There are many ways to improve your Facebook ad campaigns. In this article we will explain three that our company has proven time and time again with our clients.
Let’s get right into it!
1. Running Tests on Creative
When you run an ad, you have a hypothesis of what your audience will want to engage with. You take an educated guess on the best way to get attention based on the best practices, your skill level, and experience in running ads with your audience. This creative aspect of your campaign is often the most important and hardest element of your campaign, driving the front end of getting attention. The ability your campaign has to stop someone from scrolling and engage is made capable by knowing your audience and appealing to them.
The creative image, video, or graphic is paramount to captivate your audience. When you set up a campaign, creating two or more versions that you can test against the same audience can allow you to see which ad performs best.
This is the exciting part about marketing, you can find out new things about how your audience thinks and responds. Then use that information to improve your next campaign.
2. Have a Narrow Target Audience with a Specific Message
Narrowing or even finding a niche target audience with a specific message is something we have found can save our clients a lot of money. We preach knowing your audience because it is easier to appeal to them in a relatable and authentic way. The more specific and relevant you can be, the more your message will resonate with their current needs.
Instead of aiming for a broad reach, like a whole city or an age range, targeting niche communities can allow you to hone your ads for those specific people with shared interests. A community is anything a small group of people can share an interest around.
Take this for example:
Let’s say you’re selling a home loan product. You want to target homeowners in the city of Austin, Texas. Instead of attempting a broad reach, why not add a determiner or a qualifier to the audience so that the message is more specific to them?
An example of this would be targeting the CrossFit community and make your message specific to them and in their vernacular. Instead of your message saying “Homeowners in Austin, Texas can prequalify for new home loan rates,” you could personalize it to the CrossFit community.
Personalizing could look like this, “Nine out of Ten CrossFitters in Austin, Texas prequalify for our new home loan rates, see if you qualify today!”
With this personalization, your ad will have a greater success rate because it is more relevant and more authentic to your specific audience. It will also go to a smaller number of people which will cost you less money
3. Pay once, Sell Later
This last approach is a concept we consistently push for our clients who are looking to build a brand inside of niche communities. After optimizing their Facebook ads, we ask our clients to capture leads by email so they can nurture those leads long term. By doing this, they own the leads and no longer have to pay for the attention from the same people.
This method sends your Facebook ad leads to an email nurture campaign where your cost is virtually zero moving forward and the campaign becomes much more effective overall.
Your message over email is not as regulated as it is through Facebook, what this does is allow you to take the money you spent on your Facebook ad and make those dollars go much further for the same audience. You can take a list of over a hundred leads and plug them back into Facebook to find a custom audience, using people who are similar to those who have already pre-qualified themselves as a quality lead.
This is called retargeting with a lookalike audience. You spent money and found people who raised their hand and became a lead. Now leverage that information for future success!
Think Big. Act Small.
The methods we listed today can help you think about your Facebook ad campaigns in a bigger picture. Thinking about what your audience wants to hear and what messages resonate with them and how you can optimize your campaigns can give your bank more and more leads. Thinking about how you can nurture those leads over the long term is how you can continue to keep and captivate your audience.
Take what you know and get started running ads. As long as your brand is accurately represented and is compliant in your creative, you have nothing to lose. Learn from your campaigns and optimize as you go.
Want to discuss ways to implement these or other tactics in your business? Follow me on Linkedin or reach out through our website. Let’s start a conversation.