When it comes to spending your advertising budget, you may be unsure how to get the most bang for your buck. After all, there are so many different advertising and marketing options out there. How do you know which will best suit your business, reach your desired audience, and give you the biggest return on your investment?
Even with all of the changes Facebook has undergone in the past few months, it’s still a great place to advertise your business. Ads are affordable and you have the ability to target your “ideal” customers. With approximately 1.93 billion people using this social media platform each day, you’re bound to reach the audience you’re looking for.
Like any marketing or advertising platform, you’ll want to go into this endeavor with a solid plan or strategy. Without one, you might as well be tossing flyers off a bridge and hoping for the best.
Facebook Ad Strategy 2023
If you’re new to advertising on Facebook, this landscape may look like a frightening new frontier where no business has gone before… but it’s not. There are more than 3 million businesses actively advertising on Facebook.
“Wait… then isn’t it oversaturated? Shouldn’t I advertise somewhere else?” There are so many advertisers on Facebook because it works. It’s an excellent way to reach your desired audience and inspire them to take action (ideally, purchasing your product).
Now, what you do need to know is that not all of those 3 million advertisers are successful. Many have failed to understand who their ideal customer is and how to target the people they want to sell to.
As a result, the question isn’t whether you should advertise on Facebook. The question is, how do you advertise properly so the ROI is worth your time and money.
What to Know Before you Set Up your Facebook Ad
We get that you’re excited, but some pre-planning will help make your campaign much more successful.
First, you need to understand who your customer is.
- Who are they?
- What does their family situation look like?
- How much do they make?
- Where do they live? (Both geographically and whether or not they own or rent).
- Where do they work?
- How do they spend their free time?
Once you understand who they are, you’ll want to take it one step further and understand how they think.
What keeps them up at night? How is their emotional state and what needs are they looking to have fulfilled? How do they identify themselves? The way they see themselves is often more important than how you see them (even if your view is more realistic).
Next, you’ll want to walk through the average customer journey. What steps do they take as they:
- Recognize that they have a problem
- Identify what that problem is
- Discover potential solutions
- Become aware of you as an option
- Choose to purchase your product
For each customer, this journey may be slightly different. However, they generally fall into 3 categories:
- Awareness Phase (top of the funnel)
- Consideration Phase (middle of the funnel)
- Decision Phase (bottom of the funnel)
Why does this matter to you as an advertiser? Because you will tweak your content, offers, verbiage, and Call to Action based on whatever stage of the customer journey your potential buyer is in.
Finally, you’ll want to break your audience up into segments based on where they are situated in the customer journey. This will allow you to make the right offers to the right people at the right time.
Here are a few examples of potential audience segments:
- Any new customers in the “prospects stage” are entering your funnel as warm leads because they are interested in your product.
- Lukewarm leads visited your website but didn’t engage, you may wish to use Retargeting to remind them that you are there, waiting in the wings, with the solution to their problems.
- Engaged blog readers like your blog and keep coming back for more. They’re more likely to share your content on Facebook or make a purchase.
- Landing Page visitors came to a specific landing page and are therefore probably interested in that particular product.
- Shopping cart abandoners were so close to making a purchase… but something stopped them. They may just need a gentle push to finish their purchase.
- Return customers love your brand. They’ve already purchased from you in the past and come back time and time again for more. These customers can serve as brand advocates, singing your praises and recommending your product to their friends.
As you learn more about your own audience, you may uncover different segments that will require different messaging.
Now, consider how your Facebook strategy will differ based on who you are advertising to and where they are in their journey (and in your funnel). Consider these possibilities.
- When you are looking to attract prospects, you may create ads around your brand or content that will help them understand their problem (and position you as an expert).
- As your goal shifts and you want to CONVERT the prospects, you will utilize contests and giveaways, free trial offers, and lead ads.
- When it’s time to CLOSE the prospects, you’ll incorporate lead nurturing campaigns, discount offers, sales campaigns, and limited-time offers to encourage them to buy.
