In our present business environment, you need to have a strategy for running Facebook ads for your business.
You absolutely could continue ignoring your strategy, dusting it under the rug, never to be seen again…
Out of sight, out of mind, right?
But that just won’t cut it if you want to grow. As a business owner or marketing lead, your daily battle is to expand your brand awareness and get customers into your sales funnel with the highest ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) possible.
Facebook has 1.6 billion daily users – that’s billion with a B – so it’s safe to assume that your audience is scrolling Facebook right now, waiting to discover your business and products.
If you aren’t targeting your audience on Facebook, you can bet that your competitors are – and that they are getting a leg up, gaining new market share, and growing awareness.
While the days of publishing a post on Facebook and getting hundreds of organic likes, shares, and comments are long gone for brands and businesses, you can still run effective Facebook ads on a minimal budget with a limited amount of time spent and get results.
Never tried and don’t know where to start? Here’s one option, or…
Use this 6-step strategy to run Facebook ads that grab the attention of your customers:
Table of Contents
Step 1 | Choose your Facebook ad objective.
What are your business goals? Sales, of course, in most cases.
But what about your specific advertising goals? Nail this down before you spend a single dime on your marketing. You need to know what you want to achieve with each ad to set the right advertising objectives.
You should know what you want people to do when they see your ad. For example, if you want to get email leads into your sales funnel, you can create ads that encourage people to visit a landing page where this is the clearcut objective.
Let’s take a look at three different categories, or goals, which can help you strategize on the different approaches you can use. [Hire one of the Best Facebook Marketing Agencies of 2022, in no time flat.]
(Brand) Awareness Objective
These objectives create interest in your product or service. Drive home what makes your business valuable and your USPs (unique selling points) that set you apart from the competition. Think of what problem you are solving and explain how your product fixes that.
This is a productive and generally low-cost way to generate brand awareness.
Even as little as $15-20USD per week can have a true impact on the number of eyes on your Facebook page (and business).
For example, say Credo is going to launch a new feature on our marketing matchmaking platform.
We identified a gap in the marketplace that is a huge time-saver for clients and created a brand new feature to fill that need.
We could use the Brand Awareness objective in the Facebook Ad creator section of the Facebook Ads Manager to point out the pain point we alleviate for customers and explain how this new feature fixes that problem for customers.
This generates awareness of the new feature – and so, for our brand.
Our team plans out a campaign that highlights the benefits of this exciting new feature and launches it with the Brand Awareness objective, which you can select in the backend of Facebook Ads Manager when creating your ad.
Consideration Objective
The objective here is to get people to think about your business and want to learn more.
Using Credo as an example again, we have a Success Stories section on our website.
This partially tells our story by providing insight into how we helped our clients hire the right marketing team – and the positive, tangible results those clients have had with their new marketing agency.
Using the Traffic objective, we could create a campaign that encourages people to visit the Success Stories page to build trust and validate the value of the marketing matchmaking service that we provide.
Conversions Objective
These objectives encourage people to buy or use your product or service.
This could also go back to the landing page example, where a conversion (the objective) is to extract emails through a dedicated squeeze page.
What is a conversion in Facebook? Simply put, it can be (almost) whatever you want it to be. It could be an email for a download, a specific time on site, or reaching the landing page everyone reaches after converting to an inquiry or buying a product.
For example, let’s say we notice an uptick in signups for one-on-one Concierge Sessions with John (our founder, who provides 60-minute consultation calls directly to clients).
There is a spike in purchases for this service, the signup page is getting more traffic, and we want to double down on the ad spend to keep that momentum going.
Using the Store traffic objective, we can create a campaign to encourage customers to utilize this additional feature.
An effective ad would explain why this Credo service saves clients time and money and then drive traffic to where they can purchase this (convert!).
Step 2 | Understand your audience.
Your audience is the people who are the most likely to become your customers. This is your target audience.
What is your target audience? A target audience helps focus your marketing efforts on the people most likely to buy your products. The most bang for your buck. The best ROAS and ROI (Return on Investment).
You will have one main customer persona – or you should. A persona is a description of your typical customer based on the metrics of demographics, behaviors, interests, and connections described below.
However, you can have several target audiences. Define your primary and secondary audiences, and proceed with allocating the marketing budget from there.
Facebook is a user-friendly platform with a level of specificity in targeting that is hard to top.
