If you’ve ever been deep-sea diving, you’ll know that there are many gems under the big blue that we have yet to explore. Just as divers watch the changing of tides, any social media marketer will tell you how frequently the digital environment changes.
Our goal here at KWSM is to stay ahead of the ever-changing social media tides. For this reason, we recently dedicated three days to gaining an in-depth understanding of the latest Facebook ads tactics, and how to drive the best results for our clients.
Much of social media success stems from creating compelling content, but what happens when no one sees that content? The answer is nothing. Nothing happens, and you’ve wasted time and money building a content calendar and generating highly engaging creative that no one will see. Just like the extraordinary beauty of deep sea life would be lost on us if those brave souls never dared to explore it.
In order to optimize our efforts and operate within Facebook’s ever-changing, always-elusive algorithm, we’ve studied Facebook ads to determine how to best set up sales or leads funnels to generate results. Here are a few of our takeaways.
Find a cold audience with the potential to warm up
How do we engage cold audiences? One of the best ways is using a company’s own customer base and email list. If we are running your Facebook ads campaigns, chances are we’ve talked to you about lookalike audiences. Facebook has a lot of data, and it uses people who already buy from you to generate a list of people with the same interests and habits. We can leverage Facebook’s data tools to find people who are clones of your customers!
Build a path, not just a destination
We’ve learned that the best ads follow a defined path of action. Most businesses rely on web traffic ads, but now there are a variety of options in Facebook’s ads manager, including lead form ads and landing page conversion ads. Once you’ve refined the audience you’re going after, send them down a digital pathway that ends in the desired action.
Don’t necessarily take no for an answer
What about all those people that click on your ads and land on your website but don’t buy or sign up? It’s time to retarget. Through Facebook’s Pixel you can identify the digital bottleneck and approach that interested audience differently to secure the sale or sign-up. If they showed enough interest to land on your website, don’t give up too easily.
The key to using ads to make social media work for your business is to grasp these three fundamentals: know your goal, know your audience, and know where they are in the process. (awareness, consideration, purchase)
Gathering this knowledge will require an initial budget outlay and testing. It is critical to test audiences against each other, monitoring which audience is engaging with your content.
Facebook is frequently improving its ads platform, resulting in the ability to achieve greater return on ad spend and a more controlled digital advertising process. Want to learn more about Facebook ads and what they can do for your business? Ask us about our expanded ads program!
