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Facebook advertising. How to get more business coming your way

Marketing, social media, advertising

business_man

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Hey, I decided to give some value back to this forum, as it was so life-changing (and still is) to me. Since Facebook/Instagram advertising is what I do, I want to share some of my knowledge.
There is not other place like Facebook, where you can reach your customer so precise, despite all the scandals it is still one of the best marketing platforms. I will try to give some basic information first, if you like it, I will roll out more of that. Or maybe we will start discussions and learning process will be more organic. Appreciate your feedback guys! And other marketers input!

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Part 1

So we can cut this in 3 major parts.

1. Targeting/audience – whom you are sending your message.

2. Actual ad/the message. There are smaller parts on this – copy and picture. While I am not a copywriter, I don’t want to dig into those too much, there are way better sources than me, and about pictures you probably forgot more than I ever learned, haha J

3. Actual offer/sales funnel – this is a place where you land your audience. While Facebook offers some different campaign targets – "post engagement" for example. Usually where you get most value is "conversion campaigns" and for those campaigns, you usually send people outside Facebook (Facebook constantly adding “Inside Facebook” options, like build in stores etc. but lets put these aside for now).

Let’s talk about 1st point today: THE AUDIENCE. If you have this one wrong – everything else will be BS too :D

It’s pretty obvious but it is easier to say than to actually do: you have to paint a picture of your target in your head. How does it look, where they hang out (in Facebook), what do they like, interests etc… Like in hunting or fishing, more you know about your target, easier it is to catch, haha

To make things easier, this is usually an order I would recommend to follow when creating an audience:

Look for...
1. Competitors – if I market Coca-Cola, probably same people who like Pepsi, might be interested in Coke. At least they are drinking fizzy drinks for sure. Your competitors already have your audience, so go and borrow them (actually steal it, but just not to feel bad, let’s call it this way, haha). Competitors can be direct, like Coke and Pepsi, and indirect – maybe some juice companies Timbark, Ocean Spray etc.

Doing this you usually have enough reach already.

2. Interest – if competitors is not enough you dig into interest, to expand or narrow down your audience. Maybe your fizzy drink is special (I took crapy example in fizzy drinks, now I have to roll with it… haha), targeting Pepsi alone you’ll get millions of people in your audience, maybe that might be too much with your budget and strategy, so you will target only athletes, because your drink has vitamins, minerals, isotonic qualities etc… So you target someone who also runs marathons, goes to the gym etc... this will narrow down your audience. It works for expanding too, just add some interests and you have a bigger audience.

3. Demography – this is first thing armatures thinks when picturing THE TARGET. This is what pros think last… In fact, if you just starting out with the campaign you don’t care about that too much in the beginning. Unless you’re selling tampons, you will cross out men, or some video games maybe not relevant to 65+ grannies (at least not relevant for enough amount of grannies to be interested in :D).

In most cases I just run my campaign and later, when I have a bit of data, I start to break down my audience into gender, age, mobile/desktop etc. If I have a limited budget, maybe I will cut underperforming groups. Ideally, I want everything as separated as possible:

One ad to 20-25 males desktop, second ad to 20-25 males mobile, third to females 20-25 mobile and so on… That is an ideal world. More isolation I have, more control I have, more flexibility I have to pull off positive ROI. And in some cases (I would prefer don’t have those cases) it’s a matter of cents if you are profitable or not, haha :D

End of Part 1
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Let me know guys if its valuable for you and I will add other parts in here to.

Best wishes!
 
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Jake

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Let’s talk about 1st point today: THE AUDIENCE. If you have this one wrong – everything else will be BS too :D
Not always. Depends on your offer and location I'd imagine. We do basically 0 targetting and let the FB algo do it's job.
 

business_man

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Not always. Depends on your offer and location I'd imagine. We do basically 0 targetting and let the FB algo do it's job.

What is your offer? If its not a secret of course :)
 

business_man

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Everything on auction starting from 1 thai baht

Well yeh, if you have a generic product, then i would agree. For most cases - it is better to target. And then to narrow down even more, to send specific offer for specific audience and send them to specific landing page. Thats my experience.
 

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Following. @business_man , do you do mainly conversion ads on FB?

I tried running a PPE ad for a few days to gain some social proof, then taking the page post ID and running a conversion ad to it. It ran into an error. Apparently several other people are having this issue in the past few weeks. Have you run into this??
 

business_man

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Following. @business_man , do you do mainly conversion ads on FB?

I tried running a PPE ad for a few days to gain some social proof, then taking the page post ID and running a conversion ad to it. It ran into an error. Apparently several other people are having this issue in the past few weeks. Have you run into this??

I usually run conversion ads, yes. In most cases, it's what business needs - conversion.
I also run engagement ads alongside (with very small budgets) to get some social proof. I never had problems or errors with that before.

