In case you hadn’t noticed, Facebook is kind of a big thing.
How big? Well, for most businesses, Facebook can produce more traffic and sales than paid and organic search put together, even when the business is doing extremely well with both SEO and PPC search.
In fact, even for a brand new business, the fastest and easiest way to grow is to drive traffic from Facebook, but it can be costly and ineffective if you don’t run campaigns that follow users all the way through to the sale.
This client built their business on Facebook, owns a huge share of organic rankings, and has great PPC campaigns… but Facebook is still #1.
Our clients who are doing the best with Facebook, and in many cases driving most of their sales from there, all run these four essential campaigns.
Campaign #1: Feed your Funnel with Targeted Audiences
The first campaign that everyone needs to run is a “top of funnel” campaign, targeting people who have had no prior contact with your business. Once you get them to engage with your ads, you’ll add them to one of the other three campaigns.
Every campaign on Facebook is defined by the Audience (who you’re targeting) and the Ads that you’re delivering to them.
The “magic” of Facebook advertising is the ability to target users based on Demographics (age, gender, income, family status), Psychographics (interest and identity), and Behaviors (things they do, have done, or are likely to do).
A lot of advertisers ONLY run this type of campaign, but that’s a huge mistake, even if they turn a profit.
In fact, most advertisers are running the wrong kind of ads to their targeted audiences.
Campaign #2: Top of Funnel – Page Engagement Audiences
The second campaign everyone should be running – and most advertisers are not doing this – targets users who have engaged with your Facebook posts.
So if someone liked or clicked your ad in the first campaign, or any other post or video on your Facebook Page, Facebook automatically adds them to your Page Engagement Audience. All you have to do is start targeting them.
The advantage of targeting people who have already engaged is threefold.
First off, you already know that they’re interested, so they’re more likely to become a customer. This means that your conversion rate down the funnel should be higher.
Second, because they’ve already engaged with your posts, it’s actually easier and cheaper to reach them, due to the influence of Engagement in Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm.
And of course, you can do so without paying the 15% premium that advertisers who only run “target audience campaigns are forced to pay.
Campaign #3 – Middle of Funnel – Website Custom Audiences
The third campaign everyone should be running is “remarketing” campaigns, targeting people who have visited and taken action on your website.
A lot of this can be automated these days, but even if it’s not fully automated, it’s usually easy enough to set it up once, and let it do its work.
Many e-commerce platforms (like Shopify) have built-in capabilities to send ads to Facebook users based on the products they viewed, but the same kind of “in case you forgot” ads can be set up for every kind of business.
This one is a real no-brainer, but at most a third of Facebook advertisers are actually using it.
Campaign #4 – Bottom of Funnel – Email Custom Audiences
Finally, if you send email to customers and prospects, you’re losing out on a lot of sales if you don’t also advertise the same promotions to your email subscribers on Facebook.
This is easy to set up – just upload your mailing list and create a custom audience – and it can be just as easy to automate.
Our clients who run these “email amplification” campaigns routinely see a 20-30% boost in sales from the subscribers who receive both an email and a Facebook ad campaign.
This one is an easy slam-dunk win, but only a tiny percentage of email marketers takes advantage of it.
It all adds up …
Running ads on Facebook can be very difficult, or very easy, depending on how you set up and run your campaigns.
Of course, our Done For You Service Clients choose the easiest and fastest way by hiring us to run it for them while they run their business.
But no matter how easy, the surest path to success is to run all four of these campaigns, which work together to maximize the sales and ROI from your campaigns.
Thanks!
Dan
