With over 2.74 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the world's most popular social media platform. From a marketing perspective, there are many opportunities to reach new audiences and expand the reach of your business.
So what's the purpose of Facebook Ads? Reach more people who will eventually become customers.
Maybe you already have a business account on Facebook and want to boost the results of this account. After all, you want to send more visitors to a specific landing page. A goal you can achieve through Facebook Ads – and it doesn't even have to cost that much money. In this article you can read exactly how you can get started with advertising on this medium.
What is Facebook ads?
Facebook advertising is the ability to post paid messages on Facebook. These are promoted so that they are shown to more users from your target group.
A Facebook ad can help you:
Increase the amount of followers (by promoting your Facebook page)
Present your services or products
Send customers to your physical locations (such as stores)
Promote your website (which will drive more traffic)
To summarise this, the goal of Facebook Ads is to reach more potential customers. If you create ad campaigns the right way you'll be able to target the type of customers that will have most interest in your business and your products or services.
What's the difference between organic Facebook posts and Facebook Ads?
Almost every company has posted something on Facebook at least once. Usually business owners will promote their own services or products on their Facebook page, introduce a new team member, or share a blog about their industry. It's fairly simple to make, quickly write a short message, add a link and or image and you're all set. These type of posts are called organic Facebook posts.
Advertisements on Facebook can also be posted in the form of a message, but with Facebook Ads there is the option to opt for other promotions too instead of simply relying on messages. You can create a Facebook Ad that shows up in the feed instead or opt in to display your ad campaigns in Facebook messenger or the Audience Network of Facebook. There are however many more options that we won't explore, otherwise this post would become very lengthy!
The biggest difference between an organic post and an advertisement post is that organic posts only show up in the feed of users that have already followed or liked your page. With Facebook Ads your post will show up in the feed of your target audience (and the segment you select), even if these people haven't interacted with your business prior.
What makes advertising on Facebook interesting?
In addition to reaching a new target group, advertising on Facebook is also interesting for reaching people who have already come into contact with your company online. This is what remarketing is all about.
So what is remarketing?
For those of you who are unfamiliar, remarketing works by following your leads around the web with related offers. When a user visits your website they are “cookied” or tagged. To remarket to these visitors, a code is placed on the page that the user visits, which then triggers your ads to follow that cookied user around the web, whether that be on a social media site or on various websites across the internet. So when you see ads on the sidebars or top banners of other sites of the new dining set you just browsed on Pottery Barn, this isn’t a coincidence or “fate,” it’s remarketing.
But there is more to it:
Because Facebook is such a data-driven platform, you can target your target group very specifically. They know a lot about its users and can therefore make sure that your target group is highly-qualified (if you setup your segments the right way)
Facebook has the best ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) of all social media channels. This makes it an effective medium to advertise on
You don't need to have a huge budget to start advertising on Facebook. We've seen smaller shows get results with budgets of less than $500 a month
With over 2 billion active users, you instantly get access to one of the largest platforms in the world, giving you access to a very large audience to showcase your business to
It is a valuable addition to your organic social media content and it helps people become familiar with your brand
Now that you've learnt more about the basics of Facebook Advertising and why it's interesting for your business, let's move on and take a look at how it works.
The best campaign structure for Facebook ads
Ads on Facebook consist of three layers:
Campaigns
Ad sets
The actual ads
Campaigns: the overarching part of all individual advertisements. When you change something here, it also changes everything for the ads that fall under this campaign. In the campaign settings you can:
Set a name for your campaign
Limit the maximum spent on the specific campaign (note: this only applies if you don't want to set ad specific budgets)
A goal for your ads, such as more conversions or more traffic to your website
Ads sets: this is where you determine who gets to see your ads. In the ads sets settings you can:
Determine who gets to see your ads (who is your target audience? pro-tip: separate them into warm and cold leads)
The maximum budget you want to set for the ads per day (unless you've already set a campaign specific budget)
Placement of your ads (where do you want your ads to be displayed?)
Ads: the individual ads. This is where you can create multiple designs (to A/B test for example) and choose different formats such as video, images, a carrousel of images, a sponsored message, etc. This is where you can:
Determine the actual look and feel of your individual advertisement
Which advertising form you want to start using
How does Facebook advertising work?
Advertising on Facebook, how do you do that exactly? How do you ensure that you take the right steps for a profitable campaign and do not incur too many costs?
The success of a Facebook ad depends on five important factors, namely: ad copy, visual material, the target group, the offer and the strategy of the company. When these factors are correct, you can effectively use Facebook to achieve brand awareness, engagement, website visitors and conversion.
Whether you're advertising a free lead magnet or a paid product, you're competing against thousands of other advertisers. That is why it is necessary to create an irresistible offer, what makes you really unique?
If you sell photo cameras via Facebook, a photo camera is not immediately distinctive. Although a significant discount is distinctive, this immediately reduces your margin, so that you have less budget to advertise on Facebook. Also, only one provider can offer the cheapest price, so this strategy is not always successful.
