In addition to the strategies of content marketing, social media documentation and leveraging client content, social media (in particular Facebook and Instagram) advertising should form a major part of your marketing strategy.

Here, we’ll discuss the process, and a potential system, for effective Facebook advertising. This is the system we teach Range of Motion Business Mentoring clients.

It’s important to first understand the basic structure of the Facebook advertising platform. At the upper level, we have Facebook campaigns, within each campaign we have one or more ad sets, and within each ad set we had one or more ads.

Let’s being with the Facebook Campaign.

The Facebook campaign is where you decide on the purpose of the advertising. For this, it’s important we take a step back and consider the avatar (the person you’re targeting), and the action you want them to take. Within the campaign level, you can choose from one of three different categories of marketing objectives.

If your avatar is a cold lead with a low level of awareness of their problem, the solution and your business, you should use the first of the three groups of marketing objectives, awareness. Within the awareness objective you have the option of brand awareness or reach. Although these strategies can be effective in growing the number of people who like your page, there are more effective ways to spend your marketing dollar.

If your avatar is a warmer lead with increased awareness, you would take advantage of the consideration objective group. Within this group of objectives we have traffic, engagement, app instals, video views, lead generation and messages.

The final group of objectives are best suited to an audience of people who are at the highest levels of awareness and are closest to making a purchase. This category includes conversions, catalogue sales, and store visits.

As mentioned, you should choose the objective that is right for you simply by determining what level of awareness in your product the prospect has and action you want them to take.

It’s important to jump ahead at this point and understand that there are two primary actions we want the prospects to take for two different levels of awareness. For audiences that are less aware of their problem, the solution and your business, the purpose shouldn’t be to make a direct sale (or convert them to being a long term client), but to encourage them to take an action that will active the Facebook Pixel, which we’ll talk about more as we go. For those audiences who are more aware of their problems and your solutions, including those who have already taken some kind of soft action (like visiting your website, which we’ll know because of the pixel we’ll discuss later, or watching a Facebook video) on your ‘colder campaigns’, the aim will be to create a harder action (like contacting you) that will lead to a sale.

So once you’ve decided on the action you want your avatar to take, we can go inside the campaign to the ad set level. This is where we choose who we want to see the adverts – where we choose the audience.

There are three different types of audience, the core audience which we create using details like their demographic and interests, custom audiences and lookalike audiences. Let’s discuss all three.

The core audience is basically your avatar, so the more clearly defined the avatar, the better you’ll be able to target them within Facebook. Here, you can select demographic information like age, gender and where they live. You can also target people with certain interests. Interest targeting can be useful in two ways. First, you can simply select the interests of your avatar and secondly, you can target people who interact with pages related to you business, including your competitors. In this way, you can show your advert to people who are interacting with businesses just like yours. In Facebook advertising terms this is known (somewhere aggressively) as ‘stealing your competitor’s customers’.

Our next audience type is a custom audience, an audience you can create that’s made up of people who have already interacted with your business or whose details you already have. For a fitness business, there are three main ways we can build a custom audience. The first is a customer file, which is basically where we upload the email addresses of our current clients or our current network. Facebook matches these email addresses with the email addresses people have linked to their Facebook account, and populates an audience. The second type of custom audience is made up of site traffic, people who’ve visited a certain page on your website. We’ll talk in a moment about how Facebook uses the pixel to identify people who’ve visited a certain page, and how we can use this to retarget them. The final type of audience is made of of people who’ve engaged with your social media pages in some way. This could include people who have watched a certain video, filled out a lead form, interacted with your Facebook or Instagram page, or interacted with an event.

Lookalike audiences allow you to take an audience you’ve already created and Facebook then finds more people who ‘look like’ that audience. The logic is, we want more people like the ones who are our current clients or who’ve already purchased from our business.
When you create a lookalike audience, you can target a certain percentage of the population of the country/ies and/or region/s you’re targeting. For example, 1% of Australia would mean you’re targeting the 1% of people in the country who are most similar to the audience you’re copying. Effective audiences to copy include your current clients, people who have viewed your content or interacted with your social media page, and people who have visited a landing page on your website.

