Facebook Advertising

It’s the big whale every new business owner wants to catch, a Facebook advertising campaign that adds zeros to their bank accounts quicker than they count them.

Facebook is a beast, both in a good way and sometimes a bad way. If you’ve advertised on Facebook enough in the past, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

This article is going to be more for the beginner, more for the business owner who is looking at Facebook marketing maybe not for the first time – but they still have not yet spent their first $1,000 on a marketing campaign.

If you have spent $0 – $1,000 on Facebook in the past, this article is going to be perfect for you.

If you have spent over $1,000 but never made a return on that ad spend, I suggest you also keep reading this to rebuild your foundation before moving on.

How Do I Get Started With Facebook Advertising?

This answer needs to be split into two sections:

1. The step by step instructions to set up a Facebook Ad. And:
2. More about the strategy to get Facebook advertising working well for you.

Here they are:

1. Step by Step Instructions:

• First set up your businesses profile on Facebook (this is linked to, but different from your personal profile). Go to https://business.facebook.com , and follow the steps to set this up.
  • You will create or connect your businesses Facebook Page.
  • You will enter your other information (business name, address, etc, etc – your home address is fine if that’s the main address for your business).
  • Now when you go to business.facebook.com you will see there are a few main sections, these are:
    • Business Settings (your business info)
    • Ad Accounts (these are 1 or more different accounts where you will go to launch an advertisement). These “accounts” are all linked to your Business Profile, and your personal profile too. But your friends can’t see your business details or ad accounts of course.
    • Your Business Pages / Fan Pages, etc.
  • If you are running and involved with advertising just one business, you will most likely only need one ad account.
  • If you have different businesses with different target audiences, it’s recommended to create a new ad account for every target audience (business).
    • WHY? Facebook learns and grows smarter with targeting your best customers with every interaction one of your ads has with someone/anyone. So don’t confuse your ad account (more accurately your Facebook pixel in your ad account)by using one Ad account to target 22 year old males with ‘custom made surfboards’, and the same ad account to target 62 year old married couples with ‘retirement villages’.
• Now you should be ready to launch a new Ad.
• If you haven’t set up your Facebook Pixel yet on your website, see how to do that here.
• Click on your Ad Account inside of your Business Manager (business.facebook.com), and click on “CREATE AD“.
• You can now read here about the different type of Ads you can choose from, go through the steps, select what image or video you want to use, type in the words you want to show on your Ad, tell Facebook how much your willing to spend per day (e.g. $100), and so on.
• When you are running Facebook Ads, always check back in every hour to see how much money you have spent, and how many clicks / sign ups / purchases you have got. It is very easy for your Ad spend to quickly run away from your targets. 

2. Facebook Advertising Strategy

Before I give you the high level overview, I need to say that strategy is too big of a topic to tackle in one article. That’s more of a 2 day, locked in a room type of thing to really think through and work out with you.

It will vary depending on your product, it will vary depending on your target audience, and so on. Therefore, I won’t go into all that now. But here are two other articles you should read next on strategy.

Open these now in a new Tab (in a new browser window) and read them after you have completed reading this one. They are:

a) How to Advertise on Facebook  – (this opens in a new window)

b) Case Study: Facebook Ads  – (This opens in a new window)

Facebook Strategy – High Level

This is a high level instruction of what your strategy need to be to get customers on Facebook. More importantly, this is the core and starting point of any successful marketing strategy on Facebook (or anywhere).

Here it is:

You need to find a big group of people (your potential customers), and you need to sell them something that they really need or want to buy.

This may sound simple, but the large majority of new business owners and new marketers on Facebook don’t do this. They think they’re doing it, but they’re not. 

New marketers on Facebook believe that’s what they are selling is what the customers really wants and needs.

Even when you a business has a great product, they fail to market it as such. Marketing your product or your service the right way, is equally important as having the right product to market.

Even when you have the right product, and you have big group of people who want it, it’s still very easy to get it wrong.

I’m touching on “positioning” here, but it all relates to your strategy too. These items you should be thinking through at Step #1, before you do anything else.

1. What do you have to sell?
2. Who are the people who really need it / want it.
3. How are you going to position it, to show them it’s what they’re been looking for!

3. Getting Attention and a High CTR

When you want to grow your business, you need to get your target customers attention. When you’re advertising on Facebook, it’s the most important place to make sure you’re doing this right.

• The less effective your Ads on Facebook are, at getting your target customers attention –> The HIGHER your marketing costs will be.
• When you learn HOW to get your customers attention on Facebook, your marketing costs will decrease.

It seems backwards doesn’t it? Wouldn’t Facebook charge you MORE if you’re going so well? Isn’t that how the world works these days?

(that’s a conversation for another day, but paying more when you’re doing well will more so only happen when you’re dominating your entire target area and everyone is seeing your Ads and only your Ads – that’s when Facebook will start to increase your costs one way or another).

Facebook knows how well your Ad is at getting peoples attention. Because it calculates your Click Through Rate, known as your CTR.

Facebook will show your ad to 1,000 people that match your target, and will count how many of your target customers click on it.

The more that people click on it, the better your Ad is at getting your target customers attention.

BAD CTR

So now you might be thinking: “I will just put some crazy, weird, funny, attention grabbing picture in my Ad so everyone clicks it!”.

That is somewhat a smart thought. Until you try it.

