The first thing to remember is that people come to facebook to get updates from their family & friends & not to see your ad. With so many ads flooding in the user’s feed, your ad should have good design, has to be creative, attractive, colourful, stylish, text having the clear message & appealing enough to stand out from the rest & lure the users to engage with the ad. You can do something funny with it or blend it with trends, etc. You’re basically introducing your brand, your content, so make it such that people share it with their friends.
Suppose every competitor of yours are running an ad stating 50 % sale, so if you also run an ad of 50 % sale, the users become blind to that same kind of ads & likely to scroll by, so you have to offer something different. Convey a message in your ad as if they’re already missing out something & they should avail your product or services to keep up.
Loading time for your landing page should be less & should also be interesting enough to retain the users interest or excitement. Facebook also judges your ads based on the loading time & content in the landing page.
Success rates of fb ads depends on proper audience targeting. It has huge no. of options available for targeting audience especially with fb pixel installed in your website. The more detailed & properly the audience is targeted, the relevent score goes up & the CRM goes down making your ad cheaper.
The more relevant facebook predicts an ad will be to an user, the less it will cost the advertiser to show the ad to that user.
Facebook is mainly used to advertise B2C services.
Download Social Media calendar from net to excel
Importance of Facebook Page & Group in driving traffic to your sales funnel ?
You should have a business page, facebook group, where you can post content for your users. Now if you only post marketing & promotional content, the users are unlikely to engage & may unfollow your page & leave the group. So, its recommend to add some value or information to your post first & then try to sell. You’ll have to reply to each of your customers to build trust & try to create an emotional bonding with your brand just like Apple & many more out there.
You can also conduct a poll to know the needs & demands of your existing customers. You can share blog posts, share case studies, conduct events, presentations, live interactive interview with an expert or webinar or conduct workshops, contests & give some discount vouchers to increase audience engagement. Also you need to maintain consistency with your page activity. Whatever you do, your ultimate goal is to drive the audience to your sales funnel.
How to drive more audience to like your page ?
Though likes in a facebook page is not that important anymore if you want to show your page post organically to your followers as facebook is decreasing it’s organic reach, but it can help in branding, social proof, etc.
Run ads; keep low likes, relevant & targeted; getting fake likes or likes from irrelevant profiles won’t serve any purpose; focus on quality likes than quantity; As you know, posts don’t reach all people organically who likes your page, so it increases the probability of showing a post to someone irrelevant instead of someone to whom it’d have mattered.
Run a campaign to like your page targeting users who have visited your website in the last certain amount of days & excluding those who have already liked your page. This way the ad is only shown to people who have already visited your website & knows you or your brand, & hence will be quality likes.
If post performs well organically, then only boost it.
Why Facebook Ads ?
Demand Generation – brand awareness & demand generation – one can create demand
They charge for impressions based on how many people are targeting the same audience
Target right audience – fb has a lot lot of information about you which they collect from your every action on facebook, so they can target the right audience
Funnel – Awareness > interest > consider buying > buy > loyal customers > refers to others. Don’t try to sell directly.
Create > Ads > choose marketing objective > 3 category(awareness, consideration, conversion) >
Run Facebook Ads
- Categorize your target audiences. (for e.g. housewives, students, small business owners, etc) i.e. all these categories are your target audience, but you create separate audience sets for each category & run separate ads to each audience category to make it appealing to them because each category may vary in terms of SM platform presence, format of content, area of interest, etc. So, you have to show separate ads for same objective to each of these categories in terms of what’s appealing to them.
- Design your ad well; invest on graphic designing & copywriting
- Do A/B Testing on the basis of ad design, audience targeting, etc
- Suppose for example, you are doing A/B Test of 5 ads in an ad set, & after a week you see 2 ads are performing well while other 3 are not, so you get rid of those 3 ads, & continue to run those 2 ads, & you design another 3 new ads to run & again see the results after a week & act accordingly. Repeat this every week to perfect your ad as much as possible.
How to create brand awareness using Facebook ?
Audiences
There are 3 types of audiences you choose from
Custom audience – In this case, you have to create the audience by yourself by proper targeting or with details received from Facebook Pixel if already installed in your website.
Lookalike audience – Facebook creates a set of audience similar to your chosen category of custom audience. You can choose between 1% to 10% the total population of the country you choose. The narrow the audience, the CPC & frequency(number of times an ad is shown to a person) is higher & vice versa. It is very useful in reaching new similar audiences.
Saved Audience – These are the set of audience you save after you create custom & lookalike audiences, for future use.
