Facebook ads are incredibly powerful tools to galvanize and increase the profits in your business. The problem is that most people do not know how to do them properly. There is lots of misinformation on the internet about facebook ads and is really difficult for those starting to separate what is useful information from the rest.
I acquired most of my knowledge of facebook ads by browsing endlessly the most useful tool to learn internet marketing – Youtube. Well, not exactly this time. There are lots of guys talking about face ads on youtube – especially all those such as Dan da Silva for whom face ads plays a big part of their drop shipping strategy.
I learned a lot from what they are doing, but in the end I can say I refined my approach through Jon Loomer’s teachings. In this blog post I will emphasise two crucial steps of my facebook ads strategy – the necessity to create custom audiences and how I interact with these audiences once I create them. The blog post is inspired mainly by John Loomer’s approach…
Audiences
Audiences are the foundations of any facebook ad campaign. Without building consistent and proper audiences you will lose your money! And the key here is to move beyond just spending money on acquiring new audiences. Facebook ads should be targeted to those that already visited, engaged or bought from you.
We can therefore create a funnel of audiences that you need to start creating in the custom audience section of facebook’s power editor. So here goes…
Interests and Lookalikes. These is the top of the funnel type of audience. I was just emphasising how you shouldn’t just focus on these types of audiences but they are the foundation of any ad campaign.
By building audiences based on interests and lookalikes, you will start generating traffic to your website and landing pages – especially the landing pages that contain your content.
There are a lot of recommendations in order to build your lookalike audiences and interests audiences. And you can find lots of youtube videos on how to do so. I will develop a more extensive view of this point later…
People that visited your website. The second stage of the ‘audience funnel’ are those that visited your website and have engaged in way with your brand. You should therefore build this type of audience using facebook’s pixel.
People that like your facebook page. This is the third stage of the ‘audience funnel’. These are all the people that liked your page and so already have an interest in your and what you are saying. They are committed fans. They liked you – and this is already a big achievement!
This basically mean that your brand and product relates to them. And you should take note of that by building a custom audience around them.
People that registered their e-mail addresses with you. This is also an important type of audience. All those that have registered in your website to your newsletter or have downloaded a particular lead magnet you created should be an audience on their own.
Ideally you would have a specific lead magnet for each segmentation of products you wanted to create. You would then divide your list accordingly…
People that went to product pages. Product pages are the fifth stage of the audience funnel. These are people that have a specific interest in your product and have, therefore, felt compelled to interact with what you are selling.
Each product page should have a particular audience. This is really useful when it comes to re-targeting later.
People that went to registration page and didn’t buy. One of the last steps you can customize is all those that went to your registration page but didn’t buy what you wanted them to buy. These potential clients are clearly interested in your brand and product but, for some reason, didn’t buy. You could identify why this was saw through the use of other strategies – namely by e-mailing them. But for sure these people constitute an important “custom audience” that would should address.
People that bought. These is the final stage of the ‘custom audience’ funnel. These are people that are already your clients – and the goal should be for them to buy again.
Targeting
Once you created your custom audiences, the next step is to interact with these audiences in a coherent way. Here I will suggest how this can be done through the use of a basic funnel.
Content. Developing new content is a great way to build your audience. You need to create either a blog post or a video about whatever topic you are trying to sell and promote it through facebook.
Audiences that I target in this method are all those based on interests, what could be called cold audiences. Content is a great way to expand your fan base and you should promote it having this in mind.
Collect E-mails. The second stage of my funnel is to promote particular lead magnets or discounts. Lead mag
Audiences that I target in this strategy are people that have visited your website, people that like your facebook page, people that have signed up in the past and people that bought from you already. This is a great way to understand who is interested in the particular lead magnet you are trying to promote – and engage.
Once you start collecting the first e-mail you then want to retarget all those that went to your lead magnet or discount page and not to your thank you page.
Sell. The last stage of my funnel is the ‘sell strategy’. What I mean by this is that whenever you want to sell a particular product or service you should create an ad that clearly engages people and leads them to buy your product or service.
I start by promoting this particular service or product to my fan base and all those that have visited my website, sign up for my newsletter or visited that particular page in the past.
I go on to retarget to all those that went to my product page and didn’t buy.
The Power of Retargeting
Facebook ads is all about retargeting. One can say that there is a two-step process always in facebook ads – the initial process of igniting someone’s interest in something, and the subsequent moment of further convincing those people to buy if they haven’t done so in the past.
You should retarget especially level two and three of your funnel. In other words, if you are trying to have more signups for you e-mail list and whenever you are selling a particular service or product, the audience that engaged with this attempt – and didn’t buy – should be re-engaged until, potentially, it will end up buying.
