10 Quick and Easy Tips for Facebook Advertising Success

Don’t worry, pretty much every business owner is in the same boat, they’d like more clients and more sales.

The question then is whether to look at traditional methods like billboards, newspaper and radio (expensive and nearly impossible to measure results) or to dip your toe into the exciting world of digital marketing. Advertising on Facebook is one option that you seriously do not want to overlook.

Facebook advertising is incredible in its ability to choose a very specific target audience, monitor the effectiveness of your ads, and continually optimise your campaigns to test new audiences, offers and to continually improve the results of your ads.

To get the best results from Facebook Advertising, it takes a few key steps which we’ve broken up into the Account Setup phase and the Campaign Creation phase.

Account Setup

Use Facebook Ads Manager.

Lots of people that say that Facebook ads haven’t work for them in the past have just tried boosting a post for a few dollars and not seen a return, sadly with that approach you really are limiting your chance of any success.

Read here to see why we recommend not to Boost posts.

Our advice is to always use the Ads Manager platform. Firstly, it allows you to use all the various campaign objectives and full audience targeting capabilities. Secondly, it accumulates all the data on your ad campaigns and presents them in comparison to your campaign objectives in the clearest way. This allows you to make informed decisions based on your ad’s performance.

Using that information, you can alter the campaign, adjust the budget and see what audiences or what ads are performing the best.

Read here to see how to understand your Facebook ads data.

Facebook Ad Manager is also available as a smartphone app, but I’d strongly recommend using the desktop version and only using the app in an emergency as it still doesn’t give you the amount of information the desktop version does and it can be a little glitchy.

If you have a team or want to bring in a marketing agency you will need to use Business Manager, Business Manager allows you to bring in team members which you’re not Facebook friends with as well as giving different permissions and accesses to your various team members.

Use the Facebook Pixel.

The Facebook pixel is a small piece of code that you place on your website that tracks visitors’ actions in the same way that a cookie works. That code sends the data to Facebook where it is compared with their record of users that have looked at or clicked on your ad. This is how Facebook can then generate accurate data for actions that happen off of Facebook like purchases, viewing particular pages and content or even more specific actions like clicking particular buttons, adding products to cart but not purchasing or viewing a booking page but not scheduling an appointment.

In addition to the tracking aspect, it is also another method of building an audience. A common strategy is to use that information to target people that added to cart but then didn’t purchase with an ad to try and give them that extra nudge sometimes even including a discount code.

Download the free “Pixel Helper” chrome extension to test your Pixel as well as see how other websites are using theirs.

Retarget and Direct Your Ads to Existing Contacts.

Selling a product directly from a Facebook ad to a cold audience is incredibly difficult and not a strategy we typically recommend. People buy from brands that they know, like and trust and so you must build up that awareness and trust before pitching your services.

The generally accepted guidance is that a customer needs at least 5 points of contact before they’re willing to make a purchase and that is even higher for big-ticket items.

The great thing with Facebook is that once you have a database of contacts, you can upload that customer or email list and Facebook will find all of the people on that list it can match to a Facebook profile, and you now have a warm audience of people that already know you!

One common approach for this strategy is to give something away for free or a low price in return for the contacts email address, which allows you to then retarget for your higher ticket program and products.

Campaign Creation

Begin with a Clear Goal.

This is one of the most common mistakes made and why many people have tried Facebook Advertising and got minimal results to show for it. Facebook gives you a clear choice of objectives for your advertising campaign and choosing the most appropriate one for your own objective is crucial.

Three of the most common goals within the coaching industry would be to generate sales from the ad for coached that have online programs (Conversion Campaign), to build an email list for future marketing (Lead Campaign) or to increase awareness of your business and your brand by showing them your key content (Traffic Campaign). Everything about your ad should be constructed with your primary goal in mind in terms of messaging, but you also need to let Facebook help you by telling it to optimise and find the right type of people to display your ad to.

Choose the Geographic Area.

