have both.