Which of the audiences you choose to use depends on the objective you’re working towards.

Generally speaking, you should use a core audience and a lookalike audience for colder leads with lower levels of awareness, and some form of custom audience to target warmer leads who have already consumed your content, interacted with your Facebook or Instagram page, or taken some action on your website.

We’ve hinted at the use of the Facebook Pixel and retargeting. This is one of the most powerful aspects of the Facebook advertising platform and will add some context to the core, custom (including customer file, site traffic and engagement) and lookalike audiences we’ve already discussed.

The Facebook pixel is a piece of code, supplied by Facebook, that sits invisibly on your website. It’s not too difficult to instal as long as you know how to edit some of the backend of your site, otherwise, ask your web developer to do it for you. When someone lands on a page on your website, this pixel makes a note that they’ve been there. As more people land on that page, the pixel will add their names to that list. Now, you never get to actually look at this list, but the Facebook pixel will continually update it for you.

So why is this so beneficial? Basically, this allows you to determine when a cold lead has become warm. That is, when someone has gone from being unaware of your product or service, to being aware of your product or service. They are no longer one of the billions of people on Earth floating around on Facebook, or even one of the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who are in your core or lookalike audiences. They are now people who are interested enough in what you do to actually visit your site. They now know (if your website is effective) that you can solve their problem.

So what do we do with this list of potentially interested, warmed-up leads?

We retarget to them.

Retargeting is where you create a website custom audience, which we’ve already touched on when we talked about the site traffic part of a custom audience. You can use this website custom audience to show different adverts to these now warmer and more aware prospects. Retargeting refers to the fact we’re showing new ads to people who’ve taken action based on our previous ads.

In these warmer leads, we change our advertising message, a concept we discuss in another part of this series on writing marketing material. We also change the type of advert we show them. Instead of the purpose of the advertising being to build awareness, we’re now trying to start a chain reaction of events to make a sale. There are three effective strategies for retargeting to this warmer, more aware prospect. We can show them short testimonials of people who match their avatar to help convince them that we can solve their problems. We can explain the process by which they would begin their journey with your business. Or, even more direct, we can give them a way to contact us, either by sending them to a basic landing page where they can enter their contact details, or by using the ‘lead generation’ or ‘messages’ marketing objective to allow them to make immediate contact with you.

In most cases for a service-based business, this contact should be the ultimate goal of your advertising and they’ll then move to the next stage of your sales funnel or client journey.

Once the audience type has been set up, you can decide on the geography – where you want the people viewing your ad to live or work. If you operate a geographic location this can be useful to ensure you’re not marketing to people too far away to use your services. Online services however can be non-geography dependant, so you may want to target a whole country or group of countries. You can set a narrow range of location by entering the suburb you want to target in to the location field, or if you want to go even narrower you can drop a pin on your location.

We can also target or exclude people who’ve had certain interactions with your Facebook page or events.

The final piece to examine when creating audiences is the option to exclude an audience. We use this option when we don’t want an advert to be shown to a certain group of people. For example advertising your business to people who are already clients is a waste of your marketing dollar, and advertising a page to people who’ve already taken action on that page is also an inefficient use of your budget. In these two examples, you can exclude an audience of current clients you’ve created by uploading a customer file, and you can exclude people who’ve landed on a confirmation page after submitting a form. This exclusion strategy will ensure your adverts are being shown to those at the right stage of your sales funnel.

With an audience now established, we can decide on the placements – that is, where to ads will be seen. You have the options of automatic placements – where Facebook will display the ad in various locations through Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network (non Facebook pages or apps that Facebook has advertising agreements with) and Messenger ads. Which you choose will depend on the intent of your ad, but the Facebook newsfeed should be the priority.

