Facebook is putting a lot of effort into trying to entice small and medium sized businesses to use the advertising platform. It’s a slow and tedious climb for a number of reasons, but two issues stand out. Facebook itself is doing a poor job of helping customers with ad creation (if you’ve been trying run ads or test Facebook boosts effectively and not spend a fortune, you know what I mean). Secondly, the company changes the ad manager and the newsfeed platform often; even their own help links often contain out of date information or minimal instruction.
But Facebook should be, and often can be an incredibly powerful tool to grow your business’ visibility. With 71% of Internet users on the network, you can be certain that your ideal customers are on there.
Facebook Ads – What’s Working Now? Case Study
Case in point: I recently launched a Facebook ad campaign to build opt-ins for one of my webinars. For this campaign, I tested a new tactic and it worked so well that I want to share it with you.
Amy Porterfield, a Facebook marketing expert, and made this recommendation in a recent webinar and it piqued my interest - you should run one type of ad for your “warm” audience and another type of ad for your “cold” audience. In very simple terms, create a unique ad to be served to people who already know you (your warm audience such as your Facebook fans) and create a different ad for people who don’t know you (whom you target by their interests, for lookalike audiences, etc.).
In the Facebook ad campaign for my webinar, I ran these two ad versions:
Warm Audience: I used a photo of myself in the visual. I know my fans are familiar with this photo of me (visual recognition is compelling):
Cold Audience: I created a more generic visual for the ad (this ad is a page post). The copy is nearly identical, by the way:
As the ads ran, I continually checked the analytics. I quickly saw that these two ads were performing better than any I’ve run in a long time. The webinar was a success, I added a lot of new people to my list, and I didn’t spend a fortune. I’m still not thrilled with the cost per conversion, but the return on investment is in line with my plan.
So, right now with Facebook ads, this is a strategy that is working. It makes sense to segment your audiences and create individual ads for them. In my next campaign, I plan to tweak the copy and customize my ads even more. I’ll keep you posted.
In case you’re wondering, I created both visuals for free on Canva.com (I love Canva!).
Have questions about marketing on Facebook? Lay ‘em on me!
