Facebook Marketing: How to Grow Audience, Leads, and Sales Fast

You know Facebook as the biggest social media platform where individuals connect and share information while businesses engage with their customers.

But is that all you can do with Facebook?

Instead of simple interactions, you can use Facebook for business growth. As a marketer running social media marketing campaigns or a startup seeking to grow your online business, you need to utilize Facebook’s power.

As of Q2 2020, Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly active users, a 12% increase year-over-year. From these, an average of 1.79 billion use the platform every day. This is also a 12% increase year-over-year.

In other words, apart from being the biggest social media platform, Facebook usage is increasing at a considerably high rate.

This is good for Facebook. It’s also good for your business. An increase in usage means that the platform is the perfect place to build your audience and sell more of your products.

Is Your Target Audience or Buyer Persona on Facebook?

Before you start creating your Facebook marketing strategy, you need to determine whether your target audience is actually on Facebook. As much as Facebook has a huge number of users, it might not be the social media platform where your target audience congregates.

If you’re already running marketing campaigns, then you know your target audience. The only thing you need to do is find out whether the audience is on Facebook.

If you’re just getting started building your online business, consider the audience on Facebook and see whether it’s the one you want to target.

Here are the main characteristics to consider in determining whether your target audience is on Facebook.

Age and Gender

The age of Facebook’s users is a crucial piece of information which you must have. This is because age determines a lot; from interests and spending habits to communication styles and the kind of customer experiences desired.

Looking at the generational differences between baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z, it’s not hard to understand why age is a major factor to consider when targeting an audience.

Data from Pew Research shows that the age brackets making the biggest chunk of Facebook users are 18-29 and 30-49, both at 79%.

As for gender, there are more women using the platform than men.

Location

Where do the majority of Facebook users reside? In cities or in the country?

It might be easy to quickly guess that urban dwellers are the biggest users of the platform. And with such a guess, if you’re targeting people living in rural areas, you might then decide that Facebook is not your marketing platform of choice.

But what does the data say?

Indeed there are more town dwellers using Facebook than rural dwellers. The difference is however not as big as you might think.

Education and Income

In many cases, the education level determines the income level. Education, implying the amount of exposure someone has had, also determines how you approach and engage the person.

Education levels aside, income is a better factor to use when deciding who to target for your business. This applies to both the traditional business run from a physical office and online business.

As we always advise, if you want to maximize your earnings and profits, your business should target the highest-earning audience. These have a higher spending power as well as a willingness to spend on products solving the problems they face.

Read more about this in our article about choosing a blog niche.

With an understanding of the type of audience on Facebook, it’s time to compare it to your own audience.

So, is your target audience on Facebook?

If your buyer persona matches the one on Facebook, you can confidently start thinking of how to reach them on the platform.

How to Create Your Facebook Marketing Strategy?

To effectively market your products or services on Facebook, you need a strategy. The best strategy is one which clarifies everything from the who and what to when and why.

Here are 7 things you should do to develop a winning Facebook marketing strategy.

Set Your Facebook Marketing Goals

If strategy is a path, then goals are the destination. You must therefore clearly define your goals if your strategy is to work.

The question to ask yourself here is, “What do I want to achieve?”

With goals, remember to use the proven method of setting SMART goals. It’s important that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Considering that you’re using Facebook to grow your business, your “what” should directly impact your business. In other words, whatever you do should build your business’ audience for the sake of business growth.

Don’t focus on just getting more fans, likes and shares.

So, what marketing goals should you be thinking about?

Here are some example goals you can have for your Facebook marketing efforts. A good strategy will help you achieve these.

• Increase website/blog visitors – one of the first things you need to keep in mind is that your Facebook audience doesn’t really belong to you. Just ask yourself, “If Facebook went down today, will I be able to communicate with my Facebook audience?” No matter what goals you set, always work towards drawing your Facebook audience to your website or blog. Once they’re there and they like what they see, they’re likely to come back and even share your content on Facebook and other platforms.
• Acquire more email leads – since you ultimately want to sell more, you’ll need to have more leads which you can nurture. One of the best ways to nurture leads is through email. OptinMonster found that email marketing has a 6.05% conversion rate compared to 1.9% for social media. Moreover, email marketing’s ROI stood at 4,400%. Would you really want to ignore that? Nurturing your leads is easy when you use a tool like ConvertKit. ConvertKit helps you create automated sales funnels, customize a subscriber’s path based on their actions and even segment your audience based on their customer journey.
• Increase brand awareness – with Facebook’s huge user base, there’s no cheaper yet effective way to make your brand known other than by being on Facebook. What’s more, with options like boosting your posts, having a wider reach becomes easily possible.
• Increase engagement – one of the biggest reasons why you need Facebook is that it’s the platform where most online conversations take place. If you want to engage with people and get them talking about your products or services (in positive light), you have to be on Facebook.
• Improve quality of sales – whereas you can aim at increasing sales using Facebook, a better goal would be to improve the quality of sales. From the data which Facebook has, you can narrow down on your target audience and make more high-value sales.

Pick Your Tools

Part of developing an effective strategy is in deciding which tools you’ll use to achieve your goals. Facebook provides different tools which you can use to get the results you’re aiming for.

Here are some Facebook tools you can pick from.

• Facebook business page
• Facebook groups
• Facebook promoted posts
• Facebook sponsored stories
• Facebook live videos
• Facebook marketplace

There are no restrictions on what you can use. If your strategy requires it, you can combine all of them for maximum benefits.

Create and Curate Your Content

To build an audience through Facebook, you have to share a lot of helpful and interesting information. This information will come in different forms and it’s what is at the center of your social media interactions.

Here are some types of content you can create for sharing on Facebook:

• Text posts (status posts) – mainly used to share information, updates or spark engagement. Asking a question is a great way of getting started with text posts.
• Images – the visual appeal of images usually results in more engagement than text posts. This doesn’t have to be pictures only. You can also create illustrations and infographics.
• Videos (pre-recorded) – this is great if your products have a strong visual appeal. Also good for telling stories. Keep videos short: 1-3 minutes is what Facebook recommends
• Live videos – great for interacting with followers directly or giving them a behind-the-scenes view of your company, product manufacturing or showing the faces behind the brand
• Link posts – use this to share a link to your blog article or product page. Ensure you tell your readers why they should click the link. Also share content from other industry experts
• Facebook polls – great for building engagement by allowing people to comment and vote. Engagement continues after poll results are made public as people weigh in on the results

Work on creating more content than you need for the day so as to always have something to post. This helps you stay ahead of the game since you’ll never run out of content to share.

As you stay ahead of time by curating your content, remember to check what’s trending in your industry or niche. Also plan to create content specific to special days like valentine’s, mother’s and father’s day etc.