The final decision to make within the ad set level is the budget. Here, you have the option of choosing a daily or a lifetime budget. Depending on your level of awareness of your business financials, this will be a very basic decision, or more complex. At its’ most basic, choose an amount that you have allocated to a marketing budget. If you are more in tune with your business finances, choose an amount that ensures you are paying less for each client than that client will be worth (your average client lifetime value). Put another way, you have to earn more from that client that the client cost you to acquire.

With the ad set level now covered, it’s time to look at the actual ad itself – the creative element that the prospect sees.

We begin with deciding on the format of the ad – what media it will be. There are numerous options here which are dependant on choices you’ve made at the campaign and ad set levels. Primarily, you’ll be choosing between a carousel ad (where you have numerous scrollable images or videos), a single image or video (which includes a slideshow of numerous images), or a collection (a group of images which opens into a full screen experience).

The choice of format depends on the intent of your ad, but in the majority of cases, a single image or video will be the preference. Remember, the ad is going to be displayed in people’s newsfeeds, so if the creative doesn’t look like something that one of their friends has posted it will immediately be flagged in the prospect’s mind as an ad and they won’t consider it.

Once we’ve chosen the format, we can start working on the creative – the ad the prospect will see. It begins with the video or image, some guidelines on each.

Videos can be either short form (under 15 seconds) or long form. There are pros and cons of each, and both can be used for different purposes. For example, at Range of Motion we have a longer two minute video which introduces people to Range of Motion, including testimonials and an itemised description of how we solve the pain points of our avatars. We use this video to market primarily to cold leads who know nothing about our service. Incidentally, we’ll use video views here to retarget people who’ve watched at least 15 seconds of the video so we can market to them using a more direct method. We also use a series of shorter videos, under 20 seconds each, which are individual testimonials. These are shown to people who have already been exposed to our marketing (which we know because we’ve set up an audience of people who’ve watched the long form video or who have activated the Facebook pixel on our landing page). The common theme is that both videos have captions – as most people scroll through Facebook with the sound off. You can see we use different video lengths for different purposes.

When selecting images, you should again consider that you want something that will stop the prospect scrolling through their feed, but it shouldn’t be immediately obvious that it’s an ad. This is where it’s worth spending money to get some professional photos of you or your staff working with clients. The key element of this photo is that it should show your unique selling proposition and should convey the culture of your business – happy, smiling people who match the demographic you’re showing the ad to.

You also have the option when selecting images to upload up to six images, and Facebook will show the image that is performing best. This is a very basic way of testing the best creative, but we’ll talk about more effective ways when we discuss split testing and dynamic creative.

Now we get to the text that will appear in your ad, broken down into text (which shows above the image or video), headline (which shows below the image or video) and news feed link description (which shows below the headline).

First, the text. We’ve covered how to write the actual copy in another part of this series when we discussed writing marketing material. We won’t repeat this here, but consider the key elements of choosing your marketing message based on the level of awareness of the prospect. The length of the copy will vary depending on this level of awareness, with short one sentence copy right through to long sales letters both being effective for different avatars with different levels of awareness, and different marketing goals. As much as we’d like to give hard and fast rules for some of these creative elements, they really are open to experimentation. There are some tips you can experiment with however. Using emojis in your copy can be an effective technique (as long as they’re normally used by your avatar for that ad). You can copy and paste emojis from a resource like emojipedia.com. It’s also a good idea to copy the URL into your text, to give the prospect another place to click to go to where you want to send them.

The next step is in choosing your website URL (if you’ve chosen an objective at the campaign level that directs the prospect to a page off Facebook). Again, this destination is different based on the type of lead you’re marketing to. The overriding purpose is to move people along the awareness continuum. So if you’re showing the ad to a colder, less aware lead, you need to send them to somewhere that educates them on how the services you provide will help them or offers a resource that they need. This is indirect with no hard sell, but gives you an opportunity to capture them with the Facebook pixel to retarget later. If they are more aware however (either because of an existing awareness of your business or because you’re retargeting them), the URL you send them to should either help to encourage the decision making process or allow them to take action (or both). For example, we could redirect a warm lead to a website landing page that doesn’t have a lot of information on it, but just offers the absolute basics with a form they can fill out to contact you. We could also send them to a page that explains exactly how your service works – getting more into the nuts and bolts of what their journey would actually look like chronologically. Messenger ads and lead forms can also be an effective tool here, but this occurs at the campaign level. If we’re looking to convince a prospect that we are the right fit for them, and they’re not quite ready to buy, we can direct them to somewhere with testimonials of their avatar to help the decision making process.