What does the error say?

And thanks for the follow :) If people will be interested in this topic, I will post more.
 
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I don't really care about the PPE right now, only conversions. I'm selling physical products, landing page is the product page on my site. Ad copy and landing page copy have been checked by many people, they look good. Image/video also looks fine. Ads are getting lots of good engagement, shares, likes, laughs, etc.

My strategy right now is run VC conversion adsets until those adsets get 50 ATCs. I will lose money on this stage.
Second step is duplicate and switch objective to ATC. Do this until both adsets have generated 50-100 ICs. Hopefully a bunch of purchases too. Then duplicate and switch to IC. Then same with Purchase. This builds the pixel and gives it data to work with along the way. What do you think??
 

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And thanks for the follow :) If people will be interested in this topic, I will post more.

Keep posting, people will want more...

However the post has a RANT prefix, that needs to be changed and more people will realise what you're trying to do.

Not sure if you can change it yourself you might need one of the Mods to help you out there.
 

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You should add that it's a good thing to use the same ad (as in not only the same creative, but the same post with the same ID) for audience tests. This way the winner ads have a chance of some social proof and engagement that may help how you're perceived.
 
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business_man

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You should add that it's a good thing to use the same ad (as in not only the same creative, but the same post with the same ID) for audience tests. This way the winner ads have a chance of some social proof and engagement that may help how you're perceived.

Hey, that's good advice. Although it's a bit more advanced and for now I just wanted to give more basic understanding for people who maybe have less knowledge about Facebook ads.

Also, in some cases, I can not test audiences with the same post, because I try to run every separate audience to separate landing page (even if its exact same duplicate).

But yes, you absolutely can do this.
 

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Hey, that's good advice. Although it's a bit more advanced and for now I just wanted to give more basic understanding for people who maybe have less knowledge about Facebook ads.

Also, in some cases, I can not test audiences with the same post, because I try to run every separate audience to separate landing page (even if its exact same duplicate).

But yes, you absolutely can do this.

Absolutely, depends on what you're testing at which point.

That said, quality testing requires testing 1 variable at a time, so in your example that means inability to optimize for conversions on Facebook's end and testing the ad+audience for CTR or similar non-site actions and then the site's conversion rate separately. I don't know how good of an idea it is not to optimize for conversions in your case, but you seem to be in this deeper than me so I'll just trust it and wait for the next post. :)
 

business_man

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I don't really care about the PPE right now, only conversions. I'm selling physical products, landing page is the product page on my site. Ad copy and landing page copy have been checked by many people, they look good. Image/video also looks fine. Ads are getting lots of good engagement, shares, likes, laughs, etc.

My strategy right now is run VC conversion adsets until those adsets get 50 ATCs. I will lose money on this stage.
Second step is duplicate and switch objective to ATC. Do this until both adsets have generated 50-100 ICs. Hopefully a bunch of purchases too. Then duplicate and switch to IC. Then same with Purchase. This builds the pixel and gives it data to work with along the way. What do you think??

Well, regarding landing page copy and images... I usually rely on numbers. What my experience and a lot of my colleague experience showed, that what looks good, not necessary converts good. So what I do I just look for conversion numbers and always run a split test. Even if I have a well-converting page, I try to run 10-20% of the traffic to some variation. Do you run the split test for your page?

What if you start your campaigns with the "end goal you want" right out of the gate. It will be purchase in your case, I guess. What results did you get on that one, in comparison?
 
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MythOfSisyphus

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I really need to learn more about Facebook and instagram advertising this year. Is there a really good resource you can recommend besides this thread?
 

business_man

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Absolutely, depends on what you're testing at which point.

That said, quality testing requires testing 1 variable at a time, so in your example that means inability to optimize for conversions on Facebook's end and testing the ad+audience for CTR or similar non-site actions and then the site's conversion rate separately. I don't know how good of an idea it is not to optimize for conversions in your case, but you seem to be in this deeper than me so I'll just trust it and wait for the next post. :)

Not sure if we understood each other :) So I will try to explain.

Funnel structure
The main rule which I am trying to follow is: "singe out everything"

So let's say I have a budget to run few split tests simultaneously. I will structure my audience, ads and landing pages like this.

I will use simple examples for a purpose of demonstration.

Audience A (Males 35+, who likes car racing)
Audience B (Females 35+, who likes car racing)

Ad1 - Copy 1 and Image 1
Ad2 - Copy 2 and Image 1

Landing page 1A
Landing page 1B
(at this point landing pages looks identical).

And yes, the split test is ALWAYS conducted with changing 1 variable at the time.

