Facebook Ads can be a gold mine for finding customers for your small business. The social media juggernaut has a sophisticated advertising platform that is perfect for targeting a wide range of consumers – if you know what you are doing. In this article, you are going to learn actionable tips to create a successful Facebook Ads campaign.
Choose Ad Formats That Work
Facebook is a marketer’s wonderland when it comes to the types of ads you can use. There are many to choose from depending on what your goal is. Here are some of the best advertising formats on Facebook that have generated results for a wide variety of small businesses.
1. Messenger Ads
Facebook Messenger has grown to be a sizable player in the world of messaging apps. There are 1.3 billion people who use Messenger, according to a TechCrunch article. Messenger ads work in multiple ways such as sending an automated message when someone clicks on an ad or creating a chatbot sequence where customers are given automated answers. With 20 billion messages sent every month between businesses and consumers on Messenger, it is a proven platform that can work. The types of businesses that will benefit from advertising with Messenger include B2C & B2B businesses. B2C small businesses thrive on the platform when a personal connection matters most such as salons and restaurants.
2. Lead Ads
Facebook’s lead forms come in two flavors – Volume or Higher Intent. The first option aims to get you as many leads as possible. It would suit a lead generation campaign or free giveaway for a small business. The second choice adds a slider within the form to double check that the lead wants to fill out the form.
Facebook pre-fills he contact information for leads such as the phone number or email address. Choose higher intent if you are targeting leads for B2B companies. These lead forms work well for sales and business development if you are looking for qualified leads. Volume leads should be your choice if you need a daily flow of leads for your team or if you have a low-cost product that does not require a lot of people to sign off before purchasing.
You can connect to a tool such as Zapier to get the leads sent to you or use Facebook’s Lead Center to download them directly.
3. Instagram Ads
The types of businesses that should invest in Instagram ads include real estate agents, e-commerce companies and consumer brands. If your business has top notch visuals already, take advantage and reach consumers on Instagram. Instagram ads arrive in the feeds of users or you can send sponsored direct messages. You should definitely monitor the performance of your ads and tweak them as needed. At one point your ad will encounter something known as “ad fatigue”. To avoid it, you should use a software like Pudding.ai that allows you to see your ads creativity performance.
Test Multiple Ad Sets in Campaigns
Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) has become a powerful tool to create profitable ads.
You can create different ad sets and within each ad set, there is an ad. You should create a few ad sets in one campaign, set a fixed budget for testing and see which ad sets are performing the best. Give the campaign time to learn and find the audiences that you are looking for – go for around 24 hours. After this time frame, look at the ad sets that are underperforming and turn them off.
Look at this example above of ad sets for 2 campaigns done with the CBO tool. These ad sets use a mixture of Messenger Ads and Lead Ads from Facebook. Ad 1 has not generated a single message yet while Ad 3 is generating significantly more messages than Ad 2. You could opt to keep running these 3 Messenger ads if the cost per lead continues to stay low or turn off the least performing ad in the campaign.
Don’t Overspend On Ads
Scaling your Facebook ads means increasing the budget in order to increase sales. One common mistake small businesses do is randomly increasing the budget of campaigns without a plan. For example, you have found a campaign and an ad set that is profitable. You want to increase the budget to increase profitability. You assume you can just increase the budget at any time?
Wrong!
If your ad was profitable on $50 per day, you should not increase it significantly in one day to $300 or $500 per day, for example. Don’t be surprised to see your campaign overspending its budget and ROI decreasing. This can be frustrating for a lot of small businesses.
There are many strategies to scale up while remaining profitable. One of the best approaches is slowly increasing your Facebook ad budget by 10% to 20% every few days. This allows your ad to scale and find new customers for your business without changing the performance of your ads.
Another strategy is to duplicate the most successful ad sets within your campaign into a new campaign. Give them time to perform and you should see similar results. You should duplicate the ad set and choose a higher budget. You can rinse and repeat these strategies, increasing your budget slowly and see returns with scaling up.
Review charts within your ad campaigns to check the performance of the ad. Here is a screenshot of how the charts of a Messenger ad campaign look:
The cost per result and result rate (of conversations started) are two important metrics to track when scaling up. Check your charts every two days to ensure that your ad campaigns are delivering on ROI.
Bonus Tip: Take Advantage of Conversions
Use Conversions to see how much revenue your ads bring in. The secret sauce of this is the Facebook Pixel that tracks sales or other conversion metrics after being installed on your website.
Slow & Steady Wins the Facebook Ads Race
These actionable tips will help you build a profitable Facebook ad campaign that you can tweak and optimize throughout the life of the campaign. Don’t be in a rush to advertise with a big budget quickly on Facebook. Use these tips in a measured and cautious way to see success for your business whether you are in the B2B or B2C space.