Today it's all about tactical, performance-oriented, revenue-focused Facebook ads. Many people asked for the basic framework. I didn't go into depth around things like bidding strategies, placement optimization, etc. but if that's interesting to you, my friend Andrew has a course called "Optimizing and Auditing" that walks through all of that in depth. But for now, let's get into it...
There are three things in advertising (paid marketing) that I believe will always be true:
- Advertising is very similar to stretching a photo in Microsoft Word (or Google Docs, if you're too young to know what MS Word is). The more you stretch the image (your paid media), the blurrier it gets. But if you have a high quality image (brand equity), it doesn't get that blurry as you stretch.
- You must treat your customer like Kim Kardashian walking a red carpet. You must have everything that she could ever need in that moment right there, ready for her. You cannot expect your customer to go learn, read reviews, do their research, and eventually buy your product if you make them do the work. They might get distracted, find an alternate brand selling your same commodity, or just not realize they need what you're selling, anymore.
- You have to be extremely native to the platform you are showing your ad in, whether that's a billboard, a Facebook ad, a TV commercial, etc. Just like you'd never use a Snapchat story as a billboard, you shouldn't use a TV commercial on Facebook, and expect it to do well.
When a new brand launches, the biggest misconception is that the second you turn Facebook ads "on", your whole business plan just works. Facebook will magically find you every possible person who is going to buy your product using it's very secretive algorithm. All of that is false. You still have to build a brand. Your Facebook ads are just a vehicle for getting your future customers.
Advertising is like flirting. You want to make sure that if you're going to ask out the person of your dreams that you give yourself the best possible shot: your hair is nicely done, you are wearing something that makes you look and feel good, you have somewhat of an idea of how you're going to lock that first date in, etc. Similarly, when spending on advertising, you want to do the most you possibly can to get this new visitor to become a customer.
Most brands today (>95%) find minimal success in channels like Facebook because they follow the 2013 playbook: run very basic ads to a homepage for their site — like a digital billboard that leads to nowhere magical. That's the equivalent of walking by the person you want to go on a date with and expecting them to come up to you and ask you out for a date: it makes no sense at all.
I think of 3 main things when putting together a paid-social campaign for a brand: audience targeting, creative optimization, landing experience. Let's break it down:
Audience Targeting
Who are you going after, but more importantly, why? What relevance do they have to your product's usage or consumption? Did you choose the audience(s) because that's whom you think your brand would sell best to, or because you looked at data from a platform like Quantcast Measure or your brand's Twitter analytics, and now you know who's interested?
There's an endless amount of potential audiences to choose from when thinking through ad targeting, but just like with every joke you need a punchline, with ever audience you target, you need to answer a WHY — what's the punchline for THAT group of people to buy the product?
If you have absolutely no idea and you've just launched your store, start testing audiences slowly. On the other hand, if you've built your brand completely organically, but don't know what audiences work best, just go broad with your Facebook ad targeting and let Facebook's machine learning figure it out. As long as you've had a Facebook pixel on your website, Facebook has secretly been learning and understanding who that customer might be, so going broad lets Facebook choose for you.
Outside of interest based audiences, you can test lookalike audiences, which is a larger segment of customers who match the traits, psychographics, demographics, browsing patterns, user behavior, etc of an email list, engagement audience, or website event you choose. While that may sound confusing, it's the equivalent of asking that person, "Hey, who are the 250 other people just like you that might say yes, if you say no?"
If you've already done that, find brands that have similar audiences and cross-share your lookalike audiences. When I started doing this with larger companies ($50-100M rev range) in 2017, it got a little complicated, but today co-op Commerce does that as a feature of the platform. You can easily request to swap audiences with a brand like Caraway or Black Wolf Nation.
Creative Optimization
With creative, you want to test anything and everything. That UGC selfie style review? Test it. The studio-shot campaign? Test it. A video that looks like it was made for NowThis's Facebook page? Test it.
There is no shortage of what you can test... here are some ideas:
Static images
- Customer quote overlays
- Publication review overlays
- Witty copy overlays
- Split screen comparisons
- Dynamic Product Ads (see Software of the Week)
Videos
- UGC reviews
- Animated videos
- ASMR style videos
- Slow motion (pouring into a glass for example)
- Showing how to place an order
- Repurpose influencer content
Whitelisting
Landing Experiences:
This is the one I am most passionate about. You've now done a lot to convince someone that it's worth spending time on your site — now you have to convince them to try what you're selling. Driving to the homepage doesn't work, it might be the worst thing to try doing.
Instead, for cold/new/prospecting/unfamiliar-with-your-brand traffic, put together a rich experience. What do I mean by that? Something that hits the punchline of why someone should buy/try your product — and with an angle that makes sense to them.
For example, when selling flavored water, we thought of tons of angles:
- Someone wanting to get off diet soda
- Someone is trying to lose weight and wants to make water more enjoyable
- Someone is going through a medical treatment and flavored water doesn't give them a metallic taste in their mouth
- Someone takes supplements or pills and flavored water offsets you wanting to gag from the strong smell
The angles should be the prompts, and the page experience you bring someone to should be the punchline. It should answer WHY what you're selling is going to address the angle, prompt, or question they have going into it.
Going to a homepage, even if it's optimized for conversion, isn't going to allow you to hit the punchline of all those possible angles, and also make full use of the way you segment your audience targeting. That's why you want to build out landing pages. These can be listicles, articles, a very in-depth product page with an offer, or even an interactive experience like games and quizzes. The goal with these experiences is to not convince someone they should buy the product, it's that they should realize on their own, "Oh, I see a need for this in my life."
Bailee Cooper, of Sharma Brands, put together a useful landing page guide you can download here for free.
Here are some great examples (and maybe good deals) you can use as inspiration:
With all of this, you should be going from smart/tested audiences to great creative to a page that makes someone realize they are missing out by not purchasing. I promise with JUST doing what is in this email, you'll drop your Facebook CPA by 30% minimum.