For objectives such as conversions, you want your audience to be as specific as possible. If you are aiming for brand awareness, a wider net will help get new customers into your sales funnel.
As mentioned, your target audience will have certain characteristics in common. These characteristics can be bucketed into three categories:
Demographics:
They may have the same:
- Age
- Gender
- Job Title
- Location
- Household Income
- Education
Interests:
Your ideal customer shares similar interests in certain products, hobbies, or activities with others like them. Say you want to target males, aged 24-35 who enjoy rock climbing in the Denver area for a new indoor climbing gym you just opened. Interests are just one of many ways to pinpoint potential buyers.
Behaviors:
People in your audience may read the same publications, buy the same items, or use the same device to access Facebook.
As an example, if you sell phone cases and a new edition of the latest super-protective case for the newest Apple phone just dropped, you could target Apple phone users.
Connections:
You can target people connected to your page, who liked any of your posts, or who were shown any of your ads.
You can also exclude this group if you run an ad to grow your following or think your ad dollars are better spent elsewhere.
Step 3 | Create eye-catching content.
If you put out lackluster content, you will get lackluster results.
Quality content builds trust. Quality content, made for your audience, connects you to them.
Lazy and generic content, whether photos, copy, or video, can likely do more harm than good to your brand.
You can crush it with all the other steps on this list but if you pair that strategy with subpar content that bores your audience, you set yourself up to fail before you even begin.
This crew from Texas, Houston IT Developers, nailed why content is one place you just can’t cut yourself any slack:
Businesses have to find exciting ways to engage people and stand out from the crowd. This is the reason why the adage “content is the king” has become more relevant today in 2022. The need for efficient content marketing is growing exponentially to connect businesses with potential customers and perhaps more importantly to connect with the outcomes businesses are looking for.
Step 4 | Decide where to run your Facebook ad.
Placements are where you run your ads. Ads can appear on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network.
Based on your ad type and settings, you can choose different placements. Depending on your objective and content, some placements may not be available.
Typically, the best option is to run multiple placements.
This increases the number of people who can see your ad and can improve ad results.
More placements do not mean more expensive ads but beware when selecting the Audience Network for your ads.
Money can be spent here rather fast and you have little control over where the ads are placed within the Audience Network.
The list of ad placements on Facebook is long – and getting longer every day. This includes everything from Stories and Reels to the Oculus mobile app.
Step 5 | Set your budget and ad spend.
You control your advertising budget.
It can be tough to nail down your budget. This free tool makes that easy.
In your ad settings, this is the total amount that you want to spend daily, throughout the campaign, or leave it spending with no end date (not suggested).
You can edit this whenever you’d like. But again, you want to set a budget, campaign end date, or at the very least monitor ad spend once a day.
Many unwitting advertisers set up a first-time campaign, came back two weeks later, realized they set a daily budget instead of a total campaign budget, and spent five times the initial plan.
That’s months of marketing budget burned in two weeks. A very expensive ouch.
Step 6 | Measure and learn from results.
Measure. Your. Results. This cannot be said enough.
If you don’t measure the results of your ads, you have no idea what is working and what is not working. You are ignoring data that can directly improve your ROAS.
With the right strategy and tools, measurement is fairly straightforward with the Facebook Ads Manager.
One negative that you may have heard of or experienced with the Facebook Marketing Suite is that it can be hard to link marketing dollars spent to conversions and sales.
It can be difficult to see the total business value of all of your marketing activities on Facebook – encompassing ads, organic posts, articles, and more.
Facebook measurement tools now do a better job to capture that total value.
This includes Facebook pixel and Facebook Conversion API tools, which Davie Fogarty used to build a multi-million dollar e-commerce goliath on the back of Facebook Ads in his early twenties.
He explains his simple Facebook Ad setup and strategy here:
Use tips from this video and this simple, 6-step strategy to optimize your Facebook marketing.
Done right, your business can flourish.
Done wrong, you’re just wasting time and money.
Over time, as your business grows, your campaign objectives will change.
Campaigns will shift from building awareness to customer acquisition.
Then, you shift ad creative and objectives to encourage people to make a purchase or sign up for an event to get that conversion.
Though frustrating at times to use, Facebook Ads are a marketing channel your business needs to be active and engaged with.
Need a hand with your Facebook marketing? Check out the average Facebook Advertising and Consultant Rates or find the Best Trusted Facebook Ads Companies of 2022.
