If I had a dollar for every time a business owner or marketer said they’ve tried Facebook Advertising but it didn’t work, I’d be a millionaire. In most cases businesses have done things like boost posts or advertise directly from their Facebook Page. The thing is, if these are tactics you are using, you may be paying more for your Facebook Ads than necessary. In fact, the strategy I am going to spell out for you below will completely put you off ever boosting a Facebook post again.
Why Advertise on Facebook
Do you remember the good ole days when every Facebook Page owner could reach 100% of their followers with every post? Well, if you’ve been around since then you’ll know that Facebook has drastically reduced organic reach. If you have a really strong, loyal following that hangs on your every word, you may be lucky enough to reach a whopping 20% of your followers on the platform. If you don’t, you’ll be lucky to reach 6%. The reality is that if you want to reach your community on Facebook, you need to cough up some cash, but you don’t need to spend as much as Facebook would have you believe and if you leave the Boost button well alone, there are better ways to squeeze more value out of your Facebook Ad dollar.
Identify and Advertise Your Hero Content
Recently I was talking to my business colleague and Facebook Ads guru Phil McGregor about an ad strategy for a client of mine, and he half-jokingly made the comment, “can you tell me how to get people to write blog posts that aren’t salesy so they can reach more people?” Phil had a point. Most of the blog posts businesses produce are pretty promotional in nature. It may seem counter-intuitive to write a post that doesn’t lead people immediately to a sales conversation, but stay with me on this. Here’s the strategy I suggest based on Phil’s idea of how you can get your Facebook Ads really working for you. It’s a strategy we use with our content marketing clients and it works really well.
Help First
I’ve said before that people are more likely to buy from you if you help them first. This has never been truer. Content is more important than ever before. Globally we are producing more content every 2 days than was produced from the beginning of time right up until 2003. That is a staggering and sobering statistic. The problem with that is, there is also a lot of noise. Our ability to consume content is limited, so people look for the most efficient ways to consume information. They listen to and read only what is most relevant to them, so if you are churning out content just for the sake of it, you will be lost in the crowd. The challenge, then, is to make darn sure the content you’re producing is meeting the needs of people you want to reach. Basically, because people want to research and feel helped before they buy, want to build trust and establish a rapport with businesses, and feel good about the buying decisions they make, using Facebook Ads as yet another way to establish your authority, profile and trust is a great strategy. Before talking about how to create content that you can leverage in ads, I want to stress that it’s important to build a relevant audience on Facebook first, All of your content on the platform should be geared towards a specific community. It’s wise to profile your perfect clients in great detail prior to creating any content. It’s something I spend a lot of time on before formulating any social media or content strategy for my clients and it consistently pays off. Doing your homework first can save a lot of headaches, not to mention unnecessary cost later.
How to Create Your Hero Content
Phil’s idea is to choose 5 blog posts or pieces of content that you can put into advertising funnels through the Power Editor tool (available to Chrome Users). Power Editor basically enables you to fine-tune and carefully target your advertising. It is way more powerful than creating ads straight from your Facebook Page. The content you produce should be:
- solving a problem for people or helping them with something that is keeping them awake at night.
- relatable to the products and services you offer
- highly shareable and
- highly digestible. Add storytelling elements, bold your headings and edit it so that it is easy for people to skim through it.
Once you have your five articles (they could also be videos and podcasts embedded on your blog), create ads that encourage people to click through to them. These ads are not directly selling anything, instead they are helping, informing and educating your audience in a bid to identify the low hanging fruit, so we marketers have a fancy name for them: Native Ads. With Native Ads you don’t need to ask for an email in exchange for the information you share, all you need is a little piece of code on your website that tracks your website visitors’ behaviour –More on that in a minute.
Your First Native Ad Campaign
Facebook Ads are split into hierarchies. Every ad sits within an ad set and every ad set sits within an overall campaign. You first create a campaign, then ad sets, then ads. Alternatively, give the brief to a Facebook Ads professional and let them do it. This will save you time and enable you to focus on your high value work rather than get bogged down in the technicalities of Facebook Advertising. Even if you are not doing ads yourself, you’ll still need to write the copy (or hire an expert copywriter to write it for you). Make sure your ads are conversational in tone, tell people why you’ve shared the article, video or podcast and how you believe it can help them. Don’t sell or offer anything at this stage.
Those Important Little Pieces of Code on Your Website
Facebook enables you to track visitors to your entire site or to specific pages (or both). You do this by creating a Facebook Pixel in Power Editor and pasting that little string of code into your website header. Once again, it might be a better use of your time to get a Facebook ads strategist to do this for you. This code will tell Facebook what is your most popular content, and who visits that content. Once Facebook has that information, you can create a Look-alike custom audience through Power Editor and you can retarget those people who have already visited your website (more on that in a minute). Look-alike audiences are simply people who are similar to your page likers, email subscribers and website visitors. They may have similar interests, use similar keywords or have similar values. It is a little scary how accurately Facebook can profile people. Once you have your native ads running, and you’ve established what ads invite the most click throughs, you can eliminate the ads that aren’t performing as well and target the ones that are performing well to your Look-alike audience. You can then run a second set of ads aimed at inviting previous website visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. This is called retargetting.
Retargeting
Retargeting simply means creating a new set of ads for those who have visited your website and not opted-in or purchased anything. For example, I was researching cruises one day and all of sudden ads for 50% off a Royal Caribbean Cruise were appearing on Facebook. Royal Caribbean had retargeted me. If you haven’t guessed already, the second set of ads is aimed at enticing people to subscribe to your mailing list. You can now offer something else of value based on what content they have visited before. In Royal Caribbean’s case they had sent me an offer that directly related to the exact cruise I was looking at. This was a straight sales offer, but I wasn’t quite ready to buy as I had just begun my research. Now, If instead they had invited me to sign up for a competition to win a cruise, their ad may have been more effective. Once you have people on your mailing list, they are easier to sell to. If you haven’t yet had that “aha” moment, here’s the thing: By creating native ads, you’ve made it possible to identify what your website visitors are interested in, so your opt-in offer can be made more relevant to their needs. This means you are not wasting money on sending ads to people who could care less about your products or services. The next step is to nurture the sale through your email communication and further retargeting on Facebook.
Nurturing the Sale
Once people have subscribed to a free offer on your website, you can then step up the communication a notch by nurturing them to buy through automated email sequences that are sensitive to the potential client’s interests and behaviour. To create automated email campaigns that can do this, you will need to be using an email marketing platform like Infusionsoft, Ontraport or Active Campaign. Whatever system you use, it will need to be capable of segmenting by interest and by behaviour in addition to location, age and gender. It’s not a good idea to always hit people up with sales offers right off the bat. Show them your outstanding value first and then make them an offer they can’t refuse! This process takes a little longer than a straight sales ad; however, if done well, it can drastically reduce your ad spend and increase your overall sales. The more you test and measure your results, refine your content and tweak your sales copy, the more effective your ads will be. Using Facebook Ads to promote content instead of sales offers can be a really effective strategy, help you target the right people with your ads and help you nurture relationships with potential clients so you can build trust and rapport. If you want to dig deeper into how to do this, I invite you to connect with me on Twitter @casmccullough.