Something else you need to think about is the actual creation of the content. Who will create your content? Are you the one to do it, a team member or a freelancer? If working with a team member or a freelancer, make sure they understand what you want to achieve.

Working with freelancers is a great way of cutting down the costs involved in hiring and maintaining staff. You can find some of the best freelancers on Upwork, Fiverr, Flexjobs and Freelancer.

Schedule Your Posts

Posting on Facebook should not be a random act of publishing content. Posting your content without thinking about the timing can result in frustrations since you might not see the engagement you expected.

Sprout Social did a study on the global engagement levels on Facebook and came up with interesting findings.

Despite people generally being on Facebook every weekday from around 5 AM to around 8 PM, Wednesday sees the highest engagement, especially at 11 AM and 1-2 PM.

And now that you know when to post, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t post anything until then. Create and publish posts throughout but reserve your best posts for the times with the highest engagement.

You can also use Facebook’s scheduling feature to plan what to publish and when to publish it. This can save you a lot of time and give you space to think and plan ahead.

Build a Community

Even as you look at Facebook from a marketing perspective, keep in mind that it’s a social network. So don’t focus too much on selling and forget to interact with your followers in a friendly manner.

If all you do on Facebook is sell, people will become less interested in your brand.

The recent Facebook algorithm changes made users’ News Feeds more connections-oriented. Facebook users now see more content from their friends and connections as opposed to those from businesses.

This has made the work of marketers a bit more difficult but Facebook is working to keep the platform more people-focused. With that change, if you want your content to show up in more users’ News Feeds, you have to boost it.

In other words, pay for it.

But there’s a workaround. It doesn’t really rival the option of boosting your posts but can still deliver great results.

If you build a community around your brand, product or industry, your posts will be shared more by your followers. This will result in your posts reaching more people since the posts aren’t coming from a brand but users. This is a good way of increasing your organic reach within Facebook.

Keep in mind that a community isn’t built by only sharing information. You have to engage with your fans and be a part of the discussions.

Be Your Own Ambassador

When people interact with your brand, it helps to show the faces behind the brand. Of course they know that they’re interacting with someone but knowing the person makes the brand feel more human.

The best way of doing this is to ask your employees to advocate for your business on their Facebook posts. This should not be something only those in marketing do but all employees, including the CEO.

Engage with your team and employees about this and let them help humanize your brand. They should speak about their jobs and even share positive insider stories to draw people to the brand.

Of course they have to love their jobs enough to do this. Employees often report not loving their jobs mainly due to challenges relating with their managers. If you’re the marketing manager or the business owner, you need to work on your leadership skills.

If you’re a business owner, then there’s a greater need for this. Don’t just build an entrepreneurial mindset and ignore simple things like communication and work-life balance. Creating a suitable and even enjoyable working environment will help with productivity and increase your profitability.

Track and Analyze Your Facebook Marketing Results

As you put in the effort to build your audience, remember to frequently check how well you’re doing. Keep tabs on the performance of your posts to see whether they’re getting you the desired results.

In case they’re not giving you the results you expected, then find out what needs to be done. Make the necessary changes and check whether there’s a difference after a few days or week, depending on your goals and schedule.

You should also implement A/B testing to find out what content works best. For example, change the background color of images and font used for any text. For videos, you can test different video lengths and even voice-over tones.

With the kind of interactions happening on Facebook and opportunities available, developing an effective strategy should be a key part of your efforts. Your strategy is what determines your marketing success.

Also remember that strategies are not permanent – they can be tweaked and even replaced.

Start Building Your Audience with Free Facebook Groups, Facebook Live Video, Facebook Events, and Facebook Pages

Facebook has some free tools which can help you get started with building your audience on the platform. Even if you want quick growth and are thinking of going straight into advertising, it’s important to start with the basics.

Getting started at the bottom gives you an opportunity to understand how things work. You’ll be able to learn what is easy to achieve and what is more difficult.

This way, even if you were to invest money into Facebook marketing (and we advise that you do), you’ll know what exactly to aim for.

Here are four basic yet powerful tools which you can use to get your Facebook presence known and loved.

Facebook Pages

To be on Facebook, your business will need to have a Facebook Page. Whereas individuals have Facebook profiles, businesses have Facebook Pages.

Your Facebook Page is the address of your business on Facebook. It will have all the details of your business from what you do, why you do it, who your customers are and how you can be contacted outside of Facebook.

Facebook has made pages customizable to help you showcase the personality of your business. And with the options of being liked and followed, always ask people to like and follow so they can get your posts on their feeds.

Despite being a free marketing tool, your Page offers great potential for marketing purposes. It gives you access to Facebook analytics which help you understand your audience better. This enables you to be more successful in connecting and selling to them.

Consider doing the below 7 things to see your Facebook page grow your audience while spending $0:

• Use the right images for your Facebook page – you have two sections of your Facebook page which need images and you must use the right ones. Your profile photo will be shown every time you post or your page appears in search. For that reason, this should be nothing but your logo. For your cover photo, be creative and use an attractive image which draws the attention of your page visitors while communicating your uniqueness. You can use product images, photos of your employees to show a friendly image or some artwork to show your creativity.
• Share a mix of content type – once you start posting, your followers will get your posts on their news feed. This is the time to impress with both knowledge and humor. Instead of just writing test posts, include other content types such as images, videos and interesting perspectives to common opinions.
• Comment in groups and others’ posts using your page – whereas you need a personal profile to create a business page, ensure you connect with others using your Facebook page. Use your page to join groups and comment so as to draw attention to it.
• Share your page on your personal news feed – you’re your brand’s first ambassador and so you have to market your business on your personal profile too. Chances are that someone there would be interested in what you do and follow. He can even share your page with his network.
• Ask your friends to like and share the page – also include your friends in your marketing strategy and ask them to like and follow your page. Just doing that will get your brand in front of many other people. This works because Facebook tells people about pages their friends have liked.
• Link your Facebook page to your other social networks – you most likely have a profile in other social networks. Be it Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other, link your Facebook page to those profiles. Let your connections in those networks know that they can engage with you on Facebook too.
• Include your page URL in your email signature – it’s very easy to forget that email communications still happen in the 21st century. If you use an image for your email signature, let it include your Facebook URL. If your signature is pure text, then include the link in your signature and make it easy for someone to visit your Facebook page.

Facebook Groups

Facebook groups offer you more flexibility and opportunities than your page. Being a community of people sharing a common interest, Facebook Groups are a powerful way of building and growing an engaged audience.

What makes a group an effective marketing tool is that the members are usually targeted, highly receptive to your brand’s message and very engaged.

These groups are a great source of leads and new connections. You can also easily take these relationships outside the group.

