Starting a new marketing campaign is no easy task. Every week more and more businesses are being launched across all industries; in Q2 of 2020, 1.47 million new business applications were processed in the US. The longer you wait, the harder it’ll be to compete on the field. That’s why having a carefully thought-out Facebook marketing strategy is so important.
Obviously, that’s easier said than done. If you don’t already know what you’re doing then coming up with a strategy that’s going to work is far from easy. Digital marketing experience gives you a huge upper hand and from the experiences that our team has, we found that these were the most important tips to push a campaign in the right direction.
Tip #1 - Set Goals, Track, and Analyze
This is so simple but a lot of beginners still overlook it. The first step in creating a Facebook marketing strategy is to set goals. What do you want to get out of your campaign? Maybe it’s sales or maybe it’s more booked calls. Whatever it is, write it down.
But how many sales do you want? Sure, getting 10,000 sales would be nice, but be realistic about what your business (in its current state) is capable of. After 3 months, how many monthly sales do you want, within reason, your business to get?
Now that your goals are set, you need to actively track them. Every week review your campaign and how many sales it got you. If you’re not on track to meet your goals, make changes. Switch up your creatives and ad copy, or even adjust your sales funnel. Change something.
Any effective Facebook strategy is constantly being reviewed and changed. It’s not something you can just set up and leave to take care of itself – it doesn’t work like that.
Tip #2 - Don't Just Run Ads
There’s a lot more to Facebook campaigns than running ads.
If you’re starting to get some results from your ads then great. Keep running them, keep A/B testing, and keep making tweaks.
But you also need to spend time engaging with your audience. Reply to comments and post non-ad content that prompts your followers to engage. You can even join relevant Facebook groups and have discussions (in fact, you really should do that).
Don’t be a brand that just runs ads. Get involved with your community, stay active, and become a well-known name in your industry.
Tip #3 - Use the 70:20:10 Rule
This simple rule is incredibly useful, especially if you’re a small-business owner who doesn’t know where to begin. Use this in your Facebook marketing strategy and you’ll be less stressed trying to figure out how to best spend your budget.
The gist of the 70:20:10 rule is that you spend:
- 70% of your budget on your regular campaign
- Things that you know work or that are proven to work; things that are safe
- 20% on safe experiments
- This includes testing out a new audience or trying out a different ad format
- 10% on risky experiments
- Things that you don’t know will work or not
If you’re working on a really tight budget, then you could save this for later. It will still work, but when you’re working with little experience and just want to build the groundwork as you learn, and don’t want to “play” with your money, that’s completely fair.
We’d still recommend that at some point, you give this a shot. It gives you the opportunity to test ideas and discover new things that, if they work, can be added to your Facebook ads strategy.
Tip #4 - Spend Time Planning Your Content
You can’t skip this. If you do, you might as well be lighting your budget on fire.
Plan your content weeks in advance.
It’ll be a lot of work to get the initial posts prepared but after that, it’s a few hours a week just to get more content ready. You can’t just throw together a post in 5 minutes and run it as an ad – you’re going to get awful results.
The Structure of a Facebook Ad
The 5 main parts of a Facebook ad are:
- Ad copy
- A creative
- Headline
- Description
- CTA (Call-to-Action)
…and they all need to be carefully thought out.
The first thing someone will see is your Facebook ad creative. That’s what catches their eye and you need to spend time designing an image or recording a video that is going to do exactly that. A video will get you more engagement but it’s important that the first 3 seconds get viewers interested enough to keep watching it.
Your ad copy also has to be informative enough about your product but not boring. Would you read a 150-word block of text? Probably not, and neither will most of your prospects. Touch on pain points, keep it amusing, and don’t go too hard on the sales pitch.
The headline, description, and CTA are grouped together. Let’s say you’re running this ad to get more email subscribers, in which case your CTA would be the “Sign Up!” button. Your headline and description would then need to entice them to click that button (but keep it short!).
Planning Your Facebook Ads
As you can see, there’s a lot that needs to be done when you’re creating a new ad for your Facebook marketing strategy. You can’t do all of this in 5-10 minutes.
Even if you spend an hour planning out an ad, that’s completely fine. If you don’t already have one, create a buyer persona. This helps to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer and think, “What would make me click on this ad?”.
That’s the ultimate goal – you want them to click. After they click it’ll be your landing page that needs to persuade them to keep going, but that’s a different story.
To recap: plan your content weeks in advance, spend plenty of time creating it, and consider making a Content Calendar to help you keep track of everything.
Tip #5 - Identify the Best Audience to Target
A common mistake that small business owners who are just getting into marketing make is thinking they know who their customer is.
You might think, “I sell dinosaur socks so obviously my customers are people who want to buy dinosaur socks”. It’s a little more complicated than that. Really pinpointing who your audience is, lets you get more specific with targeting.
VERY Simplified Example
Let’s take an air conditioning company in Arizona for instance. They could have the same line of thinking as above, but we need to break this down further. Who is the most likely group of people to need air conditioner installation services?
You’ll need to do some research to figure things out depending on your industry and region etc. But for this example, a good place to start would be targeting homeowners. Here’s what we found out about the average homebuyer in the US:
- Around 45 years old
- In a relationship (either married or partnered)
- Has gone to college, but doesn’t necessarily have a degree
These 3 details alone let us cut down our audience significantly so that we’re targeting those who are most likely to need our services.
Using very broad targeting in your Facebook marketing strategy results in a significant amount of uninterested people seeing your ads. This is an unnecessary waste of money.
Facebook has a lot of targeting options and although you don’t need to use all of them, there are definitely a few that need to be utilized no matter what. Age and location are the two big ones, but you should always try to utilize more of them where possible.
Use a Facebook Marketing Strategy That Works
Outlining your first Facebook marketing strategy can be scary. You’re going to be investing a decent-sized budget into a platform you have little experience with – that’s a scary thing to do.
That’s why taking the time to do all the research and design a strategy is important. If you do it right then it’ll give you peace of mind that when you start launching ads, you aren’t doing so aimlessly. You took the time to make a plan, you’re sticking to it, and you didn’t skip any steps.
But sometimes an industry is just too competitive for the less experienced and hiring a Facebook Ads agency is the perfect remedy. All you have to do is click the button below, book a call with us, and we’ll explain how we can blow your competition out of the water.
