23 May
It’s one thing to create an ad and start advertising on Facebook, but it’s something else entirely to track all the numbers you get in return and apply it for the ultimate success of your business. The numbers might not match the goals you had in mind. Or maybe those goals have changed. What do you do now?
Well, every advertising campaign will need to be tweaked at some point. Rarely does anyone get it right the very first time, especially when they’re first starting and aren’t too familiar with their audience yet. You can make some wild (or even educated) guesses, but you won’t truly know how the market will react until you’re out there in the thick of it.
You’re not going to become a millionaire overnight, so even if your ads are running smoothly, there’s room for improvement. You’re going to have to optimise your campaign and scale your ads. First, let’s take a look at ways you can better define your objectives to create the best plan possible.
What Are Your Goals?
Optimizing your ads doesn’t start after you’ve already created them, but before. You need a good targeting strategy and goals planned beforehand. How will you know if the ads are performing well if you don’t have your goals mapped out? This is your only measure of success.
You also need a good understanding of what Facebook is. It’s a social networking site. When people jump on Facebook, they’re doing it interact with friends and hang out. They hop on to relax and clear the mind after a long day. That’s why selling can involve some complex processes.
With Facebook being committed to sharing only user-relevant content, you need to find a way to brand yourself in a way that’s relevant to potential customers. Do your advertisement fit neatly on their Newsfeed? Is your content organic? This will ultimately matter, as you don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb.
The ultimate goal when it comes to advertising on Facebook is brand awareness. As we covered previously, Facebook isn’t great with direct sales. It will take time, targeting, and energy as you develop relationships with your potential customers. To get any kind of traction on Facebook, you must be content-driven. Most products or services are ‘discovered’ on Facebook through content.
Split Testing
As you spend time and money working out your ad campaigns, your job isn’t done. The most recommended method to determining what works and what doesn’t is by split-testing. Split testing (or A/B testing) is a way to determine what graphics, copy, imagines, headlines, and call-to-actions drive more of your targeted audience to convert.
It’s impossible to know off hand which ads will work. You can have all the right stuff together, but the call-to-action needs more work or there’s an off word that creates a snag in the reader’s mind. By split testing, you will get to uncover the ads and designs that best work with your demographic. This is why the road to successful Facebook campaigning is a complex one.
Catchy Images
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: humans are visual creatures. As a person scrolls down their newsfeed, your ad is competing with hundreds of different posts, images, graphics, and videos. It can be so jam-packed with content that their eyes never even find your ad. Or they see it, but they see something else that grabs their attention even more, so they click on the other thing and forget about your content completely.
The best way to ensure you have a catchy image that grab’s the user’s attention is the process of creating buyer personas. If you have a persona mapped out, you will see that there are so many different types of people, who are interested in different things, but might have in common one thing: your product or service.
Is there only one type of person who likes Anime? No. You have people of all ages, genders, and nationalities who enjoy it. But, by studying different demographics, you can put together a broad idea of what age group likes what. So, if you’re selling anime shirts for girls, what is that buyer persona? What age group is into anime the most? What are the things they’re most likely into? A picture will begin to form and you’ll see the types of images that attract them.
Also, you might try some different contrasts. While you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to create an image that grabs your customer’s attention, why not look at creating something that’s different and opposite? Our brains do well at noticing something that’s out of place, which might work with your ad.
Fault Finding and Scaling
There will come a time when you have to scale your Facebook ads. And it can be a challenging process. The way a lot of marketers handle scaling is to just throw more money at their ads, hoping to increase their broader reach. But throwing more money into your ads rarely works, because ads with a lack of targeting are doomed to fail.
What you need is to breathe more life into your tired campaign. This is necessary for your success, because no matter how awesome your ads are, if you don’t put them in front of the right eyes, they don’t do that well.
Eventually, you’ll end up wasting more money. Instead, you’ll have to bite the bullet and do a bit of fault finding and scaling of your ads to reach a new audience. Here are several proven scaling methods to help you continue to target your audience, even the one you don’t have yet, but desperately need to reach out to.
Discover New Potential Customer Personas
One factor we already touched on was creating a buyer persona for your perfect type of audience. If you know who you have to market for, doing demographic research can be a breeze. But as a lot of marketers have their set buyer persona, they might only focus on those which have been successful in the past, ultimately limiting your growth.
To give an example, let’s say you sell protein supplements. You’ve had decent success with your typical buyer persona: bodybuilders. You might also target those who are interested in getting in shape. But to scale up and reach other personas, you might look at anyone who could benefit from having more protein in their diet, including:
-Anyone on a high-protein diet, like Atkins.
-Anyone who has joined a gym or has expressed interest in doing so.
-Women who recently had a baby and is looking to tone back up.
Segmenting
One great way to scale your ads is to segment them. Essentially, segmenting is a form of hyper-targeting. When you target an ad, you’re going after the one group of people you feel will respond the greatest. By segmenting, you’ll take a variety of different factors and personas and create ads specifically based on each one.
For example, the high-protein supplements. You might brand them to men and women differently, since men and women workout differently, build muscle differently, and have different problem areas. Men build muscle quicker and have a single need where you might have to reach out to women by different methods.
It doesn’t end there. Even within the women group, you might consider segmenting further. One ad is for teen girls. Another ad is to reach potential moms. Another might be to those who already have kids. And another could be post-menopausal women. You would stick them into their own buyer persona and create different ads for each.
With Facebook demographics, as wide and vast as they are, there are so many factors to consider. Married versus single. Older versus younger. Parent or not? Sedentary lifestyle or active? Segmenting gives you more options to be creative and hyper-target the perfect audience for you.
These are just a few things to consider. If you’re not scaling and optimizing your ads, you’re just throwing time and money down the drain.