Attract With Smarter Facebook Ads
Your ideal clients flowing into your business on autopilot. That’s a growth engine at work.
It might sound like a pipedream but when you get started with automated growth marketing, it’s not only achievable, it becomes a staple part of your business growth strategy.
This blog series walks you through the steps to build your own growth engine.
I’ll present each step in its own dedicated blog post every week for the next four weeks:
- Attract With Facebook Ads
- Capture Contacts
- Generate Leads
- Marketing Automation
I’m not going to take you deep into the weeds on this or get too technical.
These posts will help you understand whether a growth engine is something you want for your own business and you can share them with your agency or switched on marketing person and say “Start building me one of these!”
Of course, as growth marketing specialists we build these for ourselves and our clients all day every day, so if you do need help with it…
Why Start With Facebook Ads?
Every engine needs fuel. For a growth engine, you need a steady flow of traffic into your online properties. And for this, we need Facebook.
A lot of businesses give Facebook ads a go, get middling results then write off the channel.
If that sounds familiar, hang in there for a minute while I make a case for trying them again.
Facebook ads are extremely powerful and laser targeted, offering the best bang for buck when compared to other paid media channels.
The problem is they can be tricky to set up and run properly. Nobody really has a handle on them so they’ve become one of the least understood marketing tools, up there with search engine optimisation.
Let me pull back the curtain a bit on Facebook Ads so you can check out the awesome capability hardly anyone knows is there.
Forget About Fan Pages & Likes
Facebook uses an algorithm to curate which stories and updates to show users in their newsfeed.
Facebook encouraged businesses to set up their own fan pages and then promote them to collect as many “likes” and “follows” as possible. The idea being, once you had a fan you could seed their newsfeed with your promotional material for free.
Then Facebook started to manipulate their algorithm to throttle how many fans would see these business page messages.
They claimed users were being bombarded with commercial messaging but the fact you could pay them to show those same messages anyway to the same fans possibly told a different story.
The upshot was “organic reach” (the percentage of fans a business could reach for free each time it posted on its page) plummeted, dipping under 10%.
Then it kept falling.
At 1% organic reach, if you send an update to your 1,000 fans, only 10 will receive it in their newsfeed.
If you want to reach the rest (and non-fans) you have to pay.
That makes Facebook purely a pay-for-play platform for businesses looking to grow, the old ways aren’t worth your time anymore.
Make Data Decisions
Facebook ads aren’t set in stone like an ad in the paper or a billboard.
At their best, they’re fluid and ever-changing, locked in a constant loop of “test then optimise”.
You don’t decide who to target and what to say, you test assumptions and let the data Facebook collects decide for you. It’s best placed to tell you what will work on its own platform.
Use the process of elimination to test all the elements of your ad then combine the “winners” into a supercharged ad with the best of everything.
You want to work in this order:
- Test different audiences (variations of your ideal client persona).
- Test different hooks or offers.
- Test ad formats, headlines and copy variations.
Optimise For Conversions
When setting up a campaign in Facebook, most people default to the “Traffic” objective.
Facebook says it “is designed to drive people to your website or app”. That’s what you want right? Job done.
Well yes but it’s not the ONLY objective that will drive traffic and others potentially do it better.
The Traffic objective tells Facebook “Try and send as many people from that audience I gave you to my page”.
Sounds perfect I know but you’re not asking it to be selective about who from that audience it tries to send and you’re paying for each attempt it makes.
If you choose the “Conversions” objective you can tell Facebook “Send people from that audience I gave you to my page and keep track of the ones that fill out my form. Find out what they have in common and then put my ad in front others like them first”.
In the example I just gave you, filling out an online form is the conversion facebook is watching but you can set it to anything – page visits, video views, ad clicks etc.
Facebook is using its brain and being discerning about who from your audience it tries to get to your page, fueling your growth engine with better traffic and lowering your cost per result.
Take Advantage Of Microtargeting
You can blanket a geographic area for mass awareness like you would with traditional media but you have the ability to slice that audience up into very specific segments while excluding others you aren’t interested in.
You can target based on a mindblowing list of Demographics, Interests, and Behaviours, mixed and matched in any combination to create super niche audiences.
Once you have a very specific idea about who you’re talking to it’s easy to tailor ads they feel are speaking directly to them personally.
Check out the complete list of Facebook targeting options in a handy infographic:
Source: Wordstream
Custom Audiences
Facebook gives you the power to build your own audience from just about anything.
The Custom Audience feature is the secret sauce of Facebook ads and hardly anyone is using it at all.
Here’s a couple of super effective ways to use it in your growth engine:
Remarketing
If people visit your website, join your email list, watch your video or interact with your ads, Facebook can keep track of them and when they jump on Facebook again – BAM there’s your ad bringing them back to you.
Lookalike Audiences
This is the most amazing feature of Facebook advertising.
You can upload a group of people to Facebook (minimum 200 records) and tell it “find me more people like these”.
Try your customer list. Facebook will find them, assess their key attributes, then find others just like them you can market to.
So you’re essentially taking the most efficient route to find and market to people that are just like your actual customers. Facebook is cherry picking them for you!
I’m too busy to read all that guff. Just give me the short version.
Yeah alright, it’s not like I had a heap of free time to put that all together for you either but here’s an action plan:
- Forget your fan page, you have to pay to talk to anyone on Facebook now.
- Complete testing rounds before spending seriously – test audiences -> offers -> creative.
- Select the “Conversions” campaign objective.
- Print this out and make sure you’re aware of all the target options/combinations.
- Build two Custom Audiences:
- Remarketing based on website visitors
- Lookalike based on your customer list
Next Week: Build Your Own Growth Engine (Part 2) – Capture Contacts
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