Here It Is – You Have Found it!
In this blog post I’m going to show you EXACTLY how to set up your Facebook Ads system for Maximum, Scalable, Repeatable Success. By the end of this article you will have 6 Actionable steps to Build your Brand, Build Authority, turn Cold audiences into Warm ones, Make More Sales for Your Business and DOMINATE your Market.
This is a Perpetual System that will Continually Expose New Prospects, Warm them up and Convert them into Customers.
The 6 Step Blueprint:
- BRAND YOUR BUSINESS ON FACEBOOK WITH VALUABLE CONTENT
- BUILD YOUR WARM AUDIENCE, ONE FACEBOOK USER AT A TIME
- TARGET YOUR CONTENT TO YOUR IDEAL PROSPECT
- SET UP YOUR ADS TO PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT
- RE-TARGET AND CONVERT YOUR PROSPECTS
- RE-TARGETING THOSE WHO DIDN’T CONVERT
Sounds Easy Right?
It really is, but before we dive into it, I’m going to show you how most entrepreneurs do Facebook Ads, why they are doing it wrong, and why they get very little return for their investment.
THE AVERAGE ENTREPRENEURS APPROACH – AND WHY IT DOESN’T WORK
Here’s how the average entrepreneur’s ad campaign is set up on Facebook. The typical setup involves a Single Ad Campaign, with a “Traffic” Campaign Objective to drive people to their website.
A single ad set is then created with their combined demographic targeting – For example: “Males & Females from the ages of 18-45 who are parents of Pre-schoolers and interested in Camping, Boating or Fishing”.
There may even be multiple ad sets for better measurement – For Example, splitting the above demographics into separate ad sets for Males and Females, or splitting again into age brackets to see which perform best.
Each ad set typically then has the same single ad in it – They talk about their core offer which they wish to promote. Their Unique Selling Points and Value Propositions are written into their Ad copy, they have their strong call to action, a relevant image and they are directing the links to their website landing page.
Their landing page further re-enforces their offer, and the call to action asks for their details to be entered on the page – eg: “Enquire Now / Buy Now / Get a Quote”.
The average Entrepreneur may see this as a good method.
It may have worked in the past, and may still yield limited results today, but for the most part, in 2018, this approach is ineffective, and here’s why.
Today’s Facebook ecosystem is one that is jammed full of content and ads – It takes a lot to cut through the noise and make someone STOP SCROLLING, let alone to CLICK ON YOUR AD. The average cold lead in your target demographic is going to briefly see your ad as they hastily scroll through their news feed, but they won’t take any action on it… Why?
Because, while they may find your offer interesting…
They don’t know you,
They don’t trust you,
Your Ad doesn’t Speak to Them, and
Your Ad doesn’t Give Them Anything Upfront.
The Facebook Advertising platform is an ‘Interruption Based’ system, meaning that ads are shown to targeted demographics by mixing them with your usual content – ie: They are dispersed throughout your News Feed, interrupting your experience.
The typical Entrepreneurs ad had just interrupted their target customers happy news feed scrolling with a big “ME, ME, ME!! – BUY MY STUFF NOW!” call to action.
It’s the equivalent of being swamped by a mob of hungry street traders in down town Denpasar!
Remember, people love to buy but hate being sold to!
How does the Target customer react to this when this new unknown name appears in front of them asking for them to ‘Buy Now / Subscribe Now / Take Action’?
Do they recognise your Brand?
Is it a name they recognise and are comfortable with?
No? – STRIKE 1!
Do they trust your Brand?
Even if they recognise it, have you previously demonstrated to them knowledge on the subject to build trust and authority?
No? That’s STRIKE 2!
Does your ad copy talk directly to THEM and solve THEIR problems?
If it’s all about YOUR offer, YOUR value proposition and YOUR Call to action, then…
No, it Doesn’t! – STRIKE 3!
Does your ad offer them Immediate VALUE Upfront?
If there’s no genuine value offered up front, without a catch, then what’s going to make them stop and take notice?
Nothing Will! – STRIKE 4!
This typical approach means it’s all too easy for the ad to get lost in the clutter of Facebook content. It may still get some results, but they will be far below the potential of what they could be.
What we need is A SYSTEM that will allow us to build familiarity in our brand so that is it a recognised name in our market. We need a system to build trust in our brand by demonstrating our knowledge and authority.
We need to turn our cold targeted demographics into warm audiences that are familiar with us and ready to buy.