Here are some Facebook marketing tips to help you make the most of Facebook Groups:

• Focus on creating a community – the Facebook platform is itself a community. So, instead of focusing on interacting with individual followers, form a community where people discuss matters surrounding what your business is involved in. Always chip in with expert advice/opinion and ensure the interactions are moderated. Remember to set some ground rules to guide interactions. These should be simple and few; just reminding people to hold discussions in a civil manner.
• Offer help and support – since your business is solving real problems which people have, use the group to offer the help and support you can. If a member shares about a challenge, show some empathy and offer helpful advice. As long as members are getting help, they’ll feel a part of a valuable community, remain in the group and even spread the word. This is growth in numbers and loyalty.
• Make it unique – to stay relevant, attract and grow your audience, you need to stand out. Offer your group members something they can’t get anywhere else. Instead of only discussing your products, challenge them to think differently by proposing different perspectives to commonly-held opinions. Hold weekly chats, Q&As, industry discussions and come up with interesting discussion topics to keep them engaged.
• Be active – being a community, don’t just create a group, tell people to interact then disappear. You have to be a part of the community. Try your best to respond to questions which haven’t been adequately answered, reply to some comments or note the questions and communicate that you’ll be addressing them on a specific day. Note that groups can be very active and engaging and thus a challenge to keep up with. If you’re in a position to, you can hire someone to manage the group for you. You can get a freelancer on Upwork Fiverr, and Flexjobs to do this.
• Don’t over-promote your business – it can be tempting to promote your business with every post, reminding group members of how your product or service solves their problem. Avoid this as it may cause members to see the group as a PR tool. Being too aggressive with your marketing will backfire on your efforts.

Facebook Live Videos

The popularity of Facebook Live has been increasing over the years. Since the launch in 2016, Facebook reports that it has seen over $3.5 billion broadcasts. Facebook pages (businesses) are also actively doing Facebook live videos.

The figures showing the benefits of doing a live broadcast speak for themselves.

With more viewership and engagement, doing a video broadcast on Facebook gives you more than just audience reach.

Apart from the fact that you can engage with viewers through comments, you can check those comments later on to pick up the most engaged viewers. You can follow up with individual fans later on, address key points of interest and even extend product offers.

If you notice some fans being consistently engaged, you can reward them by giving them “Top Fan” badges. This will increase their loyalty and engagement.

Here are some Facebook marketing tips on how to maximize live videos on Facebook:

• Add a compelling description – your video needs to have a description that will make people want to watch and engage with you. Include a description which captures the main theme and tell people why they need to watch it. Make sure you promise what the live video will deliver. Publish it when engagement rates are high – since you want to engage your audience, make sure you go live at a time when your audience is on the platform. You’ll want to ensure you get lots of interaction during the live stream. Anyone watching the video later will feel that they missed the interactions and plan for the next live video.
• Interview industry experts – to add value to your live videos, consider interviewing other industry experts. This will build your audience numbers especially if the expert also advertised the live video to his followers. Such interviews also add value to your audience. Anytime you provide value, your audience loves you even more. This is because you make them knowledgeable, help them make better decisions and ultimately help them improve their lives.
• Host Q&As – hosting a Q&A session is one of the best things you can do in your live video. When your audience gets to ask questions and see you respond to them in real time, it increases your connection with them and builds trust.
• Repurpose your live stream – a live stream through which you provided lots of value shouldn’t just end up in your archives. You can take portions of it in which you discuss particular topics and publish them as video posts. This helps you with content creation, saves you lots of time and simply enables you to benefit more from your hard work.

Facebook Events

Facebook offers you a way of engaging your followers by inviting them to your business activities. Facebook events provide your followers with an opportunity to interact with your business, especially by meeting the faces behind the brand.

Facebook events come in two forms; private and public. A public event is visible to anyone on Facebook and can be searched for across the platform. A private event however requires you to directly invite people to attend.

There are many business activities which you could turn into public events and allow some of your followers to attend. Examples include product launches, opening a store in a new location and even your end of year party.

You can also have a virtual event which attendees join through their computers or mobile devices.

Many businesses have embraced the use of webinars as a means of hosting virtual events with hundreds or even thousands of attendees. With software tools like WebinarJam webinars are pretty easy to pull off.

Another great option for webinars is Demio. With Demio, your audience won’t even need to download anything. They’ll simply join the virtual event through the web.

Check out our comparison of popular webinar apps to learn which one is best for your unique situation.

Having created your event, you can market it using your Facebook Page, by emailing your subscribers or running ads to promote it on the platform. Remember to also promote the event on your blog.

You can sell tickets to the event through Eventbrite. Eventbrite integrates with Facebook to offer you a seamless experience when selling your event tickets. After you set up ticket selling, an identical event will be created on Eventbrite.

Eventbrite will handle all payouts, refunds and cancellations. You can also create different tickets e.g. for VIPs while also pricing tickets at $0 for free tickets. Read Facebook’s guide on creating event tickets for more information.

To make your online event even more appealing, collaborate with other businesses which can benefit from the event. For instance, if your business sells organic foods, you can collaborate with a nutritionist who will share with your audience the nutritional benefits of different foods.

The collaboration will help both parties increase their brand awareness, show their expertise and build their audience.

Use Facebook to Grow Your Business

The audience on Facebook is huge. With all the diverse interests from different geographical locations, can you really fail to get some customers?

Just think about it.

Are you a blogger? You could promote your blog on Facebook and build your audience. Find out the different ways you can make money blogging. There are bloggers making upwards of $100,000 per month.

Are you skilled in any way and would like to make money teaching others your skill? You don’t need to apply for a teaching license. Just create an online course on Teachable or Thinkific and promote it for free on Facebook. If you can share knowledge, then you can create an online course.

Do you host a daily, weekly or monthly podcast show? More and more people are choosing to listen to audio instead of reading text. Create a podcasting show like the successful John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneurs on Fire and promote it on Facebook. Spotify, Google Podcasts and iTunes wouldn’t be on Facebook if there wasn’t an audience for podcasts.

Are you a freelancer or consultant looking for clients? You can connect with them on Facebook. Just note that you’ll also need a blog from where you showcase your skills and previous projects. Finding freelancing and consulting clients is one of the reasons for starting a blog.

Are you getting the idea?

It doesn’t matter what business you’re into. There are many ways to make money online.

Whichever one of those you pick, you can effectively promote it for free on Facebook (as long as it’s not an illegal business).

Promote Your Products for Free on Facebook Marketplace

Facebook is keen to ensure that it keeps people on the platform for as long as possible. As it does this, you, the marketer, get to enjoy the opportunities—if you’re at least aware of them.

One such opportunity which many marketers overlook is the Facebook marketplace.

You may think that Facebook marketplace is just a place for Facebook users to sell what they no longer need. As much as this is what many use it for, it provides a lot of potential for brands as well.

As a place where people discover, sell and buy products, you can make more sales while driving brand awareness. In fact, you might find that your e-commerce platform already integrates with Facebook to help you sell your products on the platform with ease.

