We have seen great success with Facebook advertising – a main reason being because of its in-depth knowledge of its users. Facebook has an established presence across users of all age groups and demographics internationally. Both B2B and B2C companies are seeing the benefits of using Facebook as a traction channel. Here are our top 5 tips for leveraging Facebook to acquire new customers: Tip #1 – Leverage Audience Insights & Custom Audiences for Campaign Targeting One of our favorite Facebook tools is Audience Insights. This feature allows you to understand your followers and/or custom audiences, giving you the ability to create campaigns that target attributes unique to your customer base. Instead of wasting money on reaching random Facebook users who are unlikely of becoming customers, use Audience Insights to better understand and define your target audience. Another feature we love is the ability to create Custom Audiences. By going into Ads Manager or Power Editor you can create a variety of target audience segments, such as website visitors. Facebook’s algorithms can then analyze the audience and produce another audience segment called a Lookalike Audience. Utilizing Lookalike Audiences will allow you to reach a new customer base with similar attributes to your current top customers, allowing you to reach a qualified set of new customers. (Tip: You can also exclude a Custom Audience in cases where you don’t want to target your current customer base.) Tip # 2 – A/B Test Rocco Baldassarre wrote an article on structuring Facebook campaigns and clearly shows how to run successful A/B Tests. He advises saying, “Even though most Facebook advertisers split test images, texts and landing pages, some fail to set up a systematic split test series that guarantees continuous improvement. For instance, test the same text with two different images for a day, choose a winning image and use that image for both ads with different texts the next day.” We suggest creating at least two ads within a campaign so you continuously be testing and optimizing. Be sure to track your ad performance so you can accurately identify your ad winners and pause/optimize the losers. Unsure of how to track the performance? Reach out to us. Here are a few idea of things to test on a regular basis:
- Ad creative – Different images – text vs. no text, products vs. people, single image vs. carousel
- Ad copy – Title, description, text
- Targeting parameters – Use different customized lists, interests vs. behaviors
- Put important content first – Users will typically only skim the description unless the first sentences clearly layout a benefit they desire: Make sure to clearly highlight the benefits you offer in the first sentence or two – features, discount, promotions, etc.
- Show user experience on your posts, not simply content (e.g. instead of showing 3-4 images of a character arc in a mobile game, show a screenshot of the user’s experience within the game).
- Include a call to action in your posts – Customers like to know what you want them to do next.
- Be focused – Have a single objective for your ad, it shouldn’t take a Facebook user more than a second to understand what you are promoting and what you want them to do.
- Combat ad fatigue – Change your creative at least every two-three weeks so your audience doesn’t see the same creative over and over.
- Mobile vs. Desktop – Make sure your copy and creative is customized for the ad placement. If your website isn’t mobile optimized, only run ads on desktop.
- Be straightforward – If you’re selling something, display the price or be clear that you want to drive sales. This could make your CTR lower but will save you money in the long run by avoiding clicks from users searching for freebies.