4 Steps for Launching Unstoppable Facebook Ads
6 minutes | Word Count: 1013If you want to increase sales, customer engagement, and attract new consumers to your brand, Facebook advertising is necessary. Considering Facebook is the most popular social media network – 79% of Americans use it each week – it should be easy to create a profitable ad campaign that reaches a wide audience and attracts more customers, right?
Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Many advertisers create new campaigns each day, hoping to exceed their sales targets, increase engagement, and deliver a strong ROI. However, they fall flat and end up throwing more money at Facebook marketing efforts without achieving a sustainable ROI.
We know it’s possible to create successful ads for Facebook. With just some tweaks and by following a few essential tips to build your campaign from the bottom up, you can create a successful Facebook marketing campaign. So, let’s get started!
Step 1: A Great Offer Makes a Great Campaign
With a great offer in place, it is simple to build a Facebook ad that will yield conversions. By contrast, a poor offer is certain to fail.
An offer doesn’t necessarily refer to a deal or promotion, but instead the emotions that you are appealing to. The actual product has less to do with the sale than you might think. Great offers sell products without talking about sales – instead, they build value.
Companies that have effective Facebook ad campaigns understand this and use it every day. They create free trials, offer free eBooks or discount vouchers to build trust, and attract you to their products without ever ‘selling’ their products or services.
You goal when creating a Facebook ad is to think outside the usual offers and make your prospective customers feel like they’re in control when making a purchase. Appeal to their emotions and remember the basics of direct sales: reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, and social proof or consensus. Play to these six core emotional influences and you’re on the right track to building an irrefusable offer.
If you’re having a difficult time coming up with your own irrefusable offer, don’t be afraid to look to your competitors. What are they doing and can you do it even better? Big brands such as McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy’s do this all the time – spying on their competition to discover their most popular offers and then going one better.
Step 2: Track the Right Metrics
How much your ad earns is the most important metric for your Facebook marketing strategy. Engagement, clicks, and shares are also important, but they are not the figures that will yield ROI and boost sales figures.
If your ad is not delivering sales, then it is not working as well as it should. There are a number of different reasons this may be the case – maybe it’s the ad itself, it could be the audience you have targeted, or maybe it’s the landing page. Whatever it is, you need to discover what it is, fix it, and continue tracking your sales to optimize your Facebook Ad.
Track your sales first, then look to social measures (i.e. engagement, clicks, and shares) secondly. This way you will be able to spot leaks that are costing you more to sell a product than what customers are paying for it.
When calculating your results take into account all of your expenses: overheads, product cost, and delivery. Then subtract this total from your revenue. It’s easy to be blinded by ‘vanity metrics’; reach, clicks and shares are important, but if you focus on them without keeping a sharp eye on revenue, you’ll be losing money before you spot the leak.
Step 3: Build Your Facebook Ad from The Ground Up
Great ads are based on the right information. Collect and put together your key data points to shape a winning Facebook ad that reaches the right people.
Testing and optimization are the best and surest way to find the right data points, and is the key to building your campaign. There are a few steps to take to ensure you head down the right track with this.
Categorize Your Ad’s Elements
This will simplify your testing process and help you visualize the elements for optimization. The following elements of your Facebook ad should be tested:
- Ad design: This includes your images, text, headlines, CTA and visual invitation.
- Targeting: This is your demographics – gender, age, interests, country, relationship status, purchasing behaviors, and custom audiences.
- Other: Your other miscellaneous but testable elements include landing pages, product pages, ad placement, campaign objectives, and the ad type.
Optimize Every Element
This is where your offer is expressed, and you need to optimize each element that supports this expression.
Work to a Strategy
To avoid creating a legion of ads for testing, work to an optimization strategy that will help you to focus on the right angle for your vertical. Optin Monster and Social Media Examiner have some practical tips on how to do this if you need help in this area.
Test Everything and Assume Nothing
Assumptions aren’t based in data or results, and all of the dangers of assuming are relevant for Facebook advertising, too. To avoid such pitfalls, test each element of your ad to see which will give you the best results; sometimes the results will surprise you.
Step 4: Be Clear About Your Goals
It’s simple: clear goals are crucial to success. The things with goals is, it is not enough to have the end goal in mind. You need interim goals or milestones in place to keep up encouragement and motivation, and to quickly spot possible leaks in your strategy. You will travel down the track to successful Facebook ad campaigns much quicker if these are in place.
Simply break up the end goal into digestible, measurable chunks and you’ll be able to analyze your data much more effectively.
There are many factors that influence the success of Facebook advertising, but if you follow the above steps you will be treading the path to a profitable and successful campaign.