Here’s that System, in 6 Actionable Steps…
STEP 1: BRAND YOUR BUSINESS ON FACEBOOK WITH VALUABLE CONTENT
While people HATE to be sold to, they LOVE to get things for FREE.
If it’s valuable information about a topic they are interested in, they will happily consume it, they will associate your brand with it, building brand awareness, and building your authority in the market.
Purchasing decision makers want to be educated. In fact, the number of pieces of information a person consumes before making a purchasing decision has risen rapidly in the last few years. For a large purchase decision, it’s now not unheard of for someone to read 20+ pieces of content before they make their mind up.
Examples of types of content that your prospects will happily consume are: Free Reports, White Papers, Lists, Action Plans, Comparisons and How-To Guides.
Here are some Practical Examples of Valuable Website Content:
“Ten questions your Mortgage Broker must be able to answer before you hire him”
“The New Parents Guide to Buying A Pram for Your Newborn”
“The Bathroom Renovators Playbook – How to avoid the pitfalls of a bad Reno!”
“Seven delicious & healthy smoothie recipes to turbocharge your lifestyle”
So now you have an idea of the kind of content we can use to build your brand, how to we present it? The most effective method is a website article, or a Blog. By making it free to access with no subscriptions, emails or passwords required, we are opening it up to gather as large an audience as possible of Facebook users who will view it.
For those who think blogging is dead then they may want to take note… Blogging is definitely not dead, it’s just been repurposed!
Remember that Good Quality Content is always Valuable to Your Business.
DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS – ‘HOW-TO’ GUIDE HERE:
5 Easy Steps to Write Valuable Content for Your Business Website
STEP 2: BUILD YOUR WARM AUDIENCE, ONE FACEBOOK USER AT A TIME
By advertising this content on Facebook, you are not only building brand awareness on the platform, but you are able to build a list of Facebook users who have viewed the content.
This is via the Facebook Tracking Pixel. This is a small piece of code that gets installed onto your website and allows you to track activity on your site from Facebook. You can use the pixel to create CUSTOM AUDIENCES, which are lists of Facebook users that you can target your ads towards.
For example, you can create a custom Audience of people who have visited your website in the last 30 days – Definitely a handy group to advertise to, since they already know you exist.
You can then take this a step further by creating Custom Audiences based on who visits SPECIFIC PAGES on your website. This gives you the ability to segment the Facebook users who visit your site based on what pages they have visited. Powerful stuff indeed!
So you would then create Custom Audiences based on who visits the URLs of the Content you have published in Step 1, above. These custom audiences have consumed your content and are now aware of your brand – They are a warm audience that will be more receptive to future interactions.
If we have custom audiences being generated from multiple content pages, then we can use these audiences to Re-Target our future ads to warm and very warm audiences. We can Re-Target users who have viewed ALL of our content (a very warm audience most likely to be receptive to our offer), or have viewed more than one piece of our content (again a warmer audience than those who have viewed just one piece of content).
You can also use these audiences to Segment Your Ad Messaging. You know what content each audience has read, so you can now tune your message towards what they are interested in, or what parts of your ‘content plan’ they haven’t read.
The Facebook Tracking Pixel is THE CRITICAL FACTOR in the Success of Your Facebook Ads System
The Facebook Pixel gives you the information you need on who is consuming your content and allows you to re-target these users with relevant future advertising.
DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS – ‘HOW-TO’ GUIDE HERE:
Creating and Installing your Facebook Tracking Pixel
STEP 3: TARGET YOUR CONTENT TO YOUR IDEAL PROSPECT
Every Entrepreneur has a good idea of who their ideal target customer is, but it may come as a surprise that for some, that idea of a target customer is quote broad. Getting in depth and specific when profiling your ideal customer is absolutely essential and time well invested.
More Information on Profiling your Ideal Customer:
The 3 Most Important Questions to ask before starting any Digital Marketing Campaign
Once you have your target customer profiled it’s time to build a target Audience to promote your content to. You need to decide what is the one factor (or interest) that you can use to target them on Facebook that most closely defines them as your target customer.
Are they a Homeowner, a Parent, a Sports fan or a Foodie?
This factor can usually be closely matched up to Facebook user targeting via an interest (or demographic).
Wherever possible you should target via ‘intent-based’ targeting, which means picking the interests, or finding similar ones, that are likely to indicate a higher level of interest and level of intent (to buy or take action).
For example, if you were targeting guys who are into Gaming, then instead of just targeting that generic interest you should target a similar interest that shows a HIGHER LEVEL OF INTENT TO BUY, for example the retail store ‘EB Games Australia’.