After posting an ad, after it reaches a certain amount of audience, it often starts repeating the ad to same users, who are less likely to click in that same ad impression further if they haven’t clicked or even if they have clicked in the first impression of the ad, they may get irritated & hide that ad or worst, hide all ads from your page. To avoid this, click on that particular ad campaign, go to “People reached” option where the frequency(average time an audience is shown that ad) is shown. It is recommended after the frequency reaches 3, stop running that ad & create a new ad for that same campaign & same audience. The more the frequency goes up(number of times an ad is shown to an user), the relevant score(shown in the extreme right of that particular ad column, the more it is the more relevant the ad) goes down & the CPM also goes up for that ad. Vice versa, the higher the relevant score, the CPM goes down for that ad. The relevant score also depends on how properly you’ve targeted your audience. If you haven’t targeted properly, it may show to irrelevant people & the relevant score will go down.
Relevancy score mainly depends on 3 factors – How your ad is performing, User engagement & Negative feedback of the ad by any user. In short, how people are reacting to your ad.
So, its better to stop showing the same ad to targeted audience multiple times & create a lookalike audience to reach new audience who are similar to the existing audience. Lookalike audience plays a vital role in able to reach to new & similar audiences.
Audience Insights – You can create your own audience here by filtering from the left sidebar & it will show you the potential audiences your ad can reach.
Designing a Facebook Ad
Design & Copywriting plays an important role in engagement of the audience with the ad. You can do basic graphic designing from Canva & other similar sites. You can also hire a freelancer graphic designer & copywriter & get your ad designed from sites like Fiverr, Freelancer, etc.
Before you start designing the ad, you should be clear about who your target market is, intent of the ad, audience type, their location, which language to use, brand value in the eyes of people.
You can look for your competitors’ keywords to reach their audience and can also survey their audience to find what they like. Also, if you’re a retailer & don’t have a good brand name in the market, you can run ads by the name of the big brand, whose products you’re selling to capture people’s attention.
AB Testing – You should always prepare multiple ad copies to see which one performs well. What big corporate marketers do is they split test multiple ad copies, observes for a week which one performs well, then eliminate the ones not performing & again introduce new variations to the ones performing well & the chain goes on like this every week & their ads keep on improving.
For example you can AB Test with different designs, images, text/no text in body & images, headline, choice of colour, etc. You can also test with different types of ads like images, video, slideshows, carousals, instant experience, etc. to see which one performs better.
Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel is a javascript code given by facebook to paste it in the header section of your website or landing page, so that facebook can collect data from your website & show analytics, track conversions from ads(custom conversions), optimize ads for conversions(use the tracked conversion data to further target similar audience who will likely convert), build custom audiences & lookalike audiences based on visitors & the data collected from website, retarget audience who have visited your website in a certain time interval, etc.
In order for Facebook Pixel to track data of an user visiting your website, the user must be logged in Facebook with the same browser, otherwise facebook cannot collect the user’s data.
How to install Facebook Pixel ? – Go to Ads Manager > on the top left, click on Ads Manager > under Measure & Reports, click Pixel.
Click on create a Pixel > copy & paste the javascript code in the header section of every page of your website. If you’re having wordpress website, you can install a plugin to add the code to your website. And facebook will now start collecting data from your website.
Custom conversions – If you’re running the ad for conversions, then custom conversions will be useful. You’ve to enter a landing page url that is a page that customers are landed once they convert, so once they click on an ad & end up on that landing page, a very small invisible pixel will upload on that page that will send data to facebook that the audience have converted from that ad. It also helps when you’re running multiple ads for same conversion & redirecting to same landing page after conversion & see which one is more effective as it will give the data which ad made more conversions.
Conversion optimization – To run conversion optimized ads, you need to have 2 things in place beforehand – 1) Facebook Pixel installed in your website, 2) custom conversions created, 3) audience created(or can create it in the ad itself). For ads you want to run to increase conversions, go to Create Ads > under conversion, choose conversions > scroll down & give a campaign name & continue. Enter the information asked by facebook & create your ad. So, facebook will show the ad only to people who they think is likely to convert.
Facebook initially shows the ad to a particular set of people, observes who converts & who not, then shows the ad to similar audiences who are converting having same charateristics or interests or activity or engagements & are likely to convert. But initially it takes time for facebook to test & understand which category of users converts well, so it will take time for the ad to start performing better & you should not panic initially for not getting good result.