E-commerce platforms know that you need to expand your reach so don’t hold yourself back. If your e-commerce platform doesn’t integrate with Facebook, or you’re currently looking for a service to use for your online store, check out our comparison of the best e-commerce platforms.

As you set yourself up to sell more on Facebook Marketplace, here are some of the benefits you can expect:

• Improved brand awareness – with over 800 million monthly users, Facebook marketplace provides an audience you shouldn’t ignore. People are eager to discover great products and your brand can be known for just that—great products.
• Lower cost of sales – e-commerce is big and people are shopping online more than ever. Facebook marketplace is not only an additional platform where you can list your products for sale, but you can do it for free. That means increased sales with minimal costs.
• Personalized customer experience – interacting with buyers through messages, you can show that you provide good customer experiences. Nothing beats a good experience. If people remember you for a great product and experience, the better for your business.
• Potential future customers – whether only one person responded to your product or several, who said you can’t sell to them again? Urge them to check out your website or blog. From there, targeting them later with ads becomes easier. You can also get some organic growth through them when they share your Facebook posts.
• Find out what sells best on Facebook – you can’t assume that what sells best in your physical store or online shop will sell similarly well on Facebook. Instead of spending money on paid ads, why not test out the sale potential to see what your Facebook audience likes? You can save a lot of money when you advertise a product you’re sure will sell.

How to Sell on Facebook Marketplace

Selling your products on Facebook marketplace is very simple. There are no complicated processes. The only thing you need is your business’ Facebook page.

From your Facebook page, click the Marketplace icon on the left side of your News Feed. Once clicked, you’ll be presented with a few options from which to choose what you want to do.

Click on “+ Sell Something.”

Next, you’ll be presented with three options to choose from, depending on what you want to sell.

Proceed to choose “Item for Sale” and fill in the information required as well as adding photos of what you want to sell.

After finishing this part and clicking “Next,” the last step involves choosing the audience you want your product to be shown to. The options you have are Marketplace and any other buy and sell group you belong to.

Marketplace is selected by default so if you don’t belong to any Buy and Sell group, that’s all you’ll see. If you have joined some buy and sell groups, you can choose which ones to include as your audience.

After that, go ahead and publish your listing and wait to hear from interested buyers.

Facebook Marketplace Seller Ratings

Facebook marketplace has another feature which can work well in helping you build trust with your audience. It’s a rating system that can help you gain buyers’ confidence through social proof.

The rating system has two different badges:

• Very Responsive Badge – this badge shows that you respond to messages about your listings quickly and responsively. You’ll get it if you reply to most of the messages you received in the last 30 days within an hour.
• Community Recommended Badge – this badge shows that you’ve been rated positively and consistently by other people on marketplace. You’ll get this badge if you’ve been rated at least 3 times, with 75% of those ratings being positive.

Run Paid Facebook Ads to Scale Customer Acquisition Fast

Achieving organic reach on Facebook can be challenging though beneficial due to the low costs involved. It can also take time to realize significant growth.

If you want a fast and effective way to increase your audience size and sell more, you’ll have to run paid Facebook ads. These are one of the Facebook marketing ideas which most marketers swear by. Through years of experience, they’ve realized that these are easier to work with.

Considering that this is paid, you might wonder whether you should really get into it or stay in the “free” zone. Well, what if we told you that businesses are using paid ads to scale their customer acquisition? What if we told you that your competitors could be among these businesses?

Businesses have been increasing their advertising budget over the years. As Statista shows, in the years between 2009 – 2019, Facebook’s ad revenue increased from $764 million to over $69 billion.

If you see businesses spending money, then you can know that they’ve spotted an opportunity.

And in case ad revenue data from Facebook doesn’t convince you, then here is data from consumers.

Studies have shown that social media is driving product discovery. And of all the social media platforms, Facebook is leading the way. Up to 78% of Facebook users report to have discovered products on the platform.

But discovery is only half the story. Upon discovery, over half of social media users made the purchase online.

Are you selling your products on your website or blog without utilizing Facebook? If you’re to scale your customer acquisition, you’ll need to start using Facebook.

And using ads will help you achieve your goals even faster.

How to Create a Facebook Ad Campaign

To get more customers faster through Facebook, you have to create an ad campaign. You create ad campaigns from the Ads Manager.

You can access your Ads Manager from the drop-down arrow in the upper-right corner of your Facebook business page. You have to be an admin to this page to access the Ads Manager. You can also access the Ads Manager using the Ads Manager mobile app provided by Facebook.

It’s from the Ads Manager that you create and manage your Facebook ads. To get from start to finish, there are at least 7 things to do and we’ll take you through all of them.

1. Select Your Campaign Objective

Your ad campaign should have an objective. This is the goal you want to achieve through the ad.

You have to be clear about your objective because this will determine other things like bidding, ad formats and audience targeting.

Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, collect information for email marketing or simply sell more products, being clear on your goals is a must.

Keep in mind that you’re also spending money on this ad. It’s therefore necessary that you know what exactly you want to achieve otherwise you won’t be able to tell whether your ad campaign was successful or not.

Here are the advertising objectives you can choose from on Facebook. They are divided into three categories: awareness, consideration and conversion.

Ad objective: Awareness

Awareness objectives are meant to generate interest in your business. Use them to tell people about your products/services and show the value they add.

Ad objective: Consideration

Consideration objectives are meant to get people thinking about your business. The action you want people to take when thinking about your business is to reach out to you for more information.

Ad objective: Conversion

Conversion objectives are all about selling. They encourage people to buy your products or services.

2. Name Your Ad Campaign

Your ad campaign needs a name. This is important because once you’ve created and run several ads, you’ll want to know which one served what purpose. You might find that you want to run the same campaign later on and the campaign name will come in handy to save you precious time.

Having clear names for your campaigns is also helpful when it comes to reporting. The more descriptive the names, the better.

It’s best to adopt a naming convention that quickly tells you all you need to know about the campaign. Here are some of the things you can include in your campaign names:

• Business name/website/blog – who is the intended beneficiary of the ad campaign?
• Target audience – who’s being considered a potential customer?
• Facebook/landing page – where can ad viewers get more information about the offer?
• Creative type – what type of content is the campaign using? (text, images, video etc)
• Date range – when is the campaign starting and ending?

Here is an example of how you can use the above elements to name an ad campaign:

SunValley Retirement Homes_50+ Years_Video_SunValley Retirement Homes 10% Off_Jan-Mar 2020

• Business name – SunValley Retirement Homes
• Target Audience – 50+ years old
• Creative type – Video
• Landing page – SunValley Retirement Homes 10% Off
• Date range – Jan-Mar 2020

Once you give your ad campaign a name, the other option you have at this stage is A/B Testing. This is also called split testing. Using this option means that you want to test two or more versions of the same ad.