Next we move to the headline and the news link feed description. Once again, we covered writing headlines when we discussed writing marketing material, so won’t repeat this material here. But it is worth noting that with both the headline and the news link feed description you should aim to use as much text as possible until you have to click ‘read more’. You can work out the optimal amount using the ad preview on the right of the screen.

Finally we choose a call to action. There are multiple options here, again, dependant on the intent of the ad. As a general rule, for colder, less aware leads, use the ‘learn more’ call to action button, and for warmer, more aware leads, use a call to action that encourages them to take action, like ‘get offer’ or ‘sign up’.

This is the process to create Facebook ads. But the process doesn’t end when you publish your campaign, ad set and ad. Now we start the process of learning and adjusting.

Basically we want to make sure that our ads are completing as many objectives (regardless of which objective we chose) for every dollar spent. If the objective is traffic and landing page views, we want these views coming as cheaply as possible. Similarly, if we’re chasing video views or lead forms or conversions any other objective, we want more for less.

*EDIT: This italicised text was added to this article on 26/02/19, and cannot be found in the audio version:

We’ve talked primarily about the use of the ‘traffic’ marketing objective. The use of the ‘conversions’ objective can also be very powerful, though it has some limitations for smaller businesses. Basically, the conversions objective will optimise you ads to people who undertake a specific action on your website. This can be set up in the ‘Custom Conversions’ section of Ads Manager. One of the most useful examples of this is to optimise for the people who will visit a ‘thank you’ or ‘confirmation’ page on your website. This is the page that a lead will land on AFTER they’re completed a form. Of course, this is an absolutely vital link between social media advertising and a prospect entering your in-house sales funnel. Facebook will show the advert to the people who are most likely to visit this confirmation page – therefore, those who are most likely to get in touch with you. Powerful.

The downside here is that Facebook requires a minimum of 50 people to have completed this ‘event’ (action) in seven days – more than a small to medium business will achieve. If you’re getting more leads than that, absolutely use custom conversions. If not, maybe stick with traffic, but there is still a way we can take advantage of the information this tool can provide. When we go to analyse our data within Ads Manager, we can ‘customise columns’. By adding a column under the ‘conversions’ heading, we can select to view the number of people who have taken that action based on the ad. Basically, this column will tell us how many people took the action we wanted (them contacting us) based on this ad. Then, as long as we know the lifetime client value (how valuable each client is to us financially), or alternatively, how much we’re willing to pay for a client, we can ensure that the cost per conversion is less than what we’re wiling to pay.

If one advert is giving us a better return on our investment we should continue that and spend more money on it. Poorly performing ads can be deleted.

This process is called ‘split testing’, where we change one variable at a time. We can split test at the ad set level, trying the same advert to different audiences, or we can split test at the ad level, trying different types of creative (images, videos, headlines, text etc.) on the same audience. As long as we test only one variable at a time, we can identify what works best and learn for future campaigns.

Facebook has a built in split test option, where you can test a range of variables to see which one delivers the biggest return on your spend. You set this at the campaign level and then within the ad set you can choose to split test creative, placement, audience and delivery optimisation strategies. Facebook will prompt you to add in the variations you want to test, then it will test them for you – determining a winner based on the number of times your objective is reached. You then have the option to have Facebook automatically run the winning ad, or set up a new campaign using this ad. This is a powerful tool to maximise the effectiveness of your advertising.

