For many marketers and businesses, advertising on Facebook is a no-brainer. After all, with 2.41 billion monthly active users, you can reach any type of audience you have in mind.
However, just setting up an ad and praying it will work is the fastest way to throw your ad budget on fire. If you truly want to make a difference, then you need a Facebook advertising strategy to capture more leads and customers on the platform.
In this short blog post, you'll learn how to develop a Facebook advertising strategy and what elements you need to include in it, as well as some of the useful Facebook ad tools you can employ to achieve your goals.
1. Set advertising goals
You've probably heard this before. But it needs to be said again. Without goals, it's difficult to judge the effectiveness of your advertising strategy. More so, you're unable to update and improve your strategy.
Some of the common goals marketers have when advertising on Facebook are:
- Improving brand awareness
- Increasing website traffic
- Increasing reach
- Acquiring leads
- Making sales
Now, just picking one of these goals is not enough. You need to make your goal as clear as possible.
This is where you should apply the SMART acronym. Your goals should be specific, measurable, aspirational, realistic, and time-bound.
Once you know what your goals are, you can craft ads that are designed to help you achieve these goals: from the copy you use to the visuals and to the call to action.
2. Create a buyer persona
No matter how great your offer may be, not everyone is going to have an interest in it. Even if you're the greatest marketer in the universe, it will be a waste of your ad budget to show your ads to these people.
To ensure you're giving your ad the best chance to convert your audience, you have to create a document with details of your ideal customer. Your buyer persona will contain vital details about your ideal audience such as:
- Name
- Location
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
- Common behaviors
Your buyer persona should contain as many details as possible because it will affect your ad copy, headline, ad creative, and your targeting options.
A tool like Amplitude can help you learn how people use your website and products to understand your ideal customer's user behaviour. Or you can use a social listening tool like Awario to monitor your audience and learn more about them so that you can better market to them.
You can also use Facebook Audience Insights to gather more details about your target audience. You can have a few buyer personas if you're advertising different types of products.
After capturing these details, you should take advantage of Facebook's extensive targeting options so that you can reach the people who are most likely to be interested in your offer.
3. Set budgets
To advertise on Facebook, you need to spend money. But how do you do it?
There are 2 ways to set your ad budget in the Ad Set settings if you want to put a limit. These are:
- Daily budget
- Lifetime budget
You can also set the schedule of when your ad will start and end. This will ensure you don't spend over your budget.
If you have a low budget, you should use the daily budget as this will allow you to control your spending rather than lifetime budget which can burn through your money quickly.
To make your budget allocation more effective, you can activate budget optimization. Facebook will then allocate your funds to the best-performing ads so that you'll get the best results for your ad spend.
When setting your budget, consider your goals but also keep in mind that there will likely be a lot of experimentation and optimizing along the way. That means that you might increase the budget for an ad that is performing very well, stop ads that aren’t performing as well as they should, and so on.
You can use a tool like AdsReport to easily track all of your Facebook ad accounts and campaigns:
This will allow you to easily track the results of all your ads in one place so that you can make decisions on the spot.
4. Use boosted posts to increase reach
Boosted posts are beneficial when you're looking to increase reach and awareness for a particular piece of information. Did you just launch a new product? Or add an important feature that will differentiate your service from competitors?
You can boost your post to the right audience to ensure people find out about your news and updates.
To get the best results, you should boost posts that already have a high organic engagement. This will help boost their performance by reaching more people.
One advantage with boosted posts is that they're easier and faster to set up than traditional ads. Just identify the post you want to boost and select Boost Post, as you can see in the screenshot above.
5. Implement remarketing ads to improve conversions
Most times, people will visit your website and leave without taking your intended action. In fact, Ad Roll found that 98% of your first-time visitors will leave without converting.
However, Facebook remarketing ads can help bring these people back for conversion. And, you can target users based on the action they carried out on your website.
Did they visit a product specification page? Or abandon their cart? Facebook provides many options for your remarketing ads.
To do this, you'll have to install Facebook pixel into your website to track Facebook users' actions.
6. Exploit Facebook lead ads
Referring Facebook users to your landing page before capturing their details is the long way to acquiring leads. But that's no guarantee it's the best way.
Some users may enjoy their Facebook experience so much that they will be reluctant to leave the app. With Facebook lead ads, there's no worry about this since you can capture leads right on Facebook.
Users can submit their details which are pre-filled from their Facebook account. It makes lead acquisition easier and has little impact on Facebook user experience.
To use this option, you'll have to select "Lead generation" as your campaign objective.
After going through the ad and lead form design process, you can now collect the information you need from your leads. There's an option to download a CSV file of the details from your Facebook page.
Alternatively, you can use a tool like AdEspresso to connect your lead capture forms to your email service provider or CRM software. With this, you can get your leads into your sales funnel for further processing.
With the use of Facebook lead ads, Trilogy Funding, mortgage brokers, spent $17,358 to capture 1,429 subscribers. This is $12.15 for each subscriber which is a good value for a mortgage broker. See the case study for further detail.
7. Prevent ad fatigue
When you launch an ad, you might see a rise in performance. But over time, you might also begin to notice a drop.
Ad fatigue occurs when you show an ad to a user too many times. Thus, they become less responsive to your ads.
Your brand can even become annoying and attract negative feedback which is the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. The best practice is to show an ad about 1 to 3 times to a Facebook user. This will help you keep your relevancy score high.
For instance, in their study AdEspresso found that as the frequency of ad views increases, the click-through rate (CTR) goes down and the cost-per-click (CPC) goes up.
Facebook helps to prevent this by showing your ads to the right people that will likely take your intended action. If your goal is daily unique reach, then it's possible to put a cap on the number of times your ad will be delivered.
Facebook says there isn’t a one size fits all. After its research, it recommends you consider ad frequency based on these factors:
You should experiment with your ad elements from time to time to get the best performance.
8. Have a plan for A/B testing
If you want to get the best results possible from advertising, you have to know that A/B testing is a must. You should try various changes to your ad elements and see how those changes affect conversions.
Some elements of your Facebook ads to test are:
- Images (and other creative)
- Ad headline
- Ad copy
- Offer
It's vital to test a single element at a time and allow your tests to run for a good time. This will show you the changes responsible for your results and increase your confidence in those results.
While testing, you should have your ad variations in different ad sets. This will allow your test to run for as long as you want. If you have both ads in a single ad set, Facebook will pick a winner too early and shut down the other variant.
Conclusion
To get the best out of your Facebook ads and budget, you need to have a strategy that will guide you through the whole process. Failure to have a strategy means you're just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Add these 8 elements to your Facebook advertising strategy today to achieve more conversions from your ad spend.
