TIP #1: Audience Targeting
Know your most valuable demographic. This may take a little research or soul searching, but a couple good things to know right off the bat are that women are typically more likely to and click on ads while men are typically less likely to buy online, but more likely to make big purchases. This means men will take a little longer to nurture into your sales funnel, but if you have a big ticket offer, the effort will be worth it.
Beyond marketing to gender behaviors, it’s a good idea to brainstorm behaviors that your ideal audience might share and then target corresponding “interests” on Facebook.
It’s also a good idea to brainstorm demographic interests of your audience segment who you do NOT want to show your ad to. For example, your competition.
Tip #2: Ad Creation
The foremost consideration for your ad is your objective. To figure this out you must have a clear goal for your audience, and know what kind of Facebook ad will help you achieve that goal.
Let’s talk about the difference between a Conversion Ad vs. Traffic Ad.
Conversion Ads are used when you want the person to take action on your landing page, such as fill out a form. When running a conversion ad, Facebook shows your ad to people who are more likely to convert.
Traffic Ads are used when you are just looking to drive traffic to a landing page. When running traffic ads, Facebook will show your ad to people who are more likely to click on your ad and visit your landing page.
We recommend running conversion or traffic ads over just “Boosting” your posts. This will give you more flexibility in your ad targeting.
When you have set your objective and expectation for your objective, the next thing to decide is your offer.
The trick here is to frame your offer around a transformation that your target audience would consider “life-changing.” If you can make their life better or easier with your offer, show them what “could be.”
Once you know your offer, the most important place to highlight it is in the headline of the ad. That’s the title right under the image.
When writing out the main content, the first sentence should call out your audience. For example; “Attention phoenix moms!” This call-out stops readers from scrolling because they notice that you are talking to THEM. Pretty cool, psychological stuff!
As you get into the meat of your content try to use emojis to break up your sentences/thoughts so that your message is easy and fun to read.
When it’s time to add an image to your ad, stand out by fitting in. This isn’t as counterintuitive as it sounds. What I mean is try not to look like an ad. Use images that people might naturally see to make the ad look more relatable (and less annoying).
Finally, call-to-action link. Never ever ever set up your ad to link to your website homepage. Instead link to a specific lead page that discusses your offer and talks directly to the audience you’re targeting.
Think of your Facebook ad as the first of a 2 part objective to hook your customer.
1. The objective of the ad is to get your audience to the landing page.
2. The objective of the landing page is to get them to take the offer.
TIP #3: Performance Tracking
Inside of Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll see a lot of data when you are running an ad. The main metric that you want to pay attention to is whether or not people performing the action you want them to. If you’re running a conversion ad, are people filling out the form, or taking the action you want them to?
The other thing to pay attention to is how much it’s costing you to get the results you want. If your objective is to drive people to register for a $50 class and on average it cost you $10 per registrant, then you’ve made a $40 profit.
But if you’re not getting the results you want, it’s time to figure out what’s broken in the flow.
Is it the ad? Or the landing page? Here’s a quick way to tell:
- If your ad is getting a lot of impressions and people are clinking on the ad but not signing up on the landing page, most likely the problem is their experience on the landing page.
- If your ad is getting a lot of impressions, but not many people are clicking on the ad to visit the landing page, the problem is most likely the ad.
You should always be testing your ads by running multiple variations at the same time to see which one performs best. Here are the top things to test in your ads:
The ad creative: Try different images and/or videos.
The ad copy: Test different ad content to see what resonates more with your audience. You may also want to try long-form content vs. short-form content and note any difference in engagement. If there is a significant response to one over the other, turn off the ad that people aren’t responding to.
The offer: Maybe the offer in your ad is not that enticing to your audience.
Your audience: Try different interest targeting to see which audience responds better to your ad.
You’re bound to find a formula that works, just keep testing and adjusting to figure out what your audience responds the most to so that you can implement these tactics in different ways over time.
Tip #4: Balanced Perspective
Remember that you are paying to get in front of more people to win more customers.
You won’t convert your entire audience, you may not even convert more than a handful. But in retrospect, you’re spending money to make MORE money… like any investment.
Keep that balanced perspective strong by removing the emotion from winning or failing (learning is more like it). Be smart about when its time to push forward or when it’s time to pull back – and the sky is the limit!