Along a similar vein, Facebook ads also has the option of using the ‘dynamic creative’ function. You can toggle this option at the ad set level. It allows you to provide multiple images, headlines, texts and calls to action. Then, Facebook will run all the combinations. For example image A with headline A. Image A with headline B. Image B with headline B. Image B with headline A. It will determine which combination of creative elements is performing best to different demographics. For example, maybe A and A is generating more successful objectives for over 35 year olds, whereas B and B is more successful for under 35 year olds. It will then show the combinations to the demographic most likely to take action. Basically, dynamic ads show the right combination of creative to the right segments of your audience.

Your Facebook advertising strategy should be constantly evolving based on what you learn from the experiments.

*EDIT: This italicised text was added to this article on 15/03/19, and cannot be found in the audio version:

It’s important to be able to track the sources of all your leads for all the products and services you offer. Once you’ve received a lead, you can then proceed through your client journey, but it’s important to first know where this lead has come from. Not only does this allow you to focus your marketing spend, but it also allows you to ensure you’re getting a positive return on your marketing investment.

For the sake of measuring lead generation, we’re calling a lead anyone who completes a form on your website and then lands on a confirmation page. The only way they should be able to visit the confirmation page is by completing the form, so you should opt (within WordPress etc.) for the confirmation page to be excluded from search results within your website, and also disable search engines displaying this page in search results.

The best way to track these leads is through Google Analytics (of course ensuring that the GA code is present in the header of your website).

Begin by creating a Campaign URL using the Google Analytics Campaign Builder found here: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/. Use consistent values in the medium, source and campaign fields. Then click ‘generate URL’. You should create a Campaign URL for every source of traffic you want to measure. For example, you may drive people to a landing page with a form (and then to a confirmation page) from a Facebook Ad (you’ll need to create a different Campaign URL for each Facebook Ad if you want to track each individual Ad), email marketing, Instagram bio URL etc. If you want to measure the leads from each of these sources, each will need its own unique Campaign URL.

If you’re using a Campaign URL for Facebook Ads, at the Ad level, insert the unique Campaign URL you’ve created into the ‘Website URL’ field. Leave the URL parameters field (under the ‘Tracking’ heading) blank. If you’ve also included the URL in the ad copy, make sure this is the Campaign URL in its’ entirety.

Everything you do to drive traffic to a landing page (and hopefully the confirmation page) needs to have a unique Campaign URL.

Once this is completed, you’ll need to set up a Destination Goal within Google Analytics. This is where you can measure how many people complete a desired action (or ‘goal’). The goal should be people landing on the confirmation page, which, again, can only be reached by completing the form on the landing page.

Once you’ve set up a goal, you’ll be able to see how many people arrived at that goal (successful leads who’ve completed the form and arrived at the confirmation page) from each of the Campaign URLs you created. Therefore, you can track the number of leads acquired from each source.

Ensure you’re setting up different goal for each action you’re persuading your prospects to take. If you have multiple products or services (and therefore multiple landing page and confirmation pages), you should have multiple goals.

We can learn a lot from testing and analysing campaigns, and can make changes based on this analysis. In fact, we can troubleshoot the campaigns based on what we see.

These are the main solutions to the biggest problems we see with Facebook advertising:

• If you aren’t getting impressions on your ad, try increasing your audience size or your budget.
• If people aren’t clicking your ad, try changing the ad itself – it’s not compelling enough to get people to take action. Change the creative.
• If people aren’t converting once they get to your landing page, the problem is either with the website landing page itself, or the audience you’re showing the ad to is the wrong audience. Change your landing page to solve the problems of your avatar, or change your audience so the landing page you already have solves their problems.

Social media advertising can be a powerful tool, and a game-changer for your business. It can also be overwhelming and intimidating if you try to operate at a level beyond your knowledge. The advice is to advertise at a level you understand. It doesn’t have to be perfect (in fact there’s no such thing as perfect in social media advertising). An imperfect ad is better than no ad at all. Immerse yourself in the process and learn as you go.