Relevant Magazines, Interest Websites, Brands, High Profile Retailers and Public figures are all good examples of potential effective intent-based interest targets. You will find that by targeting towards intent-based interests in this way you will reach people more likely to take action, thereby increasing your overall ad effectiveness.
Be aware that for reasons only known to Zuckerberg and his inner circle, Facebook will not always offer you the option to target certain interests. Sometimes it’s not always possible to target exactly what you want to, or you sometimes just need to think ‘out-of-the-box’ with your targeting.
Combine your interest targeting with your target age group and your business service area and there it is… Your first Target Audience to advertise to.
You can build multiple Target Audiences based on your target customers defining interests other than the primary one, but wherever possible you should always try to keep it to ONLY ONE INTEREST per Target Audience.
This will enable you to measure the more successful audience over time and focus your budget where it is more effective.
You should aim to have a Target Audience that is as large as possible, as you want to give Facebook the maximum number of people that it can possibly show your content to. Ideally a minimum target audience of around 100,000 people per Ad Set. If your audience is significantly below this, then you may have to combine two of your targeting interests to get your audience up to a decent size. While not ideal it just means that you will be unable to determine which of the interests has been the most effective targeting.
While your profiling is very specific, it appears as though your targeting is ignoring this and is now quite broad. Yes, this is true, and for good reason. There is so much rubbish around these days about “Hacking Facebook Ads” and “Beating the Algorithm” … But in reality that’s exactly what you DON’T WANT TO DO.
The Facebook Ads system (a.k.a The Algorithm) is designed to show your ads to as many people as possible in your target audience that will take your desired action on them – eg. Click your link, visit your website, read your content.
After all, the more times the algorithm can show your ads to people who will take your desired action, the more they can charge you, the advertiser.
It’s not about ‘HACKING’ the Facebook Algorithm, it’s about WORKING WITH IT!
You want to give Facebook as large a Target Audience as possible to work with. Once the algorithm sees what type of users in your target audience are taking your desired action it can then put more of your ads in front of similar users that will take the same action.
TRUST THE FACEBOOK ALGORITHM – Its designed to Learn and Optimises towards your Campaign Objectives.
That is why you should take the time to profile your target customer in great detail, but then pick out only the most defining interests or factors to target them on. The rest of your ‘profiling gold’ will come into play when it comes to writing your ad copy.
DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS – ‘HOW-TO’ GUIDE HERE:
Create Target Audiences for Your Facebook Advertising
STEP 4: SET UP YOUR ADS TO PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT
Now it’s time to get some ads happening. You want to promote each piece of your valuable content to the same Target Audience(s) you have created.
So that means each piece of content will have its own Ad Campaign. Since your objective is to build your Custom Audiences from those who view the content on your website we should set up our campaign objective as TRAFFIC.
Create one Ad Set for your campaign. You can easily load in your previously created Saved Audience here. This is also where you set your daily budget. There’s no need to go crazy with the budget – I’d stick with around $10 a day to start with.
The optimisation for your Ad Set should be set to LANDING PAGE VIEWS so that the algorithm targets the ads towards those most likely to click and WAIT FOR YOUR CONTENT TO LOAD.
Write your ad copy directly to your target customer, address their pain points and offer your content as completely free for them to consume. Make sure you use a ‘Soft’ or ‘un-sales like’ call to action, such as “Learn More”
It’s ESSENTIAL that your Valuable Website Content is published on your website as FREELY AVAILABLE MATERIAL.
No subscription, email address or payment should be required to access it.
That’s the whole point… You want as many people as possible to consume it so that you can add them to your Facebook custom audience to re-target with ads, knowing that they are now more of a warm prospect that they were before the read it.
Your basic ad setup is now complete… One Campaign, One Ad Set and One Ad. This is where you have the option of duplicating your Ads and Ad sets to allow for split testing and optimisation.
There are many varying methods for the effective testing and optimisation of Facebook Campaigns. They most often involve splitting targeting between ads sets and the duplication of ads to vary elements of your ad creative. In the interests of simplicity, in this article we will stick to a simple 1 Campaign / 1 Ad set / 1 Ad structure, leaving any duplication of ads and ad sets for the purposes of testing and optimisation for another day.
In future acticles we will cover methods of testing, optimisation and scaling, including Facebook’s features of SPLIT TESTING and DYNAMIC CREATIVE.
