Facebook Marketing

If you’re looking for actual people rather than just sending people to a sales page, then you will want to look into lead ads. They’re relatively new to the Facebook ad suite.

Lead ads specifically include a contact form that captures their contact information for you.

You can ask customized questions right in the ad.

When your ad has finished running, you can download your leads directly from your Facebook page. You can also connect the leads directly into certain Customer Resource Managers (CRMs) such as Salesforce.

Remember that when you advertise on Facebook, you also have the option to advertise on Instagram. When you do create an Instagram ad, make sure it’s very graphically intensive since that’s why people are on Instagram. You could also do a quick video detailing the value of what you’re offering.

Always Tell People What They’re Signing Up For

You want your message to be clear across the whole ad experience (video, call to action, promotional copy, etc.). What will they be getting in exchange for giving you their personal information?

Also, you will want to be sure that they know what will happen next.  If they give you their phone number, you need to call them. If they give you their email address, then you will email them something.

Your time to follow up is a key metric in your success. Don’t let people forget who you are. So don’t run the ads if you’re super busy with the end of the month reports, or you’re going on vacation. You will want to be there to follow-up quickly.

You could use the questionnaire to find out when it’s most convenient for the lead as well. Then you know when to contact them.

Make sure you have a clear call to action. Don’t let people wonder what they should do next.

Don’t Ask Too Much

I used to be very involved in the email marketing space. One thing I learned was that the less information you ask, the higher your conversions. If you ask too much, people shy away wondering what you’re going to do with all that information.

What Can I Use Lead Ads For?

You can use them for just about everything. Facebook even suggests newsletter signups. Since I use aweber and Sendlane, I am hesitant about how easy it would be to import contacts from the Facebook download.

aweber specifically is known for being tough on email imports since they want to be sure you really do have permission to email them.

That being said, I’m going to be testing lead ads over the next few weeks to drive traffic to a squeeze page. Another name for squeeze page is lead capture page.  I’ll be testing solo ads and regular traffic ads to the lead generation ads.

I’ll discuss it in my private Facebook mastermind group. It’s a low-cost subscription where I share with you what I’m doing and answer your questions. It’s a great community of people who help each other. If you’re interested, you can learn more here.

One of the first things you’ll notice as you run more ads is that the effectiveness degrades over time. The people who initially clicked on your ads tended to be the more responsive ones, and once you’re past that first wave, you’re wasting your money on those who aren’t

So, it’s important to monitor your daily click through rate. Watch for how it performs over a period of time. When you start to see a decrease, you may want to consider pausing that ad and starting up a different one to the same audience.

Test your ad performance at various times during the day. You’ll likely find that it performs better at certain times. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t allow us to choose what time of day our ads run. However, we can manually turn our ads on and off to ensure they’re running at the optimal times.

Some Other Good Tips

1. Target your audience so that it’s at least 100,000 but no more then 1,000,000 In fact, you should test highly targeted ads to a very narrow audience.
2. Create more then one ad. We’ve talked before about split testing.
3. Replace the default image that Facebook populates into your ad. Upload your own image. Recommended size is 600×315.
4. Have a strong call to action. Tell them exactly what to do next. i.e. Click, Call, Download Now
5. Pause the ad indefinitely if the cost per click is too high. It should eventually get down to pennies, so if it’s still around a dollar, you may need a different ad or better targeting
6.Don’t delete your ad. It keeps the analytics around which helps Facebook target your ads better
7. Always have a start and stop time. Don’t let it run indefinitely. Plus, if you have a hard end point, Facebook wants to ensure you’re spending your money and will show your ads more then someone who hasn’t.

Taking the pain out of marketing

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I have three quick Facebook page management tips to share with you today. They should make it easier to get more page likes.

Invite People Who Like Your Posts

I had to have someone point this out to me.  You can click on the names of people who liked your boosted post.

Then you can click on the Invite button. A percentage will choose to like your page. It’s an easy way to increase the likes.

Import Your Email List

Create a custom audience to target by uploading your email list.  First you need to go into the Business Manager and select Audiences.