Are you a coach that only works in person 1-to-1? Then you’re going to have a highly focused geographic search. Does your area have a lot of tourists? Then you’re likely to want to be even more specific and choose the people that live in your area not just travelling through. Or the opposite might be true if you work with people that commute into your region and visit you during lunch or after work.

For coaches that offer online coaching or sell online courses, then the world is your oyster and you could select any countries you would like to work with.  Whichever situation you’re in its important to take the time to plan and map everything out before going live and then trying to fix and change things on the fly.

Check out this article to laser focus your audience targeting.

Customise Your Ad for your Demographic.

It’s been highly publicised that Facebooks ability to advertise so successfully is based on the wealth of information it collects about its users. Because of this, you can define your audience based on general demographic information like age, gender, job title and location but you can also go into incredibly granular detail whereby you choose specific interests or even exclude others. Combining these criteria together is what allows you to be so precise with the audience you are targeting but also with the messaging you use to resonate with that audience.

For example, a health coach is likely to have some sort of age range they typically work with. If they work online, they could choose worldwide or a range of countries but then I’d recommend selecting the appropriate language. A sensible interest target would be “weight loss” and for the messaging to resonate with the audience, I’d recommend splitting the ad campaigns by gender because especially in the fitness space the objectives and goals can be very different.

In this example, we could narrow the search by choosing the gender and further narrow by adding an extra interest of “women’s health.”

Read here to improve your audience targeting.

Set Your Budget.

No one wants to end up with an unexpected bill! Be careful when choosing your budget and how that budget will be used. If you have a time-specific promotion like a special promotion or a course launch for example, you can set your budget and provide an end date.

Alternatively, you can choose to run ads continuously and you can select how much you are willing to pay per day, for example, an evergreen campaign that gives away a lead magnet. Budgets are therefore set as a maximum daily expenditure or total expenditure for the campaign. It’s essential to go in and check that Facebook is spending the amount you were expecting so you can avoid any nasty surprises!

Include a Clear and Relevant Call to Action (CTA).

You want to make it as easy as possible for people to take your desired objective, the easiest way to do that? Ask them to do it!

If you’re offering a free download then write “Click the link to Download Here”, if it’s a traffic campaign “Tap Now to Learn More”. If you’re writing longer sales copy then consider adding your call to action more than once, we typically do this with a CTA towards the top and at the bottom.

Facebook does give some CTA options for the button as well so as important as it is to add a CTA in your copy, it is equally important to choose the correct CTA button that makes the most sense for your desired outcome.

Use Compelling Images and Videos.

We see more adverts now than ever before, as a result of that is a phenomenon known as “ad blindness”. The purpose of your ad creative is to grab people’s attention and stop them scrolling, sometimes referred to as a pattern interrupt.

A boring, generic stock image is not going to work anymore. People tend to respond better to “real images” and Facebook wants that as well as they have repeatedly expressed their focus is on protecting the user experience.

For coaches, if you’ve done a speaking gig then those photos work well. For health coaches, images of you working with your clients looking happy and getting results.

Even better than images are videos. Experiment with testimonial videos from happy clients or you explaining who you are, what you do and how you help people. Don’t worry about needing huge production value either, people like authenticity and just being yourself and recording straight from your phone can be enough to get great results.

This is also the opportunity to be creative so try funny GIF’s, animations and emojis in your copy as well, again the objective is to get people to stop mindlessly scrolling.

Build Engagement on Your Posts.

This works a similar way to Boosting a post, but we’d recommend using the ads manager to create a campaign to do it. This is different from a standard ad campaign in that this uses an existing post. The campaign objectives you’re likely to apply for this would be Reach, Impressions or Engagement.

We typically choose Engagement as it means it will generate lots of social proof (likes, comments and shares) which all contribute to building credibility and that trust that is so important.

I hope that’s been helpful, if you’re interested in learning how ChainBreak Marketing can help you achieve your goals with Facebook advertising then schedule a call today 😊