My structure will look like this

Audience A > Ad1 > LP 1A
Audience A > Ad2 > LP 1A
Audience B > Ad1 > LP 1B
Audience B > Ad2 > Lp 1B

I can even go deeper than that and if I have very different ads to the same audience (Audience A for example), I can run it to separate landing pages as well, because maybe my visuals and copy is very different on the ads and I want a landing page to be compelling to an AD.

While you do not nesseseraly want to go this complex, or don't have a budget. But using this structure you now have complete freedom to optimize your funnel quite deeply.

I can have few exactly same landing pages, but if I decide to change something, I can optimize (maybe lighter colors for a female audience and shorter copy for males for example).

I use platforms like ClickFunnels, BuilderAll, Leadpages for landing pages. So I can "cook" 100s landing pages for one campaign.

A landing page is just a tool
A landing page is just a tool - a part of the chain/funnel. Most of them I might delete after I change the ad. For some people (based on my experience with the clients), people start to think that their page or a landing page is a very precious thing. They hire a team of developers to build it and now wants to use it ("let that baster work back the money")... For someone like me, I can build 10 landing pages one day and next day kill them because I will create 10 more.

Getting social proof on your ads
And as for using the same post for engagement and conversion campaigns, I covered it few posts up as I replied GravyBoat post.

In some cases, I run conversion ads and at the same time, I am running engagement ads (using same post ID for both). And sometimes I use the same page (Shopify store for example). But in some cases, I can not or don't want to use the same page (I covered that in the beginning).

it is quite cheap to get social proof. Especially if you just care about likes.

What really matters?
What we are discussing is secondary things in my opinion. It's just a "TACTICS" which helps to improve your performance by few %. People sometimes put so much attention on "TACTICS" - manual bidding vs auto bidding, long copy vs short copy, carousel ads vs video etc.

WHILE YOUR OFFER AND YOUR ACTUAL MESSAGE ARE WAY MORE IMPORTANT.

When you have something that people NEED and you COMMUNICATE it clearly and sincerely, have a good OFFER - you will win :) That was my experience and experience of my mentors :)
 

business_man

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I really need to learn more about Facebook and instagram advertising this year. Is there a really good resource you can recommend besides this thread?

I like everything from Nicholas Kusmich. You can also check Kevin David and Miles Beckler on youtube if you want to start with free content.
 
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business_man

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@business_man , how would you target a funny gag gift idea? I'm having a hard time with one of my products...

1. Let's make it clear: since we don't know the context and all the data - the advice is hypothetical in this case. You have to experiment and find your own solutions.

2. It's not nesseseraly your target that is off. We need to dig into numbers and actual situations, but it might be: your ad and message suck, you don't have a right offer, no one needs your product and so many other variables.

This is the "Marketing Equation": The Right Message - Hits The Right Audience - On The Right Time.

If one part is off, then your campaign is in the negative.

Let Facebook do the work for you
One little trick that you can use if your targeting is off and my advice in Part 1 does not work (or you think its off), you can let Facebook do the job. It easier if you have an email list already (previous clients?) if not, this is what you need to do.

You need to get personal data from someone who is interested in your products. Let's use email for this example.

When you ask my email, you not only ask my email, you actually ask access to my personal space. I don't like you and I don't know you (yet) and you want to invade my personal space.
So you better have a damn good offer to get my data.


So you have to produce entertaining content or have a lead magnet in place, to exchange it for my email. We can talk later about lead magnets when we talk about sales funnels and landing page in Part 3.
Let's say you have a good system in place, you have killer sales funnel. Now you will run two ad campaigns for this one.

Campaign 1: sending leads to your landing page with an offer: "Hey guys, sign up and learn this trick how to have the best party in your life" - not the greatest copy, but just to illustrate an example.

Campaign 2: You will take your email list from Campaign 1 and create a lookalike audience for Facebook to be able to look for similar people.

That's a way to skip manual targeting. Test that and see how it goes.

Additional thoughts:
1. You might be losing money on the initial campaign, but maybe you need multiple touch points to have a sale, so - a retargeting campaign is a way to go.
Remember the "Marketing Equation"? The Right Time is crucial, so you retarget.

2. Like I mentioned before, maybe it's not your targeting but you actual ad or an offer is not on point.
2.1. Is your ad copy is on point? Does it attract right people - qualify the right ones and disqualify wrong ones, does it communicate clearly?
2.2. Is your ad image brakes the News Feed pattern and catches the eye? Does it tell the story and what emotions does it hit?
2.3. How does your sales funnel/store looks like? What conversion you have from the Facebook audience? Do you try to improve it with A/B split test?

3. Use my advice in Part1 and "draw" your ideal client for targeting.
3.1. Who might they follow beside you? (Some big party goods supplier?)
3.2. What do they do, where do they gather online? (Group: how to have the best birthday party)
3.3. Where do they spend money? It might be same as 3.1. in this case.

4. Set your pixels right and allow Facebook to help you target. If you had some success, use that audience to target similar people.

