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Simple Tips to Help You Create Your Facebook Ad Campaign

By mktpractice on June 30, 2016

Today we’re going to hammer out some quick tips on creating a successful Facebook ad campaign. Leave a comment about what’s worked for you and what hasn’t work. Did I miss a good tip?

Setting Up the Ad

Log into Facebook. If you haven’t signed up for Business Manager yet, you can click on the triangle in the upper right hand corner

It then pops up a menu and you can choose Create Ads

Hopefully you’ve already chosen what to advertise. If not, start with driving traffic to your Facebook page and increase likes. This also allows you to build your tribe and get a better understanding of who they are and what they like.

When targeting your geographic region, keep an eye out for the size. You can use the meter. Start small and build it up when you have a successful Facebook ad campaign.

Always be sure you set a time limit and that you set a daily budget and an overall budget so there’s no surprises.

If you’re sending people to some place other then your Facebook page, make sure the URL that you put into the ad works.

General Ad Tips

Keep your copy short and well targeted. Is it consistent with where you’re sending them? Don’t be provocative to get clicks….that’s called “clickbait” and is being shut down by Facebook when they can find it.

Have different ads for your mobile customers then your desktop customers. It allows you to do better testing and find out what people respond to. For example, if you’re sending them to download a free report, ask yourself if mobile people would be willing to do that, or if they’d be more inclined if they were on their desktop.

Set up the retargeting pixel to allow Facebook to help you get your product, brand, or service in front of people better. Retargeting is like if someone shows up on your site to look at something, then a pixel gets set. When that person goes back to Facebook, they will see ads for what they were looking at.

Always be testing your images, colors, words, fonts, etc. until you find what people engage with. And then remember to turn it off and try new ads so people don’t suffer from ad blindness. That’s where they just don’t see an ad anymore because they’ve seen it so often.

When you have a good audience, let Facebook help you by creating audiences that are like your current audience. That is to say, it looks at people who like your page and what other interests they have, and then it creates an audience of others who like those interests but don’t already like your page. It’s a great way of pulling in new customers to your sales funnel.

Monitor your ads and review their performance. Don’t start it up and just let it go. Keep an eye on how it’s working and turn off those that are underperforming.

Quick Tips for Facebook Ads

By mktpractice on June 24, 2016

I’ve got a few quick best practice tips for you today. Let me know what you’ve tried and how well it worked.

Track Your Performance

Too many marketers release an ad and then wait until it ends. Don’t be that person. Monitor your ad at least twice a day to see it’s performance, especially if you’re running a split test. Yiou may find that your ad runs better on certain days…so only schedule it for those days and save money. Plus, make sure you’re changing up the ad and continually testing new things. Consumers often get “ad fatigue” and if they see your ad too many times, they won’t “see” it anymore. So take it offline and then reintroduce it in five or six months when it will seem new again.

Clear Call to Action

If you’re sending people to a landing page, tell them exactly what to do next. Don’t give them too many options. Many internet marketers use what’s called a squeeze page. It’s where you can only sign up for the “bait piece.” A bait piece is something people get like a special report or a webinar in exchange for their email address.

Understand Your ROI

Your return on investment is the basis of your marketing. You’re in the business to make money. However, you need to look at your whole sales cycle and understand how much your spending and how much you’re receiving for the average life of the customer. I’ve mentioned before that a lot of successful marketers intend to get a zero sum out of their Facebook ads that drive people to sign up for a newsletter because they know that they will get money out of the customer in the future as they buy their products or recommended products.

So what should you track?

Total number of impressions
Total cost of your Facebook ads
Click rate or response rate
Conversion rate
Average profit per sale

Keep Your Landing Page on Facebook

Believe it or not, Facebook is friendlier to those marketers who keep people on Facebook. So drive traffic to your FAcebook page and regularly post content. You can also post links to your blog posts and encourage people to read more there. You can post videos to increase your engagement. An added bonus is that you’ll pick up more likes on your Facebook page.

Creating a Threshold for Your Facebook Ad Account

By mktpractice on June 23, 2016

While Facebook ads are certainly very affordable, it’s a good idea to put a threshold in your account so you don’t get a big unhappy surprise at the end of the billing cycle. It’s really easy to do and gives you peace of mind.

A threshold is the maximum amount your account will accrue during the billing cycle. I have mine set to $500.

You will find this in the Billing section of your Business account and can make the updates there.

Just your quick tip for today. If you have any questions, please contact me or leave me a comment. Thanks!