The TOTAL BUDGET for ALL of your Content Promotion Campaigns should be around 20% of your total Ad spend.
Your Campaign is now ready to go, click that button, Turn it ON!
You are now driving your ideal customers on Facebook to your valuable content. They experience your brand, they consume your knowledge, they become educated on the topic and they are now warmed up.
Not only are your prospects now Warmed Up to your Brand, but they are in your Custom Audience ready to receive your next Ad.
For each additional piece of content you have created you should duplicate the above Campaign so that you will be gathering multiple audiences for your future ads.
DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS – ‘HOW-TO’ GUIDE HERE:
Create A Facebook Ad Campaign To Promote Your Content & Build Custom Audiences
STEP 5: RETARGET AND CONVERT YOUR PROSPECTS
Now you have been successfully running your ads promoting your content for a few weeks now and you have started to build your audiences. They know who you are, they know you know your stuff… It’s time to put your main offer in front of them.
The Ad setup for this part of your ad System is similar to the content promotion part with one main exception. Your objective isn’t to get traffic to our site, your objective is to get prospects to buy your product online, to make an enquiry or to sign up. You want conversions, so to track these effectively we create a CUSTOM CONVERSION using the Facebook Pixel.
What we will do is find the URL of the ‘Goal’ page on your website that you want your prospects to get to. It might be the ‘Checkout Success’ page after they have bought something from you, or it might be the ‘Quote Success’ page they get to after they have filled in their details asking for a quote, or in the case of a lead generation campaign, just the ‘Sign Up Success’ page.
Once you have this URL, you can create your CUSTOM CONVERSION with it.
This enables Facebook to track who completes our ‘Goal’ or Conversion and optimise any future ads towards more of that goal.
Set up your Campaign, Ad Sets and Ads as you have previously, except you select CONVERSIONS as your Campaign objective. On the Ad set level you will select your CUSTOM CONVERSION you just created, and load in your CUSTOM AUDIENCES.
When crafting your ad, remember that even though this audience now knows who you are, you should still be ticking all the boxes with your ad copy – Make them an irresistible offer that is impossible to say ‘No’ to – Talk directly to them and their pain points, Offer them massive value up front, and don’t be afraid to hit on their fears and emotions – Get them where they will FEEL IT!! Present yourself as the solution they NEED instead of talking about your actual product.
The TOTAL BUDGET for ALL of your Re-Targeting Campaigns should be around 70% of your total Ad spend.
Your Re-Targeting Campaign is now ready to go…. Let Her Loose!!
DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS – ‘HOW-TO’ GUIDE HERE:
Create Facebook Ads to Re-Target & Convert Your Website Visitors
STEP 6: RE-TARGETING THOSE WHO DIDN’T CONVERT
The final part of your Facebook Ads System is to Re-Target those who click on our retargeting ads to get to your website sales / sign up page, but for whatever reason they don’t sign up / buy / take action.
You can Re-Target these people again by creating a Custom Audience based on who has visited your Website ‘Sales / Sign Up’ Page, EXCLUDING those who have visited the ‘Sales Success’ page. This will give you a warm audience of those who have viewed at least one piece of content, and visited your site ‘Sales’ page after taking action on your retargeting ad… They just fell short at the last hurdle and didn’t complete the sale or Sign Up.
The Ad set up is identical to the Re-Targeting Ad setup in Step 5, except you are using a different CUSTOM AUDIENCE of those who didn’t take the final action.
The main difference here is in your ad Copy. They need reassurance to take the final step so take the opportunity to address some objections here… Answer the questions that prevent them going further, and maybe even offer a further incentive to complete the Sale / Sign up.
The TOTAL BUDGET for your Sales Re-Targeting Campaign should be around 10% of your total Ad spend.
THE SYSTEM
PLAYING THE LONG GAME
Congratulations! Your Facebook Ad Blueprint is now up and running. You have taken the action that’s required to build your brand on Facebook and soon you will start to reap the benefits.
When changing your strategy from a traditional campaign style to an audience and brand building System such as this one, its worthwhile transitioning your total ad spend from one to the other over a period of several weeks. You should also consider starting your new content promotion campaigns ahead of the Re-targeting components of the system to allow your audiences time to build up.
Remember that this method isn’t going to give huge results overnight, as we need to give our warm audiences time to build up… The best things always take time.
In time you will start to see a massive improvement in conversions compared to the average Entrepreneurs Ad Campaign as the cumulative branding effect of your content advertising takes effect.