Then select Custom Audience

Then you can import your file:

How to Spy on the Competition

If you need to blog more regularly, use Facebook.  In the Business Manager side of the Facebook page, under Insights, you can add in Pages to Watch. You do need 100 page likes before you can do this.  This is one time where you may want to pay to advertise your page until you achieve those 100 page likes. It’s an extremely powerful tool to spy on your competition.  It’s also great for finding ideas for your own posts.

Once you’re on this, you can see what your competitors best performing posts that week were. You can then create your own posts on similar topics.  Or curate their content with your own opinions about it.

You can track their posts to see if they have a content calendar. This can be useful if you’re new to the industry and learning trends.

Let me know if these quick Facebook page management tips have helped you!

I’m always trying to find Facebook ad tips that will save you money. Today, I have some updates for how Facebook handles things.

Updated Terms of Service

Manually Place Your Ads

Retarget Custom Audiences

Creative Hub for Agencies

Right Side Ad Placement

Most people are afraid to do Facebook advertising because they’re afraid they’ll make mistakes. Perhaps they already lost a lot of money to Google Ads. Or they spent too much on a Facebook campaign that had zero return.

This video I found lists three. Watch it and then let’s talk about it further.

Finding the Right Audience

It’s true. A big mistake is sending the ad out to everyone and spending a lot of money but getting no return. You may as well go to a convention and shout “Who is interested in learning about Tupperware!”

You want to talk to the people who have an interest in what you’re offering. The best people to buy from you are those that have already bought something similar.

Don’t believe me? How many books or courses have you purchased on a single subject like sales, marketing, or advertising? If you’re like me, one is good and five or six is better. (The key is to actually read through the material and then apply it. You don’t get smarter by osmosis.)

The best person to buy a hamburger is someone who already bought one because they know they like it.

Brian Flemming talked about a look-alike audience. You have to have your pixel seasoned before you can do that. What’s that mean? It means you send at least 1000 people from your Facebook page to your website so Facebook knows what kind of people convert best.

Not Using Conversion Pixels for Tracking

The pixel will help you tremendously. You can use it to help Facebook help you. What I really love is that you can advertise to people who went to your sales page but did not end up on your thank you page. That is called retargeting.

You don’t know what happened…maybe a girl scout came to the door. Maybe their computer froze up. Maybe they had a question. Convince them to come back and re-read your sales materials.

Conversion pixels are powerful. You can have more than one. You can have them set to track lead generation, page views, conversions. They’re the WD-40 or bailing wire of online advertising. So learn to use them.

Not Using Facebook Reports

As we mentioned, a targeted audience is the best audience. If you’re advertising to men and women, look to see who engages more with your ads. Then create a new audience for just men or women.

And then you can start targeting down even further when you find age ranges and interests. As you get better engagement and conversions, the less you’ll pay per click. Facebook rewards good performance.

Want to improve your Facebook Ads? You’ll need to have a great custom audience. In the past, I’ve counseled to do research rather than just randomly choose things.

But if you’ve ever thought that you are your best target market, have I got great news for you. You can spy on how other advertisers are viewing you.

If you see an ad, click on the down arrow in the right hand side and select Why Am I Seeing This.

Rick’s free video goes into more detail. Watch it here.

The Takeaways

First, you can find out how you’re being targeted, and it may give you ideas for your custom targeting.

Manage your ad preferences allows you to see what Facebook is using to target you for ads. You may want to clean things up to adjust

You can spend a lot of money for tools that show ads that others have created and how well it performed. This can be useful for finding out how older ads performed.

Find What Works and Mimic It

You never want to flat out copy someone else’s ad. That would be wrong. But if you’ve seen that they tested head shot images of people and full body shot images, and that they continued the head shot ads, then you can be certain that they outperformed the full body shot ads.

So you should go out and find head shot images and start testing your ads with those.

You can also review the ad text and see what words worked better than others. What colors seemed to stay with the ads as time went on.

When you’re serious about advertising, you need to use all the tools to find the information that you need.

That doesn’t mean you don’t try things on your own.  You should always be testing. It’s just good to learn from other people’s mistakes.