With 1.35 billion users, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms out there, which makes it a great place for businesses to advertise. Done right, you can quickly grow your list and sell your products and services. Done wrong, and you’ll wind up frustrated and a lot lighter in the wallet. Prefer to listen to this post?
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We use Facebook a lot here at LeadPages™, so we’ve had a two-year learning curve to figure out what does and doesn’t work. Currently, our Facebook campaigns usually bring in about 4,000 subscribers and over 250 paying customers every month. We were nowhere near that success rate when we started running Facebook ads. Our paid media specialist, Andrew Scherr, turned that around for us. Granted, he has a large budget to play with. But if we can do this, so can you. Recently, our Marketing Educator, Bob Jenkins, put together an 11-part course to teach you everything we know about running a profitable Facebook advertising campaign. It includes videos, a mindmap, a checklist, MP3 files, slides, and even “what’s working now” strategies from Facebook advertising experts Amy Porterfield and James Grandstaff. He’s even giving you the spreadsheet we use to track our Facebook campaigns’ profits. And the best part is, we’ve made the entire Facebook Advertising System course available for you to view for free right here. To give you the short version, here are the top 10 Facebook marketing tips we’ve learned from running successful Facebook advertising campaigns over the past 2 years.
1. Start Small and Build Out
Many marketers take the shotgun approach and go after broad audiences and demographics on Facebook. While this may put your ad in front of a lot of people, it can cost you lots of money and, ultimately, sabotage your campaign Instead, you should focus in on a specific audience and expand out from there. In Module 2 of the Facebook Advertising System, Andrew Scherr, our paid media specialist, shares the techniques he uses to hone in on our ideal audience so our campaigns are more effective. He also explains how he uses Facebook’s internal tools to find the best audiences to track, and how he uses lookalike audiences to expand our potential contacts.
2. Track Your Website Visitors
Long before you start your campaign, begin tracking your website visitors by using Facebook’s Custom Audience Pixels and Conversion Pixels. This will ensure you’re ready to track your incoming leads and sales. Doing this in advance will tell you whether your campaign is effective or not and help you track your cost per lead and cost per checkout, as well as other metrics. Advertising on Facebook without tracking your website visitors is basically like flying blind. It can also help you make sure you’re not trying to advertise the same product to people who have already purchased. In Module 3, Bob shows you how to create the conversion pixels that Andrew talks about in Module 2. He also shows you what to track, where to put them on your website and how to use them to get the best results.
3. Target Your Audiences
Facebook lets you do a lot with different targeted audiences. There are 5 you will want to focus on:
- Your current Facebook fans (and their friends).
- Your current mailing list. You can export this list from your email service provider and upload it to Facebook. You can also target your Google, Google Plus and LinkedIn contacts so you can add those to your Facebook audience.
- Visitors to your current website. Retargeting this audience is crucial to your success and Bob will teach you how to get this process started, even if you haven’t used Facebook for advertising before.
- Lookalike audiences based on your existing subscribers, customers and website traffic.
- Saved target groups created out of Facebook’s 1.35 billion users. (Hint, you really don’t want to try to target them all. You can use Facebook’s internal tools to build your ideal custom audience.)
In Module 4, Bob focuses on the first three audiences. Since those audiences already know who you are, they’re the easiest to start with. The latter two audiences don’t know you exist yet. You’ll get the low down on building those audiences in Module 5.
4. Engage Your Current Fans
In Module 6, Bob talks with Amy Porterfield, one of the best-known Facebook marketing experts you’ll find. (She even co-wrote Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies.) She is a master at engaging her current fans and converting them into customers through her various campaigns. When you advertise to your fanbase, Facebook charges you considerably less than targeting non-fans. Amy’s frequent, highly engaging content combined with targeted ads to those fans creates amazing results. Amy shares her favorite strategies to help her convert Facebook users into followers and clients.
5. Offer Free Content (Especially Webinars) Through Your Ads
Instead of directly advertising a product in your Facebook ads, showcase a free lead magnet to build your list. Webinars, checklists, cheat-sheets, and resource guides outperform other types of free gifts (like ebooks, videos, or newsletters). Combine this high quality content with effective follow-up communication to generate more sales at a lower cost. In Module 6 of the Facebook Advertising System, Amy and Bob discuss real case studies that have proven to be extremely profitable and easy to emulate.