- Once prospects become customers, it’s time to DELIGHT them with premium offers, referral programs, upsell campaigns, and helpful information about their purchases.
There’s one more step before we dive into Facebook Ad Strategy. It’s called a Facebook pixel and if you want to track your conversion (which you definitely do), you need to install it. The Facebook pixel is a string of tracking dots that you take from Facebook and embed in your website. It then tracks what visitors do when they get to your site. This allows you to better hone your advertisements based on actual user behavior.
Not super techy but still trying to handle your own website? Facebook has step-by-step instructions to help you install a Facebook pixel on your website.
Facebook Ad Strategies
Now that you’ve set up the foundation for strong Facebook Ads, we can take a look at different strategies you might employ with your advertising.
Depending on what audience segments you choose to target, these may not all fit the bill. Make sure to keep all of the audience research you did, in mind as you look through these options.
#1 – Combine Facebook Ads with Content Marketing
Many companies make the mistake of targeting warm leads with ads designed to turn them into paying customers. You know better. You know that a warm lead is not ready to buy from you yet. Instead of turning them off with straight sales offers, provide them with useful content that answers their questions, and solves their pain points. This needs to be short, interesting, and valuable. Be patient. Eventually, you will convert these warm leads into customers.
How do you do this?
- Create content.
- Share content on Facebook.
- Ask your team members (and maybe a handful of friends) to like and share the post.
- Boost your Facebook post so you can reach a wider audience.
#2 – Use Giveaways and Contests
Facebook contests needn’t focus on sales all the time. You can instead offer a potential high-value prize to create increased brand awareness that will pay off in the long run by bringing new leads into your conversion funnel. Before committing to a contest or giveaway strategy, review Facebook’s policies to ensure you aren’t violating any of their rules.
#3 – Use Lead Ads to Build Up your Marketing List
A large Facebook following is great, however, Facebook “owns” your contacts. If they decide to change their algorithm or shut down, you will lose access to those people.
Creating a lead magnet such as a free e-book or course and then running a lead ad, will help you build your marketing list. Consumers can enter their email address directly into Facebook (no added steps or friction during which you may lose them) in exchange for their free gift. You can then add their email to your marketing list and include them in your email marketing campaigns moving forward.
#4 – Incorporate Video Ads
If you’ve been running ads for a while and aren’t seeing the returns you’d hoped for, or you’re brand new to Facebook ads and want to try a few different options and see what works best for your situation, video ads may be just what you’re looking for.
Not only do people love videos, but they also have the lowest effective cost per click (eCPC) compared to other ad types. Need to sweeten the deal even more? Adobe found that “shoppers who view video are 1.81 times more likely to purchase than non-video viewers.”
#5 – Create Facebook and Google Ads
While many marketers see these platforms as one-or-the-other, Facebook and Google can actually complement each other quite nicely.
Once again, your strategy must depend on your campaign goals and the audience segment you’d like to target. For example, someone searching for a specific product, say a new computer, is likely ready to make a purchase and is simply researching their options. Using the right keywords and creating Google ads around them may be better than targeting warm leads on Facebook with increased brand awareness.
#6 -Utilize Facebook Mobile Ads
Before we go any further, is your website or landing page optimized for mobile viewing? This means that users will have a positive viewing experience no matter what device they use. If your site is not set up for this, you aren’t ready for mobile ads. Despite the fact that 94% of Facebook’s advertising revenues were generated via mobile, you will be throwing money out the proverbial window if you send potential customers to a site that causes them frustration.
Over to You
When it comes time to devise your Facebook ad strategy, the most important thing you can do is understand your audience better. All of the fancy strategies and new tricks won’t help if you don’t know who you are selling to and how close they are to making a purchase.
Spend some time getting to know your ideal customer, learning who they are, what they do, and what they want. Once you understand where your potential customers are in their buying journey, you can better usher them towards purchasing your product.
Facebook may have changed, but the value of understanding your customers never will.
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