Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads: Legit Digital Marketing Tools

As a Facebook user, you’ve probably experienced seeing ads on your personal feed that were annoying or not appropriate for you, right? Yet, you kept on seeing them. They just won’t go away, and herein lies one of the key benefits of Facebook ads: they work. (When they are targeted correctly.)

If you’ve ever felt annoyed by an ad, you can safely assume that you were not the right target for the company placing the ad.

On the other hand, if you‘ve ever searched online for a product you wanted (say, a new Trek Bicycle) only to later see an ad offering you a great discount on Trek Bicycles the next time you visit Facebook, you probably wouldn’t have the same reaction as above. In fact, you might be be quite pleased. That’s just part of the magic of a correctly targeted Facebook ad in a digital marketing campaign.

But… Facebook Ads Didn’t Work For Us!

If you’re a business owner or a marketing manager and you aren’t using Facebook Ads, you might want to re-think this approach. (Read on and we’ll explore the main benefits of Facebook ads as compared to other ad platforms.)

If you’ve tried Facebook Ads and were underwhelmed by the results or stopped because they “didn’t work,” there’s a good reason why they didn’t work—and it’s probably not because your target audience isn’t on Facebook.

For most businesses, a good percentage of their buyers use Facebook. Some niche industries may find better success using a different ad platform, which is something our Ad Specialists will determine in our initial discussions with you. However, if your business has an obvious demographic available on Facebook and ads aren’t working, then we can safely assume the ads were not done correctly.

Facebook ads especially are an ever-changing nuance of digital marketing which require professional strategy and execution. For best results, use a marketing pro and don’t go it alone.

Finally, Facebook Ads are not the same as using the “Boost Post” button on a post you create on your business page. For a truly effective campaign, a trained FB Ads Specialist must use the Facebook Business Manager platform to create ads targeted towards a precise audience with results in mind.

Target Your Exact Audience

Facebook provides comprehensive audience targeting—better than Google Ads. You can target user personal interests, user demographics such as age bracket and location, behavior, connections and language. A savvy Facebook ads marketer can even target your competitors’ followers.

Pro Tip: The Facebook Business Manager platform enables you to refine your targeting so that you can eliminate Facebook users who are not in your target market. This ensures that your Facebook Ads are placed only in front of users who are potential customers and ultimately saves advertising dollars while ensuring higher quality leads.

Reach More of Your Target Market Than with Organic Facebook Posts

The unfortunate truth about your Facebook Business or Fan page is that only a small percentage of your followers will ever see what you post on it. 

The [always changing, never predictable] Facebook algorithms determine the visibility of your page amongst your followers. Recent implementations caused significant decreases in business pages’ visibility as Facebook moved towards a news feed which prioritized posts from friends and family and reduced business page posts to a less frequent rotation.

In simple English, this means that if you want to make use of Facebook as a tool for new leads, customers or even just a larger fan base, the most effective way to do so is by using Paid Facebook Ads. Lest we forget, Facebook is a for-profit organization after all.

The good news is that by using the Business Manager platform effectively you can get a solid return on your ad dollars, and the Eden Ads team averages 4-7 times the return on ad spend (ROAS) for our Facebook Ad clients. 

Remarket to People Who Have Already Interacted with Your Brand

Remarketing (aka retargeting) is a smart and lucrative way of reaching your target audience. The reason this digital marketing technique works so well is because interested users who have visited your website in the past (and did not become customers) will see your ad again as a reminder of their initial interest.

It’s estimated that 3 out of 4 website visitors that go through the steps to place items they intend to buy in their shopping carts, fail to purchase.

Through the use of remarketing you can re-target those “lost customers” and rekindle their interest in your services or products. According to a recent remarketing study, website visitors who are re-targeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website. This tackles the issue of website and digital cart abandonment once and for all. 

Target correctly with inexpensive conversions 

Facebook’s CTR (click-through-rate) is steadily increasing because of refinements to their advanced advertising tools. Because of these constant improvements to targeting capabilities, professional digital marketers can effectively target audiences and do so at a low cost.

With the small amount you pay Facebook to run ads and target only the people you want, you’re spending very little to get a great ROI from your ad spend. It can feel expensive in the initial stages of setting up Facebook Ads while your campaign manager is doing testing. This is unavoidable and you should account for this testing period when setting your ad budget.

Facebook‘s plat de résistance: the “Lookalike Audiences”

After you’ve used Facebook Ads with some success and determined the best target audience that actually converts, you can begin to replicate that success by targeting people who are very similar matches to them by using a Facebook technique known as “lookalike audiences.” This feature allows you to take a custom audience and use Facebook to find similar people who are most likely to purchase from you.

The size and targeting options are very specific to ensure that your lookalike audiences accurately reflects the target market that is already converting using your ads.

3 More Reasons to Love Facebook Ads 

Your buyers are frequently on Facebook, plain and simple. According to BroadbandSearch, the average person spends about 2½ hours daily on social media, a large part of which is Facebook. A dynamic and visual platform full of rich behavioral data and metrics, Facebook is fantastic place to invest your ad dollars.

