What to Know When Launching Your First Facebook Ad Campaign
Facebook has been incredibly helpful for marketers by offering brands a chance to reach a wide audience with a single campaign. That said, businesses looking to spread brand awareness should make sure they’re using Facebook’s tools to target the right audience. The following tips will help you understand how you can leverage key features to run the most successful Facebook ad campaign possible, even if it’s your first time.
Customer Research.
This is by far the most important component of creating a winning facebook advertisement. Being able to ask your customers the right questions of what they hate and what liked of previous experience with the product or service you are selling, you will be able to craft an irresistible offer to suit your ideal customer exact pain points. Being able to relate with your ideal customer and understand their psychology, you will then find it much easier to be able to sell your services in a way where they not only buying your offer, but begging for it and sharing it with all their friends.
It’s much easier to impress a woman on a date if you know the things she likes, rather than guessing her favourite things to do.
You can perform customer research by calling your existing customers or presenting a survey which if they can fill out, they get a reward.
It’s important you ask the right questions in your survey and also present the survey to your prospects in the correct way, because the truth is no one has the time to do a survey.
An example of this
“Hello XYZ, we are doing a survey and would love to get your thoughts to improve our services” - Bad
“Hello XYZ, we are doing a survey and would love to get your opinion (everyone loves giving their opinion) on this topic. We are selecting 5 of the people who perform the survey to have their opinion featured in an exclusive article of XYZ.”
Irresistible offer.
When creating your facebook Ad, it’s important your service or product has an irresistible offer. An offer so powerful that will take a person who is using the platform for his personal use to take action by clicking your advertisement, putting them into the first step of your funnel.
An irresistible offer must have include
1) Scarcity - This can be time or value scarcity, meaning the offer will disappear if the user does not take action right there and then.
2) Specific Clear Solution - The solution needs to be extremely specific to the users problem. An example for this will be “weight loss” we cannot create a solution for every type of person to lose weight, it will interest no one. If our target audience is mothers, then our solution needs to be directed and explained to how it will help mothers lose weight. Mother’s also have a very different lifestyle to other types of people trying to lose weight, they may not have a lot of time to spend at the gym as a single lady who does not have the responsibility of children. The solution should answer the objections of the mother EG “Are you a mother trying to lose weight, but don’t have the time to go the gym. Well no need to worry, you can now use XYZ to get the exact same results by working out ONLY 15 minute a day”
3) Specific Clear Prospect: Your advertisement must be extremely clear to your exact audience, it’s wise to call your audience in the copy to grab the attention EG “ Hey Hair Salon owners in Melbourne, we are doing an extremely special offer for all for you ……”
4) Pre-Frame: It’s important to change the mindset of your customer before trying to sell them on your service or product. The your advertisement prepare and interest them enough, to interact with your company ?
5) Perceived Value - The value of the service/product needs to be established quickly into the copy of the advertisement. An ad copy saying “ 50% off your next clean” is not establishing value, rather package the value into something attractive “50% off your next clean which will save you up to $300, we provide a risk free guarantee that you are happy with our services or you don’t pay. Book now and receive this award winning cleaning detergent worth $69 FREE!”
6) Promise: Does your ad guarantee a promise that your service/product can deliver on ?
7) Research Pain Points: Do your advertisement answer the #1 problem of your customer ? By doing the customer research, you will know exactly what and how to sell your customer by plugging in your customer's pain points.
8) A moment of sudden realization: Your ad needs to have a moment of sudden realization for the customer to go” Ohh, now that’s how XYZ is done or that’s how he did it !” It’s important your ad has this element to keep your users attention.
With the right irresistible offer, your ad should perform with a high amount of clicks.
Review Competitors offers
The best way to know of winning offers is to research your current high performing competitors. Being able to see what offer is working for them, you will know what kind of offer will work for you. Your high performing competitors have spent thousands into their marketing budgets and have spent a large amount of time testing and perfecting their ads.
Skip the process, copy and improve their offer, you will surely land on a gold mine very quickly this way and save you a lot of time and money testing different offers.
Use Custom Audiences
When running a Facebook ad, you don’t want to send it out into the social media landscape blindly. Facebook’s Ad Manager allows you to create custom audiences, targeting users by location, gender, age range, interests, and more. Narrow down your ideal target audience before launching your campaign.
If you already have a web presence, you can use the Custom Audience from Your Website tool to target Facebook users who have visited your site or taken a certain action on it. For marketers trying to increase brand awareness and attract new business, this may not be ideal. However, if you’re advertising a new product or feature to your existing customers, it’s a smart approach to attract the low-hanging fruit.
Test Different Custom Audiences
Businesses launching their first Facebook ad campaigns shouldn’t rely on one custom audience to gauge the effectiveness of their strategy. Create multiple audiences, and target them with the same ad, or target them with variations of your ad.
The recent introduction of Facebook dynamic creative ads allow marketers to test variations of ads that cycle through automatically. Use this tool and Facebook’s analytics features to determine the cost-per-click of each custom audience. You’re aiming for as low a CPC as possible.
Understand Who Your Customers Are
In Facebook’s Ad Manager, you’ll find the Audience Insights tool that helps you better understand which types of users engaged with your recent campaign most often. You can use this tool to learn about the age ranges of your customers, find out where they live, learn what their interests are, and more.
It’s important to study this data. After your first ad campaign, you shouldn’t assume that the custom audience with the lowest CPC is the best possible custom audience you could generate. By referring to your Audience Insights, you can tweak your target users even more, reaching those who are most likely to respond to your campaign.
Direct Users to a Specific Feature or Page
Your ad shouldn’t simply bring users to your homepage. Instead, direct them to a specific landing page, blog, or feature. You want your customers to take action when they click on your ad. If you simply link to your homepage, all you’re doing is alerting them to your company’s existence.
Instead, bring them to a designated landing or product page. On that page, include a clear call-to-action and provide further information that expands upon your Facebook ad.
Facebook ads give companies both small and large the opportunity to target the right customers with the right content. For the best results, make sure your marketing team is using all the helpful features this platform has to offer before launching your first campaign. Ideally, you’ll attract new business, while also learning a lot more about your existing customers.
Retargeting
A high percentage of your customers who click through your ad and go to your sales/landing page, will not buy your product or service right away.
This could be to majority of reasons ranging from someone knocking on their home door, page taking too long to load to them seeing an unexpected price or copy they do not like etc or they just completely forgot about your product or service. Yes I am sorry, your business is not special in your customer's eye, until you can satisfy the promise your business is delivering.
Re-targeting can be used to show a specific ad to all those users who clicked on your sales or landing page, but did not convert into a lead. It’s wise to include in a re-targeting an ad an incentive for the user to take action right to buy your product or sign-up. An incentive could be a discount or a bonus to the current service you are providing.
Again it is important to provide scarcity or time constraint in your retargeting ad, so your users take action right away, before they forget about you again.