You will have to find another way to really create a distinctive and irresistible offer. Giving away a book against payment of the shipping costs was one such offer. You could see this immediately in the results. Giving away a physical book attracted much more attention and boosted conversion compared to a free e-book.
Creating an irresistible offer starts with determining who your target audience is. As a seller of photo cameras, there is a good chance that someone is interested in photography. Why not give away a digital photo course as a bonus when you buy a photo camera? Such a course only needs to be taken once and can then be sold to the value of 49 euros as a bonus when buying a camera. This way you increase the value of a purchase from your company.
Lifetime value of a customer
A customer's lifetime value is an important number when it comes to advertising on Facebook. When you know what a customer is worth, you also know what advertising budget you can spend on getting a new customer.
Every day new companies are started and every day more ads are placed on channels such as Facebook. By ensuring that you increase your customer value or margin, you can afford to make a larger marketing budget available. This makes it easier to beat your competitors.
The lifetime value of a customer is determined by three factors:
A customer's average number of transactions per month
The average profit per trade
How long a customer stays a customer on average
You can influence the lifetime value by looking at whether you can make a customer purchase more often, increase the profit per order (by obtaining upsells, cross selling or better purchasing conditions) and increasing a customer's retention.
It could be that when you start advertising you don't receive any profit from your first order, but no need to worry! When you know that a customer places an average of two more orders after that, or takes out a long-term subscription, you know that more purchases will most likely follow. Knowing your numbers can help you win the advertising game over your competitors.
Writing the perfect Facebook Ad copy
With a clear advertising strategy on Facebook and an irresistible offer, writing a powerful ad copy immediately becomes a lot easier. Your ad copy is even more important than the audiences you set in Facebook.
Below this I am sharing with you a format on how to write an ad copy, there is no single format that is guaranteed to work. However, you can test with short ad texts, long ad texts, various headlines, positive ad text (benefits) or negative ad text (pain points, loss aversion).
To write only one ad copy, that doesn't sound like it is a hugely good investment, does it? As you don't want to bet all your money on one ad. Using multiple versions of, for example with a different headline and introduction, you can yield different results. Facebook shows the first two lines of your ad text on mobile devices, so it's important to experiment with this and A/B test your ads!
What can you do to write an attractive (attention grabbing) headline?
Be creative and don't limit yourself, but here are some of the examples we tend to use for our ads:
Current events: such as a news fragment about your product or target group
Advantages of your offer: which frustrations does your product solve?
Pain point of the customer: ensure recognition by naming the pain point
Enthusiasm: people also 'read' your enthusiasm in your texts
Fear of a customer: set your target group in motion by naming a 'fear'
Objection from a customer: negates a possible objection to purchase
Result from a customer: use testimonials in the headline of your ads
Shock and awe: name shocking data, or the results of an investigation
Statement: a statement stirs the tongue. This can be a powerful start to an ad, but be prepared for a deluge of opinion. Positive and Negative
3 recommendations for writing your texts:
Writing advertisement texts according to the AIDA Model (explanation and examples)
How do you make good bullet points that are clear?
Step-by-step plan for writing commercial texts (TIPS Formula)
Outsource Facebook advertising?
Marketing agencies come in many different shapes and sizes. Only you can decide for yourself what is the best choice for you. However, I can give you a number of tips that you can pay attention to during the introduction to a marketing agency.
We regularly hear horror stories from customers. If you listen carefully, you will actually hear five painful points where collaborations fail:
Incorrect expectations (marketing agencies cannot guarantee results)
Poor communication (this works both ways, with the customer as well as with the marketing agency)
Not capable (well, some specialists or agencies make a mess of it)
Strategy is lacking (just a few nice calls / meetings won't cut it)
Not proactive (you can expect a bit of pro-activity from a marketing agency)
That said, it's important to determine what you're looking for in a partnership with a marketing agency. Are you looking for helping hands, or for a marketer who thinks strategically with you? What do you find important in a collaboration? What role do you play in the collaboration? Do you write the texts and provide the visual material or do you also leave this to the marketing agency?
What should you pay attention to when selecting a partner?
Before you select a partner to work with for your Facebook Advertising strategy, we recommend you look at the following:
View the results achieved, what experiences does someone have (or where do they lack experience) - do they understand your industry?
Meet up and enjoy a cup of coffee (or tea) to determine if a partner is the right fit for you.
Some marketing agencies work with long-term contracts. With other marketing agencies you can cancel daily or monthly. Always start with a pilot instead of a long-term contract.
Insight into results, which figures will you aim for? Don't let everything depend on the marketing agency. You are the entrepreneur, you should also know what your expenses are and what this yields.
What happens if the collaboration doesn't work?
Make clear agreements, who is responsible for what? This is how you prevent miscommunication
Enjoyed reading this post? Do me a favor and share it on your favorite social media platform, such as Facebook! 😌