Why You Should Split Test Your Facebook Ads

By mktpractice on June 22, 2016

Let’s talk about one of the most important steps in running Facebook ads…..split testing. First let’s review what it is, and when we should do it, and then we’ll look at why it’s so important.

I would like to mention that it is the responsibility of the marketer to define the goals of the ad campaign and monitor the results during the campaign. Otherwise you’ll end up with a bill for $300 and no conversions.

What Is Split Testing

Split testing is where you take two ads and run them to a specified segment of your audience to see which ad gets the better result. It’s also called split A/B testing. Split testing is often used in email marketing. Facebook allows you to set up to six ads that it rotates to the viewers so you can see which one responds better. It’s important to only test one thing at a time. For example, you may want to test the word “Try” versus “Buy” to see which gets more people converting. Or perhaps you want to test the image or the colors of some text.

What’s A Conversion?

A conversion is determined by your initial goal for the marketing ad campaign. You need to know where your business makes money. Often you will hear that the money is on the back end. Many marketers set up their Facebook campaigns to be zero sum. That is to say, the amount of money that they spend on ads is recovered by the initial sale. They know that once the person is in their sales funnel, they will make more money down the road when that person converts to a buyer of higher priced items or affiliate sales recommendations.

Conversions could be:

Sign up for newsletter
Purchase trip wire or very low cost product or service
Brand awareness
Like your Facebook page
Share a post
Share a video
Subscribe to your YouTube channel
Follow you on Tumblr or Pinterest

In email marketing, a common example was that you’d send out emails A and B. A would have a better open rate and B would have a better click through rate. So which was better? Trick question. The answer is which had the better buy rate for the offer.

How Do I Split Test with Facebook Ads?

You will first create a new ad set. Next you set up your targeting. This is your intended audiuence and it’s based on your customer audience that you’ve set up for your Facebook page, or you can create a custom one with demographics and interests.

From Facebook Help:

The general rule when selecting these options is that any time you make multiple choices within a field, you’re choosing option A OR option B (ex: people in New York OR San Francisco). When selecting between different fields, you’re choosing people in option A AND option B (ex: People aged 18-65 AND only women).

In the example below, we’ve selected an audience of people who:

Live in New York OR San Francisco
Are between the ages of 18 and 65
Are women
Work in retail
Are parents
Are interested in video games OR toys

What’s After That?

You may find that two of your ads work great. In that case, keep running both of them. From here you can start testing other thing in the ad. Or you can try sending the ads to different demographics or interests to see if you can pull in even more potential customers to your marketing funnel.

Facebook Advertising Targeting Quick Tip

By mktpractice on June 4, 2016

Do you fall down the common rathole of spending hours and hours on the ad design and five minutes on the targeting? Most people do and then wonder why they’re not getting an effective return on their investment. I’d suggest you should be spending hours on targeting and fifteen to thirty minutes on making five ads to test.

The more you can niche down, the hungrier the audience will be for your product or service, within reason.

First, use your Page Insights. Specifically People. You should know who is Liking your page. You may think your ideal customer is a young mom wanting to work at home part time so she can take care of her baby, but what if you find out it’s the young father? Wouldn’t that affect your images and language of the ad?

Second, use likes of page likes. Bear with me for a second. It may sound a little confusing at first, but it’s really a great way of having Facebook tell you what your viewers are interested in.

You first want to build up things that your page likes. This allows you to build up your custom audience and build up look-alike audiences. On the left column of your page, click on See Pages Feed:

Then once you’re in there, click on Like Other Pages. I recommend having another window up with Facebook and search on keywords. Then you can like those pages.

Then you can start to look for other pages that your audience Likes. You may be able to find keywords or niches you hadn’t thought of.

Some quick tips for your ads. Keep it simple and test one thing. For example, test text color or image or the headline. Don’t test everything at once because you then won’t know which is working. Create a lot of tests and run a few at a time.

A/B Split Testing is where you compare two things in one test. For example, testing the image of a woman’s face versus testing the image of a man’s face. Then when you get a clear winner, you pick that one and start another change like a word in the headline. You run the ad for a few days to see who is getting the most clicks and conversions.

And don’t delete your ads. Create new ones so Facebook will retain the analytics.

I’ll go into more detail in each of these in future posts. What else would you like to read about?

Niche Research and Keywords

By mktpractice on May 4, 2016

In prior posts, I’ve talked before about keyword research and niche research, Unfortunately, a lot of training out there skips the step of explaining what these are and why they’re important. I’ve even heard people referring to their keywords instead of their niche. While they are connected, they are quite different.

What Are Your Keywords?

