How to optimize Facebook ads campaigns to promote your business
You may have a fantastic product or service, but that’s only half the battle when it comes to getting your business off the ground.
While the quality of your offering should ensure the long-term success of your company, if you want to make any money, you will need an effective advertising strategy to get things rolling. You can visit The Utopia for Facebook ads questions like, “what is Facebook detailed targeting expansion?”
Facebook ads are more popular than ever, and it can be tempting to dive right in with some adverts and a small budget because, well, that’s what everyone else is doing, right?
While Facebook Ads can work tremendously well providing cost-effective sales, without a researched and planned out strategy, the likelihood is that you will end up wasting most of your money. With this in mind, this article will look at some mistakes to avoid and some tips to help you create the best return on investment with your Facebook Ads campaigns.
Set up your Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel lets you retarget your website’s visitors and track “conversions” (sales or leads) inside Facebook Ads Manager.
Setting up the Pixel is relatively straightforward, but if you don’t have any technical expertise, you can either watch a step-by-step YouTube tutorial on how to do it or hire a freelance expert from a website such as UpWork or PeoplePerHour.
Either way, you will need to register a Facebook Ads Manager Account and a Google Tag Manager account. This only takes a few minutes to do. You will also need access to the “backend of your website” or at least know which platform you are using for your website – for example, WordPress and Shopify will have slightly different installation protocols.
Warm up your audiences with value
It’s generally pretty hard to get people who have never heard of your brand before to make a purchase or to sign up straight from Facebook. People tend to be scrolling through their newsfeeds, looking for something interesting. Unlike with Google Ads, with Facebook, it isn’t easy to get your ads in front of people who are actively searching for your product or service, with the intent to buy or sign up.
With this in mind, consider creating an ad set that warms up your target audience with a free offer or some educational or entertaining content. Most Facebook users will be at the top of your “sales funnel” and, as such, won’t respond well or engage readily with ads that directly look to drive a sale or lead.
For example, let’s say you are starting up a business as a therapist; you could offer a free Cognitive Behavioural Therapy guide with self-guided exercises. You could then follow up this advert and show a second advert to those who engaged with the first advert.
The second advert could be shown to those users who downloaded the guide for a free online therapy consultation. Once people are aware of your business and you have demonstrated some level of expertise, they are more likely to convert to a lead or a sale than a cold audience.
Whatever you offer in your first advert (or set of adverts), make sure it is of value to your target audience. Invest time in creating something educational or valuable. The content can be repurposed for your blog, email marketing and YouTube channel.
Use strategic retargeting
As outlined above, you can retarget users who have visited your website previously or users who have engaged with your Facebook posts or ads. The key is to create Facebook custom audiences so that you can guide users through a sales funnel.
Custom Audiences have changed somewhat since the iOS 14 update. In your Ads Manager, you still need to click on “Audiences,” “Create Audience,” and then “Custom Audience.” You can then choose to create an audience based on people who have previously interacted with your website, app, Facebook page etc.
You can also create a lookalike audience based on an email list or customer database. Facebook can match users with their email addresses. You can then target them with Facebook Ads or create a lookalike audience of users who shared similar demographics, interests and locations to the people on your list. This YouTube guide shows you how to create different audiences.
Split test your ads
To optimize any advert, you will need to test it against other adverts. For example, if you are running a Facebook Ads campaign, to begin with, you should test different ad formats – a video, a single image ad, a carousel.
When you have enough data to decide which format performs best, you can further test your ads by pausing the worst-performing ad and introducing a new one. For example, if video ads perform the best, but single image ads perform the worst after 3,000 clicks on your ads, pause the image ad and create a different video ad.
You can then go on to test which type of video performs the best. For example, you could create one video showcasing your product directly and another outlining some tangible benefits of your ad. You could have one advert featuring a model with the product and another with just the product.
Either way, keep refining and testing until you find the best performing format and designs. You can then test and refine your ads by trying different descriptions, headlines and calls to action.
Test your ads for a set number of days or a set number of interactions before making any decisions.
Use click to call ads
While forms, website visits and live chats can convert leads into sales very effectively, when it comes to higher-end products and services, for example, those related to real estate and property, phone calls are usually the best medium for lead generation.
As of 2020, it is possible to add a “Call Now” “call to action” or CTA button to your Facebook adverts. This YouTube tutorial guides you through how to add a “Call Now” button to your adverts. If you sell internationally or have an online business as a side-hustle while you work a regular job, answering all of your calls could be an issue.
With this in mind, consider using a 24/7 phone answering service with a dedicated receptionist. With a high-quality receptionist service, you can give the impression of being a highly professional and large organization, even if you are running the business from your bedroom. In addition, with a 24/7 answering service, you’ll never have to worry about missing any calls.
Use Zapier for Facebook leads
Another excellent tip for Facebook Ads, particularly Facebook lead generation ads, is to use Zapier to notify you each time a lead is generated. There is a free version of the app that you can get started with, but you will generally need to sign up for one of the premium accounts to integrate the tool with Facebook Ads.
You will need to have a lead form already set up before you can link it to Zapier. You can add all of your leads to a Google Sheet, and you can set up an SMS message to notify you each time a lead is generated by your advert.
How can you use Facebook ads to promote your business?
Creating successful Facebook Ads campaigns can take time. This is because you will often need to retarget audiences and test different ad formats and designs. Remember that you need to grab a user’s attention because when people are on Facebook, they are usually scrolling through their newsfeed and not actively searching for your product or service.