Keep in mind, that low margin, generic products is a pretty tough niche to be on Facebook, at least from my experience.

Also hit some likes or give me some feedback is that useful for you? Is my structure is easy to read and if it's enough/too much information?
This is for you guys, so I want to make it as useful as I can.

Technically - this is easy, that's not too much theory in this... But implementation is like Alchemist work, you put some potions together, experiment, try to hit right amounts, till you create something beautiful :)
 
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business_man

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Keep posting, people will want more...

However the post has a RANT prefix, that needs to be changed and more people will realise what you're trying to do.

Not sure if you can change it yourself you might need one of the Mods to help you out there.

Thanks! I changed that :) It just looked nice and red, so as I marketer I could not resist it :D But yeh, good point :)
 

jcvlds

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Great stuff man, thanks for sharing this with us.

Had a question I’d love to have your thoughts on.

It seems to me, although I may well be wrong, that your experience is in marketing and selling niche goods but perhaps not focusing on one niche or type of products, thus not looking to create a brand.

What are your thoughts on trying to create a brand via an online store and using Facebook ads as a marketing channel. Would this change your approach or strategy to structuring your ads or funnels?

Maybe I’m just dumb and overcomplicating, but thanks for shedding any insight :)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

business_man

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Great stuff man, thanks for sharing this with us.

Had a question I’d love to have your thoughts on.

It seems to me, although I may well be wrong, that your experience is in marketing and selling niche goods but perhaps not focusing on one niche or type of products, thus not looking to create a brand.

What are your thoughts on trying to create a brand via an online store and using Facebook ads as a marketing channel. Would this change your approach or strategy to structuring your ads or funnels?

Maybe I’m just dumb and overcomplicating, but thanks for shedding any insight :)


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Hey, thanks for the love!

So to make sure we are on the same page i have to ask - what is your definition of brand? In simple words.
 
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jcvlds

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Great question. Lol :p

I guess when I think of a ‘brand’ I envision a business with a group of offerings/products that can be considered similar or catered towards the same niche audience (ie a brand in kids clothing, a brand in kitchenware, etc) whose name people come to relate to that niche or those products.

In my mind, I kind of lean towards going that route rather than finding, marketing, and selling products from all types of categories to different audiences just based on finding products that sell.

Let me know if I’m not making any sense though lol. I can ponder about this some more and get back with a coherent answer


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business_man

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Great question. Lol :p

I guess when I think of a ‘brand’ I envision a business with a group of offerings/products that can be considered similar or catered towards the same niche audience (ie a brand in kids clothing, a brand in kitchenware, etc) whose name people come to relate to that niche or those products.

In my mind, I kind of lean towards going that route rather than finding, marketing, and selling products from all types of categories to different audiences just based on finding products that sell.

Let me know if I’m not making any sense though lol. I can ponder about this some more and get back with a coherent answer


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jcvlds, thanks for the explanation.

For me, Brand is - a message that I communicate and also what my audience thinks of me. In other words, business_man is a Facebook ads guy. Maybe even: business_man is a Facebook ads guy who loves to spread love and share his experience. That might be my brand in this forum.

That's what I found on the internet: "Unique design, sign, symbol, words, or a combination of these, employed in creating an image that identifies a product and differentiates it from its competitors."

So I guess we are both right :)

In any way, you WILL have your audience, unless you are Coca-Cola and don't care about burning money and showing your product to everyone in the world (and have a product that suits everyone in the world).
Selling baby cloth - young parents, grandparents etc.
Kitchenware - some who cooks, maybe someone who has a family.

So you still targeting... You can't send the same message to different people. You have to address your audience so for example:
Message for mothers: "Do you want your baby to feel comfortable?"
For godmothers: "Looking for a perfect gift for his special day?" and a pic with a baby.
You probably have to do a better job with the copy (hahaha), but you get the point.

I love Lex threads and I watched how he tailor-maid job applications to each gig on Upwork, not sure if you saw that.
Why does he bother? Why he just don't copy/paste a nice proposal to everyone? Its the same product - copywriting services.

If you go on telly or radio you will have to generalize your message. But that's why social media is so cool - that you actually can send different messages to different people. Why wouldn't you?

This will not hurt your brand, you still have your name on it, a core message - "best damn baby clothes in town! (took this from The Simpsons -
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLeKvQM8gLU
), your product design etc.

You can't always target on audience level, but you absolutely can with your message. I am helping a friend now, he sells his manufactured products in a market of 3 million people (total in the country), so on Facebook, you have a 1.5mil audience if you target EVERYONE (!!!). So you bet, you can't really target much in there... But with the message, you certainly try to QUALIFY and DISQUALIFY your leads at the same time.

Let me know did a steered on point here or no, for your question :)
 

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