How to Amplify Your Business by Advertising on Facebook
Facebook is a universal tool capable of supercharging almost any business. The platform has acquired a huge amount of information on every user, from their interests to the analysis of messages in Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Powerful campaign optimization algorithms built on machine learning principles can bring about impressive results even in a condensed time period.
We have come up with 6 recommendations, the implementation of which will allow you to boost your advertising campaigns and business.
Facebook ad account training
Facebook functions according to a certain algorithm whose idiosyncrasies you should be aware of and use in the right manner. At the beginning of a launch, each campaign undergoes a period of learning, which may take up several days. You should rather not make changes in the campaigns during such learning period, since it may negatively tell on their effectiveness.
For a start, the daily budget for each ad group should not exceed $10. For that amount, the algorithm will purchase the most high-quality users matching your ad campaign objectives. Set up no more than two creatives in each ad group to ensure their proper A/B testing and identification of the most high-quality audience-creative link.
Lookalike
Finding a similar (“lookalike”) audience is the most effective targeting method. A lookalike audience is created based on a source user base that the advertiser uploads to the advertising account. If you are a happy owner of a big user base, then an important step is to carefully segment it for a more effective lookalike. The higher the quality of the uploaded segment, the more effective will be your ad campaigns. Quality is more important than size in this case.
Two protips:
- Choose users with a high LTV (LifeTime Value) for the source segment. They are customers who bring in most money during their lifecycles;
- Collect phone numbers rather than e-mail addresses for your source base, because they are validated by the ad account, on average, by 40% better.
Example from practice: to generate leads of individuals with a minimum net worth of $2 mln for a well-known investment conference, we used a 1% lookalike audience based on a narrow but high-quality source segment of 1,000 users. Just this one audience helped us collect the required number of leads. The CPL (cost-per-lead) was less than $200.
Supergeo
A potent tool enabling effective targeting within a preset radius around a preset point. Great for promoting small local businesses such as barber-shops or beauty parlors. First of all, you need to thoroughly think through your product offer used in ad banners, identify and point out its main advantages over the (geographically) nearest competitors. Be prepared for a fairly high cost of this format.
Segmented remarketing
The Facebook ad account has a pixel (a piece of code) that collects data on users visiting a product or company page. It provides you with an opportunity to retain users reaching a certain funnel stage, e.g. those that added a product to the basket, or who began finalizing the order but stopped. Information on such customers should be collected and segmented in order to form a unique offer specially for them, which would push them on to the next step.
In addition, users may be segmented according to the time of their visits: users having visited your site a couple of days back are a “ warm” audience, over 14 days back — “gone cold”; they need to be reminded of the product advantages anew.
Example from practice: to promote products belonging to the premium banking category, it is important to use social proof. At each funnel step, we set up segmented content remarketing providing articles and reviews by loyal users. As a result, the number of leads grew more than twice.
Banners
Creatives. Make bright creatives in order to break through the banner blindness of users, use different combinations of colors and remember — all the content that the user sees in his or her Facebook feed is mostly photos and text, so do not be afraid to experiment with animation and illustrations. Illustrated banners get, on average, a 1.5–2 times higher CTR than regular photos.
Here is an example of illustrated banners:
Stories
Stories is the cheapest advertising format, with an average cost per 1,000 impressions 1.5 times lower than with classical banners. Such ads are most frequently shown on mobile devices, so it is important to make sure that the website is adapted for the mobile version, with a call-to-action present on one of the first screens.
Example from practice: It is customary to think that mobile traffic has lower quality and revenue-yielding ability, but that is not so. We carried out an advertising campaign via Stories for a peer-to-peer lending service whose customers are owners of mid-sized businesses. The number of customers grew 6 times in half-year, with a CPL of less than $30.
Chatbots
Chatbots additionally warm up audience. A dialog box with a bot in the messenger can be an alternative to a landing page. For a majority of users, a dialogue window is more understandable than a third-party landing page, which often boosts the CR (conversion rate) by 30%.
Such services as ManyChat and Chatfuel provide a possibility to create a small content chain telling, in an automated mode, of the main traits of your product, and entering the user into a mailing list on the Facebook Messenger. To do it, you need only to press a button in the dialog box.
Example from practice: via a dialog box with a chatbot, we were telling users about the advantages of an elite property lot, at the same time sending out a weekly newsletter to keep the user base engaged. Result: eight sold lots in 4 months.
Cheat sheet
1. Train your ad account. Begin with two creatives and a $10 budget to teach the algorithm to find specifically your customers.
2. Set up lookalike audiences. Use small but high-quality customer bases, preferably with phone numbers.
3. Advertise local businesses via Supergeo to reach people who live or work nearby, or who are just visiting.
4. Launch segmented remarketing to catch up with the leaving visitor and persuade him to make an order.
5. Do not discount ad Stories. It is cheap advertising producing good results.
6. Use chatbots. They warm up the audience and send out stuff in Facebook Messenger.