You can profitably scale your Facebook Ads by reaching more potential buyers than you ever could organically. Once you’ve tested and established the ads that convert most profitably, you simply invest more money into them and keep using them as long as they are producing a profit. In this way, you can keep growing your customer base much easier than with almost any other advertising platform.

Finally, Facebook is a fantastic tool for building your brand and gaining customer loyalty. For this reason, many companies use Facebook pages to create a sense of belonging to a community for their followers. These pages create the opportunity for real engagement with customers and prospects; this in turn cultivates positive brand image, greater customer loyalty and SuperFans. This activity leads to business growth, higher customer retention, and even more sales.

Ready to Set Your Marketing on Fire?

The most important of all the benefits of Facebook Ads is that they will significantly help grow your business. The Facebook Ads Manager tool is not intuitive, however, and it takes skill and diligent testing to make it lucrative. This process can be vastly accelerated if you lean on a digital marketing pro that has blazed this trail.

If you’re ready to grow your business and get real results with Facebook Ads, speak with one of our Marketing Consultants to find out how we can help you! Call us at 727-325-6471 or send us an inquiry via our secure online form.

Spicy Nugget: In Digital Marketing, Test Everything

“Just because you tested something once doesn’t mean you discovered a new Law of Physics. Don’t get cocky and equate a win with a rule that works under any and every circumstance. You don’t have the next Nobel Prize in the bag just yet!

-Adam A. Sene, CEO

When it comes to marketing campaigns, test everything: special offers, landing pages, keywords, creatives, all of it. Nothing is certain until tested. Even then it may only be certain for that specific set of variables.

Offer A worked and Offer B worked, but both offers together in the same ad may create confusion.

Then again, maybe not… So test everything.”

Let’s talk about your brilliant marketing ideas.

You know, the ones where in your mind you thought something like, “I’ve got it! I’ll target women in Tulsa like I did before with much success, but this time I’ll use a picture of a baby. Holding a kitten! They won’t be able to resist my products then.”  And you practically booked a one-way ticket to the Maldives because you expected your retirement to come early, right?

Wham. Turns out that brilliant marketing idea… Well it didn’t really work out, did it? But why?

Rule #1: Every Single Thing You Do in Marketing is a Test

Any marketer that’s been at it for a long time will tell you—coming up with new “bright” ideas for marketing is both tiring and kind of useless. The reason it’s exhausting is because most great ideas sound great in theory, but usually they don’t pan out all that well.

“Wow, you guys are so negative,” you say.

Ok, fine. Let’s say you had a great idea and it did pan out. Woo hoo! The baby holding a kitten targeting women in Tulsa WORKED! So you take that same exact formula and you target women in Denver instead of Tulsa. Wham. Failure. What does this mean?

All it means is you got a little over-excited, and you need to keep testing. Don’t assume that your first idea is your best one. Try it against some different parameters, a different audience or a refreshed creative, and continue to try new things.

Everything is a test, and everything must be watched carefully for performance. If it’s working, do more of it. If it’s not working, well… duh.

Be especially careful with agencies who don’t admit to this fact, but be even more careful with agencies who tell you that “failure is inevitable.” Testing, optimizing and scaling an ads budget can be a rapid fire activity and you shouldn’t be experiencing months of financial loss. (If you are, please let us do a free account audit.)

Rule #2: Testing Produces Data, Not Laws

The results of a single test do not make a rule that applies to everything.

If you tested an ad with success using landing page A, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work on landing page B. You have to test it.

Your targeting parameters may have worked with that one design, one audience, pointed at that one landing page. It may not work on all audiences, all the time.

Testing produces results and data. Testing does not produce laws. If you test with success, fantastic. Identify what worked if you can, scale your budget and keep on testing.

Avoid Dumpster Fires (Like This One!)

As you come up with brilliant ideas, you might start to see these bleed together in your campaigns. For example, you saw some great results using a five-star customer testimonial. Great! You also concurrently saw great results with an ad using starburst graphics and the words “Free Lunch.” And in yet another test, you told your company story and it worked even better, and another with a picture of your CEO in a diaper, and so on, and so on.

Condense everything that ever worked into a single promotional campaign, and before you know it you’ve got ALL of those things in one super ugly, muddled message piece of garbage. (Like this one!) Your dumpster fire of a design will likely have become too convoluted and complex with too much to look at, all of which undermines the campaign message completely.

As a rule of thumb for campaign design of all kinds, always simplify the message. Something clean and easy to understand beats out all of those “great ideas,” and certainly all of them combined.

In Digital Marketing, Test Everything

We believe everything in marketing is a test. We don’t claim to know it all, and this sense of explorative willingness is what drives us to constantly improve, keep learning and do better for our clients. If you’re tired of not seeing results and need some support, give us a shout. We’d love to help!