7 Steps To Success With Facebook Ads
Facebook ads offer an unrivalled opportunity, especially for local businesses.
Now is the perfect moment in time. You can reach your core target audience with laser like precision and at a great value cost.
Facebook has millions of pages, so they have endless advertising inventory to sell. This is why it is so cheap.
For many businesses, Facebook Ads is now taking over as the no 1 source of leads – ahead of Google adwords, even for people who have specialised in adwords for years.
Just look at the stats:
- Facebook has over 2 billion users
- Facebook is making $1 billion from mobile ads, every quarter
- In the UK, half the population go on Facebook for average of 25 mins every day
- So half your potential customers are on Facebook every single day
- This gives you the opportunity to target reach your existing and your prospective customers – quickly and cheaply
Facebook Targeting
Facebook targeting is so powerful. You can target by
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Demographics eg social class; salaries; the cars you drive etc
- Interests
This ability to target is a million miles away from traditional direct mail. Where you send out 1000 letters to reach 6 customers. Now you can go straight to those 6.
The Facebook Challenge
Bear in mind that the online world moves very fast –so what was working even 6 months ago, may not be best now. And vice versa: what didn’t work then, may be the best option today.
The challenge is that there are so many options within Facebook and its ad system – so you need to do a lot of tests to find out what works.
This is why we also like to leverage the knowledge that comes from being part of an advanced marketing group mastermind, drawing on the experiences across the group as well as our own.
7 Steps To Success With Facebook Ads
1 – Use Newsfeed Ads
The key to focus on is ads in news feeds. People on Facebook spend all their time in their newsfeed. A year ago when these were first introduced, people didn’t like them appearing in news feeds. Now people are used to it.
With news feeds ads you are getting to communicate directly and personally with your prospects. It’s quite different from traditional forms of advertising.
You will get the best results is to put up an ad in the newsfeeds is in the form of content, which clicks through to your website, for conversion.
As ever you do need to run different ads,in order to test responses and performance.
2 – Use Video
Over the last 6 months you will have noticed there has been a big shift on Facebook, away from images and to video.
Video ads have increased by 160% over the last year and are now much the most powerful medium for Facebook ads.
If you are just starting with Facebook ads, you will probably want to use ordinary Ads fisrts – but aim to move to video as soon as you can.
3 – Use Mobile
Not long ago, mobile ads didn’t get the same response, but with the increase in mobile usage everywhere, this has changed.
Be aware that:
- There are 1.2 bn mobile users
- 30% of Facebook users only go on Facebook by phone
- 65% of Facebook video views are only on mobile
So, you want to be using the mobile ads options.
4 – Target Existing Customers First
You can upload your existing customers’ email addresses and Facebook will match these with Facebook accounts. You can then serve ads to them.
Your ROI will be much higher, due to your existing relationship – and you reduce your risks too.
To increase conversions significantly, use remarketing cookies on your website so those who do not convert receive follow up ads.
5 – Use Remarketing to Convert Website Visitors
Remarketing enables you to track visitors to your website and then send them Facebook ads.
This ensure that those who visit your website but do not sign up or buy, see your ads as soon as they then visit Facebook.
6 – Use Lookalike Audiences
Facebook’s own algorithms are extremely powerful – not surprisingly, since they have huge resources to invest in getting this right. They hold all sorts of information about, say, your existing customers, which you cannot see, but they can use..
Even experienced marketers will tell you that they cannot match Facebook for results, no matter what they do.
You simply create your own custom audience. You’ll need at least 100 customers for this. You then create a lookalike audience via Facebook, suing your custom audience as the basis.
7 – Use the Right Bidding Mechanism
You can use cost per view or cost per click ie conversions.
Both give great results but cost per conversion gets much the better results. 100% better, even 300% better.
What About the Social Side of Facebook – and Getting Likes?
This depends on your business.
For a local business, your Facebook Page is a great way to connect with your customers and their contacts and to build relationships.
For most smaller business owners though, spending more than 30 mins per week is probably a waste of your valuable time.
The key issue is that most people who have liked your posts will not see them anyway. 3 years ago it was different and a great opportunity to make contacts cheaply.
Today Facebook is restricting the visibility of Business Pages, so only approximately 17% of people who have liked your page will see your posts, unless you pay to boost them.
It’s still important to maintain your profile and look professional. You should definitely make sure you claim your social profiles, so no one else can.
Beyond maintaining a professional presence though, it is best to get someone else to manage your page; your time is not free.
Get Started
If you’ve not tried Facebook ads before, we strongly recommend you try it.
It works for both B2C and B2B and for virtually all types of business. If you are in B2B, it’ still very likely that your target contacts are on Facebook. Personally.
It’s especially useful for local businesses as you can target so effectively, which means that you can stay within budget.
You can try it very cheaply – just set a budget. It can be just £10 if you want.
It’s very worth learning how to do Facebook ads well, as soon as you can. At the moment it’s such an opportunity.
Sophia
Internet Power