Facebook needs a minimum 50 conversions beforehand running the ad because the delivery system needs data points to find people who are likely to take the action your ad set is optimized for.
Facebook Pixel Standard Events
4% Rule
You may have noticed facebook pages where there’re millions of likes & but post engagements are hardly a few hundreds, whereas, pages where there are a few thousand likes but post engagements are quiet high compared to the former, say a thousand. So, the former page is not able to engage its existing audience or the likes are just fake or paid.
Facebook first shows the post to a few people who have liked your page & sees how much engagement the post is getting. Depending on the results, it decides whether to show it to further users or not. If the post gets more engagement, it may also be shown to users who haven’t liked or followed your page but engages in that type of posts. If not it won’t be even shown to the people who liked the page as facebook wants to show its users post that they engage more to increase their time spent in facebook. So, the next question is
How to engage your existing audience in a Facebook Page/Group ?
So, let’s say there is already a million audience base, but engagements are few hundreds or a few thousands. The first thing you need to know is what kind of posts are getting more engagements from the audience. For this, experiment with posts – post images, GIFs, graphics, videos, interviews, podcasts, webinars, funny moments, memes, ask questions, texts with emojis, go live, whatever you can & observe what type posts are getting more engagement & which aren’t for say a month. If you observe a certain type of post or category of posts are getting more engagements while the others are not, get rid of what’s not working & instead focus & introduce variations in the top engagement posts to see if you can increase your engagements even more. Usually posts asking questions, generating curiocity attract more user engagement.
Along with content, you can also conduct contests, workshops, create controversies in comment sections to increase audience engagement.
Also while experimenting with posts, you can post at different times of a day & observe which post is getting more engagement, so you try pushing important posts to that time interval & other casual stuffs to off time. You can get that data from Facebook Analytics. Try to mix the posts with what’s trending now in that platform to further increase user engagement.
Also facebook asks to reply to a message in a page as quickly as possible, facebook sees how active your page is by how much time you’re taking to reply, so better to auto reply.
Now, the users keeps on liking more & more pages, so it’s not possible for Facebook to show every posts from every pages, because of the huge competition among pages who wants to put their posts in those user’s timeline. So, it will only show posts to users facebook thinks is relevent to the user’s interest. So you need to turn on ads for your post even to reach users who had liked your page.
An organic post reach of 4% of your total likes or above is considered as good engagement & well optimized page.
Text Overlay Tool
According to facebook, ad images with less than 20% text perform better or reach more people except book/album covers, album covers, product images, games, event posters, charts and graphs, magazine & newspaper covers, films and show posters, etc. They recommend to use little to no text on images for the ad to perform best. If you need to add more text you may consider adding them in the body text instead of in the image. To know more, read their guidelines here. Its recommended to check your image or thumbnail(in case of video) whether it is following the guidelines or not to reach maximum target.
Messenger Bot
Chatfuel, Mobilemonkey ….. More open rates than email, easy to communicate with customers,
Facebook Ads
Redirect clicks from your facebook to outside for e.g. your’ website’s landing pages where you can take their e-mail/register/sign up. If you keep them inside facebook, you’ll have to operate under facebook’s terms & condition which may have restrictions in terms of reaching them, like in a facebook page, but once you take them outside & take their details, you’ll be free to reach them. However, if you keep them inside facebook, you’ll get more reach, whereas if you link it to external links, facebook may reduce its reach.
User Engagement – First fb shows the post to a few people, sees their response, then decides whether to show it further to others or not. Boosted post also if not getting proper user engagement, fb won’t show it to its users & if still boosted will cost higher to run such ad. If user engagement is more on a boosted post, fb will show it to more people(also organically) & cost per reach will go down. If you keep users on fb, such as with image posts, lead ads, fb shows it to more users & charges less than posts that contains link that will redirect to your landing page.
Facebook ads image size 600 X 600. can resize image from canva
You can see more metrics of your ad by going to ads manager > columns, breakdown, reports (right of “view setup”)
Facebook Groups
Email to join group after collecting lead, market research, conduct polls for audience engagement & know their needs, know their interests, ask questions; while anyone asks to join group, ask for their email & phone number(lead generation), share blog link & other content links, customer support,
How to implement Bidding Strategy according to your sales funnel ?
- Cost per 1000 impression (CPM) – Brand Awareness
- Cost per click (CPC) – Interest/Consideration
- Cost per Aquisition/Conversion (CPA) – Take Action
If it feels too complicated or time-consuming, don’t worry. I can handle Facebook & Instagram Ads for you.