This is where you run experiments by changing some elements of the ad so you can determine which ad version performs best.

Some of the ad elements you can test include:

• Ad image
• Ad copy
• Ad format (text, video, carousel etc)
• Ad placement (feed, stories, right column, marketplace etc)

Although you can skip this, the benefits of split testing are worth the extra effort. The data you collect helps you know which ad type your audience responds to best.

3. Set up Audience Targeting

One of the biggest advantages of advertising on Facebook is that you get targeting options which you can’t get anywhere else. This is made possible thanks to the massive amounts of data people freely share on the social media platform.

With over 1.7 billion daily users, you can’t afford to put your ad out there without targeting the right audience. Doing so can lead to your ad being seen by people who would never be interested in your products.

If you don’t target the right audience, your ad becomes irrelevant and your campaign simply wastes your time and money.

When setting up your audience targeting, you can choose from the many options available including location, language, politics, behavior, education and interests. These options provide even more detailed options to help you get the right target.

For example, targeting people based on their location gives you the below options:

• Country
• State
• Counties
• DMA (Designated Market Area)
• Specific Address Radius

Targeting Facebook users based on demographics can give you options which include:

• Age
• Education
• Generation
• Relationship
• Life events

Another popular and very helpful targeting option is interests. These are based on what people like (including Facebook Pages they’ve liked) as well as what they list as their interests.

In the list of interests, you have very many options to choose from. If you’re not yet sure what interest to target, be careful not to spend too much time here. If you know what exactly you’re after, you can just type it then check out the related topics suggested by Facebook.

You can also target a custom audience which you created based on specific targeting options. Your custom audience could be based on your current customers, your website visitors, people who have engaged with your Facebook content or those who have installed your Facebook app.

4. Choose Your Ad Placement

Facebook has three different platforms where your ads can be run. Two of these platforms are the top social media platforms: Facebook and Instagram.

Can you imagine that?

Advertising on Facebook gives you access to both Facebook and Instagram. In other words, you can make money on Instagram while on Facebook. To help you see the opportunity, consider that Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users with over 500 million daily users.

The other platform your ads could run is the Facebook Audience Network.

This is however only possible if you allow Facebook to determine where to place your ad.

If you however have some data on what works best for you, you can choose where you want your ad to go. You can make such a choice if you have run A/B testing and analyzed the results.

As a general guide, here are the platforms Facebook recommends for ad placement depending on your campaign objectives:

• Brand awareness – Facebook, Instagram
• Engagement – Facebook and Instagram
• Video views – Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network
• App installs – Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network
• Web traffic – Facebook, Audience Network
• Product catalog sales – Facebook, Audience Network
• Conversions – Facebook, Audience Network

If you’re just getting started, these options might seem daunting. We recommend going by the automatic placement done by Facebook. Their algorithm does a good job of placing your ad where it will perform best.

With time however, work on split testing and get to know what your audience responds to. This will save you lots of time down the road and help you cut down on costs.

Still, remember that audiences are always changing. Preferences change while trends come and go. For that reason, you’ll never really do enough split tests. It will be best if you embrace testing as a part of your marketing efforts to learn more about your target audience.

5. Set Up Your Campaign Budget, Bid and Schedule

Have you wondered how much money you should spend on the campaign ad?

Your campaign will need a budget and it’s important that you have at least a basic understanding of how this works.

Let’s start by looking at how to budget then we’ll get to the bidding afterwards.

Facebook provides you with two budgeting options: a daily budget and a lifetime budget. Here’s a brief on them.

Daily Budget

As the name suggests, setting up a daily budget means you’re giving Facebook the figure to spend on ads per day. More technically, you’re actually telling Facebook to give you daily ad results which are worth your budget.

Understanding this “technical” aspect of your budget is crucial. It helps you control your expectations.

Since your ads are optimized for performance, there are days when the Facebook algorithm spots opportunities for high performance. On such days, it will spend up to 25% more of your daily budget to ensure you don’t miss out.

Does that mean your budget will increase?

No.

Facebook will automatically lower your ad spend on days when the opportunities are low. This balances things out to make sure that your ad spend remains within budget.

Lifetime Budget

With a lifetime budget, Facebook basically works out a daily budget based on the total budget and campaign dates.

When creating your campaign, you’ll be asked to choose your campaign dates. With these dates, Facebook will determine how to spread the total budget across those dates.

Although the lifetime budget can be a form of set-and-go option, you might want to use the daily budget option. That will give you more control over the campaign and allow you to later on make changes to the budget as you see fit.

Before we get to the bidding part, you have another option you can choose: the ad delivery optimization.

This is in line with your campaign’s objective and it tells Facebook what objective is of most importance to you.

Ads Bidding

Advertising on Facebook is a bidding process and you can either bid manually and automatically.

It’s best to use the automatic bidding option when getting started. Not only does it make things easier, you also don’t have any data to support custom bids.

In the absence of data, you need lots of knowledge on how bidding works. You need to know the average bids, the costs for results and the kind of results coming from bids.

Whereas you can learn from other people’s data, things may work differently for you. It’s therefore advisable to consider your own results so as to have a better understanding of what is best for your business.

When you choose manual bidding, Facebook will provide you with a range of suggested bids. It will then insert a suggested amount in the bid amount box. Unless you’re okay with the suggested amount, make sure you change it to an amount of your choice.

An easy way to settle for a number is to do an average. If you have a limited budget, you can also bid just slightly over the lower bid amount. For instance, with a bid range of $1-$2, you can bid $1.5 or even $1.2.

Ads Scheduling

You can also choose when your ads should run. This enables you to choose when the ads will reach the people you’re targeting. You get to choose the day and even time.

Choosing a custom ad delivery schedule can help with extra targeting.

For example, having learned which days and what time your audience is most active on Facebook, you could schedule your ads to run only on those days. Depending on what your data tells you, you could set the ads to run the whole day or during specific times.

Such options give you a lot of control and flexibility. Just remember to use data from your page and ad insights to make sure you’re not doing the wrong thing.

Your ads can also be delivered either in the standard way or accelerated way. The standard way involves optimizing ad delivery for both speed and lower costs. Choosing the accelerated delivery, speed will be prioritized and the costs will be higher.

You should always stick to standard ad delivery unless your campaign is time-sensitive. To make such cases more of an exception than the norm, plan your marketing activities well ahead of time.

Keep yourself (and your team) updated on the goings on in your niche and plan accordingly.

6. Create Your Facebook Ad

Once you’re done with the above settings, it’s time to create your ad. This is actually the most critical part of your ad campaign.

Your ad budget, bid, placement and all those other things aside, your ad content is what determines the campaign’s success. It doesn’t matter how much of everything else you do, if your ad doesn’t convince people to take action, it won’t be successful.

