12 Apr How to grow your business with Facebook ads.
Do you want to start advertising on Facebook and Instagram to grow your business and increase your revenue?
Do you want to reach targeted people that are likely to buy your products and services?
Are you looking to start advertising on the biggest social media platform to help grow your business and want to avoid wasting money? If that’s you, you’ll want to continue reading this article, where I cover the 4 big mistakes most people make on Facebook ads.
1 – Trying to Sell, Sell, Sell.
If you read my last blog post about marketing funnels for PPC, you’ll already understand that you need to use different marketing messages depending on where your users are within their purchasing journey.
In general, Facebook advertising is different. If you are selling trainers for runners and want to advertise them on Facebook. You wouldn’t be able to use keywords as you do in PPC to attract users looking to buy trainers.
Facebook advertising is a disruptive form of marketing. Your users, although may need running trainers, do not visit Facebook to buy them. They go on Facebook to check in on friends, to watch cat videos and to kill time. They are not going to convert if they see a random advert saying ‘buy these shoes’
Starting Facebook advertising with a campaign to sell a product to a cold audience is only going to loose you time and money.
2 – Targeting the wrong audience.
Getting your targeting right is important to the success of your Facebook ads campaign. Making sure that you are targeting the right people at the right time is the key to gaining success.
If you are going straight into Facebook advertising with a campaign to sell your product or service. You need to make sure you are targeting a ‘warm audience’, otherwise you are starting with an uphill battle.
Running a campaign that sell’s your product without the users knowing anything about your product is like proposing to someone on a first date. If you’re trying to sell a product to a user that doesn’t know your brand or your business they are unlikely to buy. Similarly, not many people will get married after just one date!
Warming up your audience and making sure they know your brand and your offer. That they trust your brand and your offer. Before trying to pry their cash out of their hands, is much more likely to end in a sale.
Once a user is warm, then you can utilise things like re-marketing to sell, sell, sell. Until they are warm, you need to grow trust and build your cold audience first. Similarly, you need to date a few times before you propose to marriage!
3 – Know your objectives and goals.
What do you want from your advertising? Do you want to grow leads and newsletter signups? Do you want to increase conversions on an eCommerce website? Do you want to build brand awareness?
Make sure that you are choosing the correct advertising campaign available on Facebook for your goal. Facebook uses your goal and campaign choice for further optimization.
If you have a goal to increase sales, and use the conversion objective in Facebook. Every time you get a sale, Facebook uses its algorithms to find more people that look similar to this conversion to target more people to get more conversions. Choosing the wrong objective at the beginning can set you up to fail in the end.
If you don’t set the correct objective, Facebook will go off using their audience matching, targeting the completely wrong people. Facebook will be chasing a different goal from what you desire. This will result in more of your money wasted targeting the wrong audience.
4. What is your strategy?
As above, one of the most important steps is to define your goal.
But before you can increase the results from that goal, you need to know what the users’ path to that goal is.
If your goal is to sell more running shoes, you need to know how existing customers buy running shoes.
If you read my previous article on PPC marketing funnels you’ll know that people join a funnel at different stages of their purchasing journey. Using the same example of purchasing shoes. You might see customers use a similar path to purchase.
Customers rarely go straight to one website and purchase.
There are often many steps leading up to this purchase.
Step 1 – The customer has a problem with painful feet when they go running.
Step 2 – The customer searches online for help and advice to alleviate pain.
Step 3 – The customer reads articles about the need for specific trainer styles.
Step 4 – The customer reads blog content on your website about ‘top ten best shoes for painful feet’
Step 5 – The customer signs up for a newsletter to hear about the latest offers, deals and advice.
Step 6 – The customer purchases shoes in the black Friday sale after getting a newsletter about 50% off.
In the above example of the customers’ journey, the customer had a problem with painful feet. They found that the website that provided blog content offered a solution. Through this helpful advice, the user signed up for the newsletter. Then purchased the shoes after receiving a newsletter.
Therefore, with this example, there could be two places in the customers’ journey to first start utilising Facebook marketing.
- Gain exposure to useful content. (Step 4)
- Build the newsletter mailing list. (Step 5)
Both areas can been used to build awareness and trust with your brand. These can aid in the sale but neither are adverts targeting the sale of a product.
Once you have a customer engaging with your brand. You can start building up data around that customer and then use remarketing to further sell to them.
If you think about the Facebook strategy as a whole. You can grow and retarget each step in the journey.
Using the above journey as an example. You will only target your cold audience at the top of the funnel.
Adverts that promote a direct product or service for sale to a cold audience at the bottom of the funnel will not work and needs to be treated differently.
Remember to put your goals first. Look at your customer journey and work out where you can use advertising to build brand awareness, trust and confidence first. Then utilise remarketing to close the deal to a warm audience at the bottom of the funnel. Remember you need to date a few times before going in with that proposal and securing that sale!
If you’re ready to take the first step to growing your business via Facebook advertising and want some help to get started. Drop Amanda White Digital a message and we can discus what would work for your brand.
