Modern business builders, entrepreneurs, and marketing teams are facing a mountain of challenges in getting returns from their ads nowadays.
Macroeconomic responses to major political upheaval, pandemics, and changes to consumer behavior all play into this, but ultimately, every company’s revenue is at stake by not understanding the major ad platforms.
There are a few problems in the way though.
One is the fact there’s more than a little depth and complexity to media buying on Facebook and Instagram, just look at how much information is available:
Here’s another big one……. more and more people are publishing info about Facebook ads, while more and more people are searching for info about it. The ridiculous thing here is ……. the strategies and tactics evolve way faster than most people realize, meaning most people are consuming outdated info and then putting it into practice in their businesses!
That’s just two of the many factors behind why most businesses can’t get returns from Facebook ads.
With that in mind, we wanted to offer what we think is timeless advice. An article for our readers that would help get better results right now, and in the future.
But before we get into it, we have to touch on something important.
Having been in this game for a while, the truth I see is this…. the foundational principles to success with Facebook ads, are really just the timeless principles of success in marketing.
Facebook has a set of principles you need to master if you want success with your ads. Not knowing these principles and how to apply them is why most businesses fail with their ads.
So I’ll try my best to help.
Here are my 7 most powerful tips to make profit from your Facebook ads:
1. Realize & Accept That Facebook Is A Communication Tool
Your fan page is Facebook’s primary tool to determine whether you’re a good or bad business in their eyes (i.e. one that has a good or bad impact on Facebook’s user experience). The brands that get consistent returns don’t neglect their fan page.
What matters most is how you engage your audience. We recommend you post organically at least 2x per day.
Post content that engages for comments instead of likes, but that also avoids engagement bait. Try to spark conversation naturally through curiosity. Make sure to read “Why Content is Key“ to learn why this is so important and how you can master this principle and use it to get better returns.
Your conversion campaigns will benefit in multiple ways:
- As your engagement rate rises and you’ll reach more of your followers and gain new ones
- Facebook recommends high frequency. Posting 2 or more times per day tells Facebook you’re a quality brand that cares about its users. Your ads will get cheaper (lower CPM’s)
- Engagement metrics have become an important factor in the ad auction. An engaged page will increase the quality scores of your ads, dropping ad costs even further
- More data for Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence to work with
- You’ll get a lot of feedback on the content you post which helps to find better performing ad creatives. And, through organic posts, you’re essentially testing content for free
Pro Tip:
Build a Facebook Group Community.
You may have realized that group content is taking more and more space in your newsfeed. That’s part of Facebook’s redirection program to help users to more easily connect with friends, family and like-minded people.
If you position your community the right way, this can become a great part of your value proposition, thus increasing your perceived value in the market.
Also, invite people who liked your ads or page posts to also like your page. With a larger following, you become more trusted. Plus Facebook will show you the love because your page is sending important engagement metrics to them. You can do so by clicking on the likes of a post and then click on “invite” next to the person’s name. These people will receive a notification that you’ve invited them to like their page.
2. Give Your Customer A Great Experience & Even Better Support
In March 2018, a lot of dropshipping stores went out of business when Facebook introduced page scores & started asking for customer feedback.
Too many users felt cheated by e-commerce stores with long shipping times from China, poor product quality, and non-existent customer support. Ever since, customer surveys have become another one of Facebook’s tools to determine the good advertisers from the bad.
You can review your customer feedback here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/customer_feedback/
Pro Tip:
Answering every comment on your posts is a chance for you to make your brand look awesome, not only with the commenter, but with everyone else who sees it. In most cases, a Facebook ad is the first interaction a potential customer has with your brand. What many businesses don’t realize is that the comment section is part of the ad. Show great customer support if you want to boost people’s confidence in buying from you.
3. Start Collecting & Using Testimonials & Case Studies
Thanks to Amazon, people now make online purchase decisions based on customer reviews.
Testimonials on your website and social channels are crucial for success. We urge our clients to collect testimonials as soon as possible, and then figure out the best way to incentivize and automate this.
Reviews gives your audience greater confidence in buying from you, and they help increase organic reach (through social sharing, better SEO ranking etc.) as well as better quality scores.
Pro tip:
Have an automated follow up email sequence sent to your customers a week or two after purchasing. Give an incentive that is compelling enough for people to act on.
4. Act Like A Media Business
If you want to scale your Facebook ads profitably, your business needs to have some kind of content generation machine. It can be in-house, outsourced, or user-generated (think GoPro).
You need to create content your audience engages with. You want to be the TV show, not the ads in between (that everybody switches off).
If you can nail this, you will get an engaged audience, and you’ll have a system for finding out which ad creatives will win for you in the market (Facebook is all about constant testing!!)
Check out our article on the “Best Facebook Video Ads in 2020: Powerful Sales Video Ideas that Convert” to learn which type of video content you can create to make your ad campaigns lift off.
Pro Tip:
Regularly check your competitor’s content and also check out their ads library to get inspired on content ideas https://www.facebook.com/ads/library
5. Keep Optimizing Your Landing Page
Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, public pressure on Facebook has ratcheted up to the point they launched a big algorithm change that put more focus on what they call “estimated action value”.
We’ve seen businesses 2x their conversions with small tweaks to the landing page, so whether you can convert 1, 2 or 3 visitors out of 100 makes a big difference at scale. With rising media buying costs, converting more of the traffic to your page is crucial to keeping Facebook ads working for you.
The best thing about this: higher conversion rates will not only give you more sales, but also reduce your ad costs, because every conversion is tracked and used as feedback by Facebook that your business is relevant to Facebook’s users, thus favoring you in the ad auction.
Pro Tip:
The effect of page loading times is often underestimated, and for most businesses this is a low hanging fruit that can pay off quickly. Make sure your site loads fast and is well optimized for mobile.
6. Focus On Your Customer Lifetime Value
It used to be so easy! Unfortunately, the golden years are long gone, and social media advertising just ain’t as easy as it was 10, 5, or even 2 years ago.
The biggest difference we see between e-commerce stores that can scale, compared to small ones that hit a ceiling early on, is that the successful stores have mastered their customer lifetime value system, and can get their customers to buy from them multiple times per year, for many years.
The reason why is, the higher you scale, the harder it is for Facebook to find people who are ready to buy now, and the more expensive your acquisition cost gets. If you’re currently stuck at the maximum acquisition cost (CPA) you can afford, then working to increase customer long-term value (LTV) is your best shot to keep growing.
Think long-term. The higher your LTV, the higher CPA you can afford on the first sale. The more you’re willing to sacrifice profit on the first sale (knowing you generate a great LTV), the faster you can bring your brand to the next level.
Pro-Tip:
Spend most of your time building the LTV system of your business. Once set-up properly, it’s relatively low maintenance compared to the dynamics of brand building and media buying. Your media buying efforts will then be so much more valuable.
7. Customer Segmentation
One more thing that becomes important for scaling, is segmentation. If you can really address the pain points of each audience segment with specific, highly targeted ads that scratches your audience’s itch, you will see significant results.
The “one ad fits all” approach may work in the beginning, but it won’t last because every ad experiences fatigue eventually. And most likely, your customers buy your product for different reasons. You have to show you different customer segments the ads that emphasize those reasons.
Scalable business are the ones who figured out how to segment their customer data. They can then target more audiences (horizontal scaling), and create specific ads that their different audience segments can better relate to (vertical scaling).
Pro Tip:
A questionnaire right after purchase is a great way to segment your customers, and it allows you to make your email funnel more specific.