There are two things to focus on here, the visuals and copywriting. These two things are what work to catch an ad viewer’s eye, entice them to click on your ad and eventually convert. So it makes a lot of sense to invest in these.

The Ad Visuals

In creating your ad, you’ll have the option of creating one of several types. This depends on the objectives of your campaign.

For images, you can upload an image from your computer, use a picture from your library or pick a free image from Shutterstock (courtesy of a Facebook/Shutterstock partnership).

Although going for free images sounds appealing (cost cutting), you might want to reconsider that option. Going for a free image might lead you to pick one which other advertisers have probably used before.

What happens when your audience sees an ad containing an image they’ve seen being used by your competitor?

It’s always best to create your own images. Visit Canva and create professional images for free or look up an affordable freelance graphic designer on Upwork or Flexjobs. You can also check out Freelancer for similar talent.

Staying unique is important.

If taking a picture of your products, ensure they are high-quality shots. High quality is also important when creating video ads.

The Ad Copy

As important as visuals are, it’s the accompanying words that actually cause people to take action. Whereas a visual may move someone, it’s the words that actually tell them what to do – giving direction on the action to take.

With copywriting, you need some skills. Looking at the text limitations Facebook sets, you’ll realize that it’s not the many words which convert. It’s the right words.

To write a winning copy, focus on addressing the pain points of your audience. Show them that you understand the problem, have the solution and that taking the action you’re asking them to, will lead to solving the problem.

7. Publish Your Ad

Having gone through the process of setting up your campaign and creating your ad, you’re now good to go.

It’s time to publish the ad and watch how it performs.

We hope that from following this guide, you’ve realized that creating Facebook ads isn’t very hard. Just commit to learning more about your target audience so you can reach them more effectively in the future.

Choose the Right Facebook Ad Format

To succeed in advertising on Facebook, you need to consider which ad format to use. Although there are different formats to choose from, what’s common among them is the use of visuals.

Facebook emphasizes the use of visual content (images and video) and the ad formats available show this.

Here are some of the most popular Facebook ad formats, with information about their use.

Boosted Posts

One of the common ways of reaching a larger audience is by boosting your posts. This is simply paying Facebook to show your post to an audience beyond those who already like your page.

The posts you boost can be anything from an important industry or business update to a post which has previously generated a lot of engagement.

While setting up this kind of ad, you can choose to target your fans, their friends or even choose a completely new target audience.

Image Ads

Image ads are among the most popular on Facebook. They’re popular because of the visual appeal they provide. Images have been shown to generate more interest and engagement compared to text. For that reason, Facebook puts a lot of emphasis on visual content.

To further see how serious Facebook is about images, consider the fact that an image ad should not have more than 20% text. The visual aspect of the image should simply stand out.

If planning to use image ads, here are some image ad recommendations to keep in mind:

• File type: jpg or png
• Image ratio: 1.91:1 to 4:5
• Resolution: highest possible
• Primary text: 125 characters

Video Ads

Video has become the most popular content format people are engaging with. Facebook knows this and is encouraging advertisers to use video.

Engagement rates for video are higher than those of image. When you create a video ad, you’re likely to generate more engagement, as long as the video tells a good story.

With video ads, Facebook recommends using H.264 compression and stereo AAC audio compression for high quality. The video size should not exceed 4 GB.

Here are other video ad recommendations from Facebook:

• Resolution: highest possible
• Minimum length: 1 second
• Maximum length: 4 hours
• Captions: optional but recommended
• Primary text: 125 characters

Carousel Ads

Carousel is an ad format which allows you to showcase up to ten images or videos within a single ad. Each of the images or videos can have its own link.

The carousel ad is a special one since it gives you lots of space to work with, all in a single ad. You can highlight several products, showcase specific details of a product or even tell a story spanning all the carousel cards.

From the carousel ad recommendations by Facebook, here are some of the major ones:

• Minimum number of cards: 2
• Maximum number of cards: 10
• Landing page link: required
• Maximum image file size: 30 MB
• Recommended resolution: at least 1080 x 1080 px
• Headline: 25 characters

Collection Ads

A collection ad is intended to make it easier for people to discover, browse and purchase products through mobile devices.

A collection ad usually includes a cover visual (image or video) which is followed by several product images. Clicking on a collection ad opens up an Instant Experience which drives engagement while nurturing interest and intent.

The first media asset in your Instant Experience is used as the cover image or video. Headlines are capped at 25 characters with primary text being 90 characters long.

Instant Experience

An instant experience ad is an immersive full-screen post-click experience available on mobile devices. Previously called Canvas, it allows for watching videos, swiping through carousels and even filling forms.

Instant experience can be used with most Facebook ad formats, including collections.

The recommended instant experience specs include:

• Number of images: up to 20
• Image sizing: Fit-to-width and Fit-to-height
• Video resolution: minimum of 720p
• File type: .mp4 or .mov
• Video duration: less than 2 minutes

Lead generation ads

Lead generation is an important part of the marketing process and Facebook can help you with that too.

Through its lead generation ads, Facebook makes it easier for users to provide you with information which you can use to engage with them further.

Lead generation ads use pre-populated forms to make submitting information easy. Instead of typing, form filling requires only a few taps, increasing the likelihood of people completing the forms.

With reduced drop-offs, your objective to generate leads gets a major boost.

Some of the things you can do with lead generation ads include:

• Schedule appointments
• Include a click-to-call option
• Show business location (or outlet location) nearest to the ad viewer
• Filter out low-quality leads

Although most of the ad formats utilize visuals, you still have to choose which one will work best for you. Considering what your audience resonates with while keeping your marketing objectives in mind will help you choose the right format.

Measure Facebook Ad Results (and Optimize for Maximum Marketing ROI)

Your marketing results can tell you so much about the performance of your ads. Facebook reports your ad results in details, giving you an opportunity to tweak ads for maximum performance.

We strongly advise you to take time and go through the results you get from ads. Ask yourself whether what you’re getting is making a contribution towards your business’ growth. If yes, then you can keep advertising, not forgetting to conduct A/B testing.

If the results aren’t meeting your expectations, then check what needs to change. Don’t rush to increase your marketing budget just because you’re getting little in return.

So, how do you know what to check?

Focus on the bottom line. Focus on returns. If the ad results aren’t helping your business become more profitable, then the ad isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. Find out what needs to change and implement the change quickly.

Here are the metrics which should matter most to you.

Total Number of Conversions

The only thing that should matter is the number of people who take the action you wanted them to take. The question then becomes, what did you want people to do after viewing your ad?

When Facebook reports that your ad has reached hundreds or thousands of people, how many of them have taken the desired action?

In many cases, unless you were just looking for engagement on Facebook (not the best measure of ad success), you should check your website/blog for results. Your blog will tell you the truth about the success of your ad campaigns on Facebook.

