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Why bother advertising on Facebook?
Firstly, Facebook is a big part of everyone’s lives.
20% of the world’s population (that’s 1.5 billion people of all ages) are spending an average of 35 minutes on Facebook EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
This means that there is close to 100% chance that your target audience is active on Facebook already.
There are hundreds of articles written about different reasons why you should advertise on Facebook.
But if you really dig to the core of it, you’ll see that the biggest advantage of Facebook advertising services is that it has …
… An incredible potential to reach your target audience at scale while keeping your costs down.
In other words, Facebook has the potential to sky-rocket your return on investment (if you know what you’re doing).
Facebook Advertising Can Sky-Rocket Your Revenue
What is the difference between a company that makes £5,000 and £50,000 a day?
It’s the SCALE.
Facebook allows scaling of hyper-targeted ad campaigns.
Scaling hyper-targeted ads means that you can put more money into ads that are actually making you money.
The great thing about scaling is that it allows you to increase your revenue 10 X without having to work 10 X harder.
You’ve just got to push the right buttons.
But to get to that stage, you need to go through a set of processes.
Because if you scale too soon, you risk wasting money.
You need a system.
Below are the stages Digivate social media team goes through when advertising on Facebook:
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- Launch your ads
- Optimize your best-performing ads
- Scale your best- performing ads
Let’s look into each stage in more detail …
#1. LAUNCH STAGE: Set Up the Audience Targeting
The launch stage is the first step of the Facebook advertising process.
In this phase of your campaign setup, you have two options:
A) Create a new Facebook target audience
B) Use a Custom Audience
Let’s go over them below …
A) Create a new Facebook target audience
If you have an idea of who your target audience might be, you can easily create an audience from scratch.
All you have to do is log on to Facebook Ads Manager, set up your targeting and amount you are willing to pay, and launch your campaign.
Facebook has a wealth of information about its users.
You can target people by interests, demographics, online behaviours, major life events like engagements, baby showers, funerals, weddings and many more.
SPECIAL NOTE! Remember that even though you might think that certain types of people will be interested in your brand or offer, it may not actually be the case. This is why the launch stage is where you A/B test your targeting, copy and/or image. A/B testing allows you to improve your ad for better performance.
B) Use a Custom Audience
Setting up a Custom Audience on Facebook requires more technical knowledge than setting up audiences from scratch.
This is because you need to create these Custom Audiences from your pre-existing assets, which can be:
- Your email list
- People who visited your website
- People who only visited a particular section of your website
- Your existing customers
- Your Facebook followers
The biggest benefit of Custom Audiences is getting in front of people who are already familiar with your brand.
Facebook Customer Audience is also great for when you want to exclude your existing contacts from your advertising campaigns.
Excluding your existing customers helps you to avoid wasted clicks or views. For example, if you’re offering a free trial to new users, there’s no reason to show it to your loyal customers.
#2. OPTIMISATION STAGE: Determine Your Best-Performing Ads
During the optimisation stage, you want to narrow down your core users into segments.
You don’t want to waste money targeting as many people as possible.
Instead, you want to target only those people who are likely to convert.
And only those people.
This is the stage where you find out what messaging, ad formats and offers work with which audiences and segment your ads accordingly.
You might discover that men engage with carousel ads whereas women prefer video, so you run carousel ads for men and video ads for women.
It’s normal to have 50 hyper-targeted ads running at the same time.
Once you’ve determined your best-performing ads, don’t rush scaling them too soon.
You can squeeze even more value out of your existing best converting ads by expanding your reach to Facebook Lookalike Audiences.
Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences
If you can master Facebook Lookalike Audiences, then you’re on your way to serious profits.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences feature allows you to target audiences that very closely matches people who already took action on your ads, but are currently outside of your Facebook reach.
The Facebook algorithm knows a whole lot about your audiences’ medical problems, income, reading habits, living arrangements, attitudes– this insane amount of data is not always available to you as a Facebook advertiser! The data isn’t available to anyone but Facebook.
SPECIAL NOTE! Facebook knows much more about its users than the generic targeting parameters they allow you to play within Facebook Ads Manager. The good thing about Facebook Lookalike Audiences is that Facebook uses their own super-intelligent data to build Lookalike Audiences for you.
#3. SCALING STAGE: Scale Your Best-Performing Ads
This is the final stage of campaign management where you increase the budget for your winning ads.
You mustn’t scale too fast, because if you scale the ads that are barely profitable – you risk throwing money away.
Our experience shows that increasing your ad budget without taking the right precautions often increases your CPA (cost-per-acquisition) which reduces your return on investment.
This is because if you increase your budget too fast, it can destabilize the Facebook algorithm which can cause your ROI to drop massively.
To avoid a massive drop in your ROI as you scale, don’t increase your budget all at once. Instead, increase the budget for about 20% each day while paying close attention to your ROI.