6. Send Your Facebook Ad Traffic to a High-Converting Landing Page
Getting people to click on an ad is the easy part. Turning those visitors into subscribers or customers is where things get tricky. Improving your advertising campaign’s landing page from 5% conversion to 20% conversion will quadruple (4x) your list growth, while cutting your advertising budget by 75%. How do you create higher converting landing pages? Use LeadPages™, of course! Using LeadPages™ is one of the fastest, easiest ways to to create high-converting landing pages for your Facebook advertising campaigns. We have more than 100 templates you can use as part of your membership, and an ever-growing number in our marketplace, which you can purchase and use as many times as you want. And as a member, you get access to all of our new LeadPages™ templates as we release them. In Module 7, Bob teaches you exactly how to create a high-converting landing page so you get the best conversion rates possible for your campaigns. He walks you through building a landing page and a thank you page using LeadPages™ templates, step by step, showing you the many techniques we use to create our high-converting landing pages. He also shows you where to put your Conversion and Custom Audience pixels so you can track your results. Once you’ve published your landing pages, you’ll be ready to create your own Facebook ads, so you have somewhere to send all that fabulous new traffic.
7. Make Sure You’ve Got All the Right Pieces in Place When You Build Your Ads
Everyone thinks the most important part of Facebook ads is making the ad itself. Actually, the most important part is getting everything set up correctly beforehand. Once you’ve got all of your tracking information set up and your landing pages are ready to go, then it’s time to make your ads. In Module 8, Bob walks you through everything you need to do to create Facebook ads that convert, and set them up so you can see how they’re doing. Even better, he shows you which settings to use so you’re getting the most bang for your buck when it comes to how much you pay per click or per conversion. He also helps you set up split-tests so you can get the best results, quickly.
8. Analyze, Analyze, Analyze
Looking at your numbers is the best way to figure out whether your campaign has been successful, needs to be tweaked or has failed. But sorting through all of those acronyms, CTR, CPC, CPA, IROAS, gets really confusing. Fortunately, Module 9 is all about analyzing your campaign and using Facebook’s reporting features. Bob explains all of these acronyms to you, what they mean, how they affect you and why you want to know these results. He also walks you through setting up your reporting system and shows you how to use the spreadsheet that our paid media manager, Andrew Scherr, created just for you so you can easily see the results from your Facebook campaigns. You can download the spreadsheet, as well as the videos, MP3s transcripts, a mindmap and more as part of this program. This spreadsheet is the same one we use to track our Facebook campaigns here at LeadPages™. All you have to do is plug your numbers into the right places and the spreadsheet will do the calculations for you. Between this spreadsheet and the tools Facebook provides for you, you should be able to determine what is and isn’t working so you can pause ads, ad sets or campaigns that aren’t converting and tweak the ones that are.
9. You WILL Make Mistakes. (And That’s Okay.)
That’s part of the whole learning process. You’ll never learn if you don’t make mistakes. If you happen to get everything perfect on the first try (which almost never happens) eventually the market, your customers or Facebook will change and you’ll need to make adjustments anyway. The more flexible you are, the more likely it is that your campaigns will succeed. We want to cut your potential error rate down significantly, so for Module 10, Bob interviews James Grandstaff, Facebook advertising expert and LeadPages™ power user. James has been advertising online since 2001 and has been advertising on Facebook since 2010. He’s made the majority of the mistakes that can be made in online advertising and has figured out how to overcome them. Bob and James talk about the best ways to:
- Find your ideal target audience within Facebook
- How to test a headline for your Facebook ad
- How to use retargeting to make your ads more effective
- Additional tools you can use to speed up your ad creation
10. Stick to Your Budget
Facebook is in this to make money. So their goal is to get you to spend as much as possible. You’re also in this to make money, but you don’t want to spend everything you make on Facebook ads. Throughout this course, Bob talks about different ways you can reduce your ad costs and the different settings within Facebook that you should use to determine your budget, depending upon your goals. He also talks about the different metrics you want to track to see how much your campaign is costing and how you can improve your conversions while lowering your overall ad-spend. Bob asks James Grandstaff and Amy Porterfield what numbers matter most to them, how they budget their campaigns and how they determine success, to put you several steps ahead of the average Facebook Ads user.
So now you know the top 10 things we’ve learned about Facebook advertising campaigns here at LeadPages™...
If you want to get the full story, take the Facebook Advertising System course. All 11 videos are available for you to view, right on the page. For those of you who have run Facebook ad campaigns before, we hope you’ll see a marked improvement in your results. For those of you who are just starting to use Facebook to promote your business, this course will give you a huge head-start on getting the results you want.