Here are three signs of success you can determine from your website:

Increased Blog Traffic

One of the best ways of determining the success of your online business is by checking the number of visits. Whereas it’s not everything, the more the visits, the more the people who can potentially become customers.

On Facebook, what you need to look for is the number of link clicks. How many people clicked on the ad to visit your blog?

If your Facebook ad was successful, then there should be more people visiting your blog to interact with your content.

If the number of link clicks is high and your blog shows more visitors, then congratulations. Your ad campaign was a success.

With increased traffic, your work is now to keep providing value through your content to keep your blog audience engaged.

Leads

Another important metric to look at is the number of leads your Facebook ad generates. Leads are important because they are people who are interested in your brand enough to give you their information.

They do this by signing up for your newsletters, free-trial offers etc. These are people who are more likely to convert to paying customers.

If you’re getting more leads, then your ad has worked.

In preparation for receiving leads, you should set up a landing page using Leadpages to help convert them.

Facebook has an ad type called lead generation ad which is meant for advertisers seeking to generate leads. Use this if your intention is to acquire more leads for your business.

Sales

If you sell products or services, then metrics like reach, likes, clicks and the like shouldn’t impress you much. What should make you happy is seeing an increase in the amount of sales.

Since your ad started running, have you registered more sales? And more importantly, are those sales coming from Facebook? It’s important to determine this so as to be sure that you’re actually getting value from your Facebook ad.

At the very least, you should see more sales of the product or collection you advertised on Facebook. You should also be able to pick up interest in items related to those you advertised.

As long as your store is well optimized for sales, you should be making more money as a result of the Facebook ad you’re running.

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

Your return on ad spend (ROAS) is the money you make for the money spent on advertising. If you think about it, ROAS is actually the best measure of the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.

Advertising is really an investment and the worth of every investment is only seen from the lens of the returns. So, if you spend, say, $35 on ads then generate revenue worth $30, then you know that you’re losing money.

On the other hand, if your revenue is higher than your ad spend, then your ad is making you money.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

One of the ways Facebook charges advertisers is through cost per click. This is the amount of money you pay for every click your ad generates. The alternative charging method is CPM (Cost Per a thousand impressions).

CPC is a better metric to use since you pay for the action taken on your ad.

WordStream conducted a study on Facebook advertising and found the average CPC across industries to be $1.72.

When your CPC is high, your conversions should also be high. This is because the clicks are supposed to lead to your website or a landing page where conversion is supposed to take place.

The number of clicks should correspond to the rate of conversion. Also, the cost of the clicks should be lower than the value of the conversions.

CTR (Click Through Rate)

Your ad’s click-through rate is an indication of how much interest your ad generated. It tells you how many of the people who viewed you ad clicked on it to end up on your landing page.

Your ad’s CTR is a good measure of the effectiveness of your ad—more specifically, the creative and copy elements of your ad. These are the things which largely determine whether people take the action you want them to take.

For a quick guide on what CTR is okay, here is what WordStream found out. The average CTR across industries is 0.9%.

If your ads deliver a low CTR, it means that despite seeing your ad, people aren’t taking action.

To change this, you need to work on the visual and copy of your ad. A low CTR can cost you more since Facebook takes it to mean that your ads are not relevant to the audience you’re targeting.

CPA (Cost Per Action)

The cost per action metric is meant to measure the efficiency of your ads in terms of generating action.

You see, it’s one thing to have an ad clicked by thousands of people and it’s something different for that ad, clicked by thousands, to cost you less.

To better understand this metric, just think of the business strategy of growth through cost cutting. Cutting down on costs increases profitability since you have less expenses.

From their study, WordStream found that the average CPA across industries was $18.68.

In measuring this metric, aim at securing a low CPA. If you can lower your CPA, then it means you can have the same number of actions for less.

Put differently, you can reduce your advertising budget and get the same results. Alternatively, you can spend the same amount but get more results because the cost is low.

Get Even Better Marketing Results by Using Facebook Retargeting Options

Regardless of the results you’re getting from your Facebook marketing campaigns, you’ll be pleased to know that there is more.

If you want more conversions, then you can channel your advertising efforts towards retargeting.

Retargeting is where you target people who have visited your physical store or website/blog and shown interest in what you offer/sell.

This is important because people visiting your store or website don’t always buy immediately they develop interest.

There are many reasons why people abandon carts, check out products but don’t purchase or fail to subscribe to your newsletters.

Whatever the reason, Facebook retargeting offers you an opportunity to “remind” those prospects to buy what they were interested in.

How to Create a Custom Audience for Facebook Retargeting

Facebook retargeting starts with creating a custom audience which you want to target. To create your custom audience, go to your Ads Manager and click on “Audiences.”

If you have created other audiences before, you’ll be presented with a drop-down list from which you can choose “Custom Audience.” In case you don’t have any audience created yet, Facebook will present you with audience creation buttons.

Facebook enables you to create a custom audience using data from a customer file, your website’s traffic, app activity and people who have engaged with your Facebook content.

The options available give you flexibility so you can target different kinds of audience.

Retargeting Your Physical Store Visitors

If you have a list of customers either from your physical store or email subscribers, you can use it to create a retargeting audience. This can be a list you created by requesting for information from store visitors or one you extracted from your CRM.

To effectively use this file, you’ll have to format it according to Facebook’s requirements. This will increase the matching rate of those customers with their Facebook profiles.

Retargeting Your Website Visitors

This is a common option for many marketers as they seek to maximize on the online presence of their businesses. Fortunately, retargeting website visitors has been made easy through the use of Facebook Pixel.

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you place on your website to track visitors as they check out different pages or products. It then reports on the visitor actions (and inactions) to give you insight into how people are interacting with your website.

When creating a custom audience based on your website traffic, you get options to narrow down your targeting. This helps make your ads more relevant, thus increasing your conversion rates.

Retargeting Facebook App Users

If your business uses an app and you want to retarget people based on app activity, then you’ll use the Facebook SDK.

The Facebook SDK works in a similar way as the Pixel. It collects data and gives you insights into your app usage. You’ll be able to know about actions such as adding items to your basket but not completing the purchase.

These actions are referred to as Facebook app events.

The data you collect from these events will enable you to create a custom audience with specific details of who you want to reach. The SDK can even automatically add people to your audience based on the actions you choose to target.

If you have a Facebook app, then check out Facebook’s guide to targeting by app activity.

Retargeting People Who Have Engaged with Your Facebook Page

This is the newest retargeting option added by Facebook to help you make the most of engagements on your Facebook content.

The people who engage with your Facebook page can help you with organic reach. Since Facebook prioritizes posts from friends as opposed to businesses, their posts about your brand can help grow your audience.