BAD CTR looks good, but it’s not your target customer clicking. It’s every Jack & Jill out there who saw your weird or funny picture and thought “what’s this? CLICK! Oh, it’s someone selling life coaching. Ok, i’m not interested in that – CLOSE!”.

The only type of people you want to click on your Ad are your target customers. Therefore, it’s a delicate balance between “getting the most amount of attention possible, without attracting anyone who isn’t your target customer.”

And while you’re here, I’ll also mention that Facebook does not allow anything “sensational” in your Ads. Some examples are:

• “Make $4,323 today!”
• Pictures of girls in bikinis.
• Graphic / 18+ sensitive content.
• Hate speech, attacks on people, etc.

While these 4 things above might get attention, and maybe you are selling to single men after 25, so you think girls in Bikinis is “likely” to get your target audience to click on your ad. And you’re probably right, but too bad – because Facebook does not allow that kind of thing.

4. Facebooks Rules

Facebook are both fortunate, and smart. They have so many people who want to advertise on their platform to there users, that they can be picky about what they allow and what they don’t. This means that they don’t have to allow advertisers who want push “negative” type products (in the eyes of Facebook). An example is:

• Gambling.
• Weight loss.
• Adult content.
• High interest small loans.
• etc.

I’m not going to attempt to list everything here, because even Facebook is not 100% black and white about it.

Read the Facebook advertising guidelines and policies here. Get to know them inside and out (that is, if your serious about marketing on Facebook and making it work).

My General Rule Thumb: If i’m wondering if my Ad is “too risky” / too close to Facebooks advertising guidelines, it means it’s not worth risking this Ad. And I need to change angle or tame it down.

Facebook has a well deserved reputation of closing Facebook accounts without notice. It’s their platform. They don’t need to give you notice.

Imagine if you spent 2 years and 8 months building up your Facebook business page. You’ve spent thousands building up your pages and creating a large following, tomorrow you wake up login into Facebook and it says your Facebook page has been flagged and is going to be unpublished.

You try to contact Facebook support and lodge an appeal. But it gets rejected every-time.

If you think this is not possible, it is.

If it sounds like I’m talking from experience, I am!

5. General Facebook Advertising Set Up

Here are the key parts to any Facebook Ads campaign set up. You will have:

1. Your Facebook Business Page (not your personal profile).
2. You will have an Advertising Account (see Step 1 at this start of this post to see how to set it up).
3. You will create your Ad on Facebook. This might be
   • A image with some paragraphs and a ” Learn More ” button.
   • A video showing or teaching something, and a ” Shop Now ” button or “Learn More” button.
   • Or any of the other 15 or so common Ad types.
4. When someone clicks on your Ad, it’s most likely you will be sending them to your website. Where they can enter their name and email, or make a purchase, or whatever your goal is.
5. Your website then should be simple, with no more than 1 thing that you want the customer to do (create a new page on your website that only offers the person the one thing the Ad was about – this is the best way I and every other professional marketer I’ve ever spoken to, get customers online).
   • If you’re trying to get someone to enter the name and email address to get more information, it is not recommended that you send these people to a web page where they can do that, and they could also possibly click on read 4 different articles, or click to watch other videos, or anything else.
   • The page they land on (called a “landing page”), should just say “ok, here is the page my Ad was speaking about. Just type in your name and email address below and I’ll send you the info you want!”.

Your Website Load Speed

Have you ever been to a website during a sale, and the website crashed? There was too many people on the website at the one time.

This same thing can happen even if there is only 20 or perhaps even 10 people on your website at the same time.

If your websites load speed is slow, the worse the experience and more freezing and crashing your customers will experience. Imagine if you’re spending $100 on Facebook ads, but every second customer who clicks on your ad is seeing a “website unavailable” error message. That’s money down the drain, you can’t get back.

Your website load speed is basically determined by two main things:

1. How quick and fast your website works. Or how slow and heavy it is.
2. The quality of your web host account that your website sits on.

To test your website speed, you can use this free tool from Pingdom. Test your websites speed here.

If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, it’s not a great sign. The quicker the better. I have no stats to back this up, but aim for less than 3 seconds.

If you’re on a web host account that costs you $2-$3 a month, this likely going to give you a slow loading website. You can easily upgrade your hosting for one month, maybe you will choose the $10 or $40 a month web host plan, and then you can run your website speed test again to see how much this has increased your websites speed.

Note: You may also need to have some adjustments made to your website, to make it process and load faster. 

6. Facebook Ads Budget

How much should you spend on Facebook Ads?

If you’re just starting, the better question is: “how much are you willing to lose?”. I say that because if you are just starting out, it is most likely that you are going to lose your first $50, and maybe more.

The harsh truth is that, it’s not all profits and rainbows. 

When you start to type your first Ad on Facebook, I suggest you type up another three alternatives from different angles. There are endless ways to write the same Ad. From the words you use, to the tone. How will you position the product, and how will you describe it or introduce it?

When you come up with your four different approaches, and your four different Ads, it does not mean that your customers are going to respond to either. It’s likely that you will need to invest another $100 when you test out your 5th to 8th different Ad types.

If you spend $100 on an Ad, and you don’t make any sales… Spending $1,000 on the same Ad won’t fix that problem. 

It’s more important for you to find the right Ad, and find the winning message message before you worry about increasing your Ad budgets.

It’s very easy to spend money on Facebook Ads. We could spend $10,000 in the next 4 hours. That’s not the cool thing to do, nor is it the goal.

The goal with all marketing should be your return on Ad spend.