Facebook Advertising really is one of, if not the best way to drive leads to a landing page right now. The platform and its possibilities are virtually endless, but we see advertisers using a ‘hope and prey’ type methodology to its success rather than a systematic proven approach.
The first step in approaching Facebook advertising like a pro is having the right mindset and getting rid of the mentality “Let’s just hope and pray that it’s going to work.” It’s no longer good to treat Facebook advertising like flinging mud on a wall and seeing what sticks. With Facebook advertising becoming so popular, you really need to approach it systematically and methodically if you want to trim wastage, save cost and increase conversion and efficiency.
I’ve systemised our approach to Facebook advertising so you can also follow suit in your business. We’ve found this approach to work very well and have reaped some excellent results through Facebook advertising following this methodology.
Step 1. Know your Demographics
We need to think about things like multiple demographics in your target audience. Who are they?
- Are they female?
- Are they male?
- Where are they located?
- What cities what towns?
- What are they interested in?
Step 2. Come up With Different Sales Hooks and Advertising Messages
What are different sales copy hooks you are going to use? Your sales copy is often more important than your design so spend some time crafting this and getting the messaging right and coming up with a few different angles.
Here’s some examples of where I’ve taken the same promotion but used different hooks and sales copy in the ads, as well as different images that compliment the message or grab your attention:
Step 3. Create Images that have ‘Cut Through’
Think of some interesting images that can tie in with your sales hooks or advertising message. You should choose a few for each ad so you can test them against each other.
For example, these set’s of ads were about ‘supercharging’ your Facebook ads and the offer was our Facebook Advertising Swipefile. Notice that the images catch your eye and are interesting but they also draw attention to the call to action which is the Swipefile image.
This one below was the most successful ad in this series as it was so different than what people had seen before and the image communicated exactly what the ad was saying about ‘strenghen your ads’.
In these ones, you can see I’ve tried to use eye-catching or interesting images that compliment the product being promoted in the ad and the message in the ad:
This ad below ended up never being approved by Facebook – note to self “no more pictures of drunk dogs at mexican themed parties as Facebook doesn’t like them” 🙂
A Time & Cost Saving Image Hack For You
When creating images for our Facebook ads, our secret weapon is canva.com. (all the images above were created in Canva). It’s a graphic design program that is simple to use and allows even people who are not gifted in that area like me to do nice looking work that looks like it has been done by a designer. This tool has saved us thousands of dollars and many days of waiting for designers this year.
You can choose Facebook banner templates that are already pre-set to the correct dimensions, and then you can use their templates or upload your own images and put text and other design elements over them. It’s very easy to use, drag and drop technology.
Another great benefit from using canva is it’s more or less free. Some of their stock images or icons cost $1, but no more. And the majority of them are free.
The only downside is, occasionally the tools are a bit clunky or buggy, but it will get better with time I believe as more and more people use it.
Step 4. Drive your Traffic to Multiple Landing Pages
Set these up with the same idea as the different Facebook ads. For many, the easiest and fastest way to do this is using something like Leadpages or Clickfunnels, but it depends on your business set up and resources. Create a few different landing pages, so you can test different layouts, styles, call to actions, offers and sales hooks. Your Landing page offer and sales copy should compliment what’s in your Ad, otherwise there will be a disconnect.
You will notice in this most recent version of the Facebook Ads Swipfile landing page that it has the logo and navigation above the fold – this is to be 100% Google and Facebook compliant. All our Collective Members now do this and not a single Collective Member has lost a Facebook Advertising account to date – touch wood : ) You may think that this will have an adverse affect on conversions and possibly it does slightly but its not a big issue. The landing page below converts at 42% day in day out and has had many thousands of leads go through it.
Step 5. Track and Measure
Here’s the thing – if you track your conversions from all your different ads and targeting, what you’ll see is that there might only be a certain percentage of the demographic that converted to leads and sales. There might be only some of those images that converted to leads and sales. There might only be some of that sales copy that converted to leads and sales. And there might only be some of those landing pages that converted to leads and sales.
People who are serious about Facebook Advertising track all these things so they can be measured. The enemy of ROI (Return on Investment) is waste – can you imagine the level of waste you can cut out if you start to track and measure all these variables?
With Facebook advertising you can turn on conversion tracking. When combined with something like Infusionsoft, you can use tracking links and lead sources to track and measure. As direct response marketers, we want to run our winners long, and we want to cut out losers short. So we want to trim out anything that is not converting to leads and sales.
Analysing Results and Tuning Campaigns
What we do know is that our ads will fatigue. So over time people will get banner blindness to them if they’re seeing the same ads over and over again. So this means, you need to keep going back and reviewing your ads. Even sometimes just pausing out ads, putting in new ones and then you can re-enable them later. One thing though that I’ve noticed from years of being a professional media buyer is every single one of these media platforms; they don’t want you to turn campaigns on and off all the time. I’ve never really seen it documented in any way, but I’ve been talking with other media buyers as well. We all pretty much agree on the same thing there.
If you want to run something for a while, sometimes you’re better off just to turn it down to a couple of dollars a day if you’re planning on ramping it back up again rather than pausing and turning it back on. Because..
A.) You then don’t get that problem of, when you turn your campaign back on and then it kicks off like a review cycle; “is this ad right to go live?” Rather, If it’s just been running the whole time, it’s not going to go off to the Google gods to re-approve it.
B.) Media agencies and big media platforms definitely reward people that just keep their campaigns running even if you turn them down and then turn them back up rather than pausing altogether.
(The way they look at it is, amateurs turn stuff off all the time, turn stuff on all the time. Whereas, professionals do it more the other way. But of course, you also have to still work within your budget and sometimes that means you will need to turn ads on and off).
Getting Granular
If you get a little bit granular with them, you can progress people through the funnel. For example:
Who are people who are leads that have never bought anything? Give them an offer to try and get them across the line of an entry level product.
Or, who are people who’ve only bought our entry level stuff, let’s export them to a spreadsheet and then show them ads and make quite a sexy offer to try and ascend them up into a bigger, better, customer.
And then once you’ve done that, and you’ve created custom audiences of those segments in Facebook, you can then use Facebook to create a look-alike audience. Facebook chooses on average about six data-points and it creates a segment that is similar to your custom segment, based on what they are interested in and locations and all that kind of thing. Except now, you have a brand new, much larger segment to target, that in theory should have a good conversion.
We’ve had really good success with advertising to look-alike audiences.
So that’s pretty much the order that we would go about approaching our Facebook advertising, with the end goal to get custom audiences and then lookalike audiences working.
Share your thoughts below. Are you using Canva? Do you have a system for scaling campaigns? Have you had good success with custom audiences or Lookalike audiences? Got any questions?