Retargeting your prospects is a powerful marketing option which you can use for different business goals. From acquiring more leads to increasing sales, use retargeting for the benefit it provides.

Avoid common Facebook Ad Mistakes That Can Easily Cost You Millions

Facebook ads are a powerful marketing tool. And just like any other powerful tool, using it wrongly can lead to losses.

With Facebook ads, there are common mistakes many marketers make. You might have made similar mistakes too or maybe you wonder how come your ads aren’t generating profits.

To help you make the most of your Facebook marketing efforts, we’ve listed 6 common mistakes you should avoid.

Here are the mistakes to avoid if you’re to see more success with your ad campaigns:

Creating Irrelevant and Low-converting Landing Pages

Landing pages are central to your marketing strategy and ad campaign success. With the Facebook ad pointing to a landing page, the user expects to get exactly what the ad promised. Unfortunately, many marketers fail to realize the importance of having a landing page that fits in with the ad.

This is disastrous.

When prospects get to a landing page which talks of something different than what brought them there, they immediately leave. In some cases, ads lead to the business home page from where the prospect is supposed to navigate to the store page and buy.

That is too much inconvenience for a prospect. And with many other options out there, you risk losing credibility.

What should you do?

Don’t focus on your Facebook Ad copy and neglect your landing page. Your landing page is where the conversion takes place. It’s therefore a very important part of your strategy.

To make your landing page relevant, use the same visuals and similar copy as what you used on the ad. Increase conversion rates by using a well-designed funnel which will at the very least, get the prospect’s email address while targeting for a purchase.

Collecting email addresses gives you an opportunity to nurture the lead using a tool like ConvertKit. ConvertKit works very well when it comes to separating prospects. It will also help you communicate to your leads differently, depending on how they interacted with your content.

Failing to Experiment with Different Ad Formats

One of the biggest and most common mistakes Facebook marketers do is creating one type of ad and running it for all their audiences. This is the traditional way of doing it and over time, it has proven to be less effective.

Before creating your next ad, keep in mind that not all of your followers respond to the same kind of ad. Whereas text is fine for some, image okay for others, there are those whose interest will only be triggered by video ads.

At the same time, even one type of ad can be tweaked to appeal to different audience segments. This can be done by changing colors, fonts or simply the duration of a video ad.

It all comes down to testing. A/B Testing your Facebook ads can make all the difference when it comes to reaching and converting your target audience.

To help marketers see the importance of testing ad strategies, Facebook shared the success of ads run by Champs Sports.

Champs Sports tested two video ads, one lasting 30 seconds and the other being 6 seconds. From the results, you can’t help but see the importance of testing different ads. They eventually settled on the 6-second video.

Do you know why?

The 6-second ad delivered an 11% increase in estimated ad recall, 12% increase in return on ad spend and 271% increase in video completion rate. Moreover, there was a notable increase in click-through rates, conversion rates and the average purchase value.

Imagine having such results from your Facebook marketing campaign.

When you test different ad formats, you run your campaigns confidently knowing that you’re using the most effective format. You’re also guaranteed that you’ll make the most of your marketing budget.

Running Ads at All Times

You can easily assume that the more you advertise, the higher the chances that your audience will buy.

Well, this is not really the case. In fact, the opposite is true.

Research shows that when you run your ad campaigns too frequently, your audience soon starts experiencing ad fatigue.

In a 2018 study, over 77% of digital buyers said that they see too many ads from the same retailer. Considering the increase in the use of ad blockers, this number has probably increased.

You should schedule your ad campaign to run only at the time it’s most likely to be seen and acted upon. This calls for an understanding of your Facebook audience.

Once you know what time is best for your ad to run, set the schedule under the “Budget and Schedule” section of the Ad Sets tab in Ads Manager.

Note that you’ll have to choose the “Lifetime budget” option for this to work.

Running your ads only when they’re likely to have the widest reach will help avoid over-exposure to your audience. This results in improving your campaign response.

Failing to Activate Facebook Automated Rules

When running your ads, you’ll need to keep an eye on them to ensure they’re running according to your plans. This is to avoid being caught off-guard when for example, the cost per acquisition goes up.

Since keeping tabs on the campaign can prove a challenge, Facebook got you covered by providing a tool that can watch the key numbers for you. Whether it’s the cost of acquisition or number of impressions, the automated rules can alert you of the set thresholds and even make the necessary adjustments.

After creating automated rules, they will check your ads and either notify you of changes or take action on your behalf.

If you prefer the purely automated way of managing your ads, then create the relevant rules and you’ll receive notifications once updates are made. Alternatively, just set the rules to send you notifications then make changes yourself.

This way, you stay in control of your ad campaigns while ensuring that you’re aware of any necessary changes.

Constantly Tweaking Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

Since Facebook Ads cost money, it makes sense to want to achieve the expected results in the shortest time possible. This can help you justify your marketing budget while also ensuring fast growth.

Thinking along those lines might cause you to start tweaking your ad after some hours when you don’t see the results you expected. Unfortunately, this will only make things worse.

When you set up an ad on Facebook, the algorithm starts collecting data from user responses to enable it optimize your ad. Facebook calls this the “Learning Phase” and it usually ends after around 50 conversions.

Depending on factors like your audience size and campaign objectives, 50 conversions may take anything from a few days to weeks. You’ll need to practice lots of patience here.

If you tweak your ad after a few days, you’ll be back to square one. Do this several times and your ad will remain in the learning phase; never optimized for best performance.

Set up your ad campaign and patiently wait for the algorithm to learn through the audience responses. This will give it enough data to optimize your ad and therefore deliver better results for your ad campaign.

Continuing to Market to Converted Customers

There’s nothing as annoying to customers as being bombarded with an ad for a product or service they’ve already purchased. They can easily view you as a spammer if they keep seeing your ads on their feeds every other time.

This is something you want to avoid as it may impact the success of your future ad campaigns. You want your audience to love your brand and be upbeat about it, not angry about it.

To avoid marketing to converted customers, create a custom audience and exclude those who have already made a purchase.

This small setting will help make your campaign more effective as it ensures your ad reaches new audiences.

Focusing on new audiences increases the chances of netting more prospects and convincing them to buy.

Facebook Marketing FAQ

Here are some of the most common questions marketers ask when thinking of Facebook marketing.

Ready to Start Marketing Your Business on Facebook?

There are many social media platforms today but Facebook stands out. As the place where 2.7 billion people interact every month, this is an audience you can’t afford to ignore.

Not only that, on Facebook, people freely share everything from general interests to their private lives. Facebook takes all this information and gives it to you so you can easily target the right people with your brand’s message.

And with the different options available to reach prospects while retargeting your website visitors, Facebook is simply the best thing to have happened to businesses.

Get on board. Implement what you’ve learned in this guide and build an audience for your business while selling more both on and off Facebook.

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