Keywords describe your business, what you’re selling, where you’re selling, and how you’re selling. This is important for two reasons.

First, you should be clear on what you’re selling and focus your marketing around that. You don’t want your Twitter account to mention widgets and your Facebook page to mention gadgets while you’re main web page discusses doohickeys. It’s important both for your buyer’s perception and for Google’s impression of you.

When Google is evaluating your site, it looks at your keywords and your social media. So it’s important that you put your best keyword forward. That being said, you can have other keywords.

Is your site is selling lower cost but unique light fixtures to homeowners who enjoy DIY or those who want to have a custom home but hire people to do the work or own rental homes and want to get a quantity discount, or all of the above? If you have all those keywords on your home page, Google won’t know who to send to your site. But if your main page is lower cost unique light fixtures, and then you have pages for DIY, custom decorating tips, and bulk purchasing, you can have a variety of keywords on your site without the confusion.

Buying and Researching Keywords

People search differently when they’re researching than when they’re buying. It’s important to know the difference. If you push for the sale when people are still researching, they won’t be happy. And if you keep offering research when people are ready to buy, they’ll go somewhere else to talk to someone who will sell it to them.

A researching keyword would be like “best first car for a teenager.” The searcher would expect to see blog posts or articles discussing things they hadn’t thought about yet like initial cost, maintenance costs, reliability, etc. This is where the potential buyer is figuring out what they know, what they don’t know, and what the next steps should be.

And that’s where you can enter in. It’s important to slowly build up a positive relationship with potential customers, and the sooner the better. You should have researched ideas for content and what problems they fun into. Then, when they find your site, you can offer them an ebook or email series that explains what they need to know and to do.

Buying keywords tend to be very specific. “Best DSLR camera for underwater” is a researching keyword. “Nauticam 7D Mark II housing” is close to being a buying keyword. “Nauticam 7D Mark II housing for sale” or “on sale” are definitely buying keywords.

What Is Your Niche

Your niche is your well defined market including who you’re going to sell it to as well as where you’re selling it. When you have defined your niche, you will know how your ideal customer will find you, and how much information they will want to make an informed decision. You will know exactly where to advertise to get their attention. You’ll know when to give information and what type to keep them moving along the sales process. This is sometimes called a “sales funnel.”

If you’re selling kitchen items to people living on their own the first time, you will want to find out what they’re searching on and provide them with what they need. I’m suspecting they’re searching on easy or foolproof recipes that don’t require more then the one pan they own. If you have a few impossible to mess up ones posted, they will probably hang around your site and read your reviews of slow cookers, stand mixers, etc. When you can get them to see themselves using what you’re recommending, then they will be ready to buy. The key is testing and figuring out what’s motivating your niche.

Once you get started, you then refine your niche and expand your products or services to better serve them. You do this through polls and other engagement techniques as well as using your analytics

You can also learn more about their hobbies and interests using Facebook’s ad system. When you get to a certain number of page likes, you can get expanded metrics that include other fan pages that your tribe likes.

What Are Buying Cycles?

Ok now we’re going back to marketing When you go from a potential customer potentially being interested in your product or service through where they’re ready to buy is a sales funnel. You want to get them the right information at the right place in time to help move them along.

A sales funnel could also be called a sales cycle, but generally the sales cycle is a part of the sales funnel. In the sales funnel, you have people entering and dropping out. In the cycle, you’re defining the research keywords through buying keywords. When people talk about sales cycles, they often talk about the three phases.

Beginning of buying cycle – buyers start with basic research about the products or services. i.e. “printer reviews” “luxury sedan comparisons” “wine refrigerators for apartments”
Mid-stages of buying cycle – buyers are narrowing their online searches. “color laser printers” “audi sedans under $55,000” “12 bottle wine refrigerator”
Final stage of buying cycle – most marketers focus only on this final stage where the customer is ready to buy. This is a mistake since you want to be in a solid relationship with the buyer by this time so it makes sense to only buy from you.

How Do You Build the Relationship?

This is why it’s important to do your homework. When you know about your ideal customer, you can enter into a relationship with them when they’re first looking around. You can have the authority website that captures their email address. You can have the active Facebook group that helps answer their pre-sales questions.

The email address really is key to get. Then you set up an email series to send them regular information about what they’re researching. You could send them notes about how to use the product or service, or notifications that you just published a YouTube video showing them how to use it.

The key is to get them excited and visualizing that they’re using your product or service. They can achieve that goal and get rid of that pain that’s been bothering them. And you’re there to help them. You’re there to guide them.

Just don’t sell to them. Remember, people love to buy but hate to be sold.