6 Considerations When Starting Facebook Advertising

I’m often asked, “Hey Matt, I’d like to start an ad campaign, and I need to get 30 warm leads. Can you help?” My answer is always, “Yes”. But often the question misses the mark – it misses the objective of an ad campaign. Or should I say the 6 objectives?

That’s right, we can think of ad campaigns as having one of 6 objectives – especially when advertising on social media such as Facebook or Meta Ad Manager.

If we fail to consider these 6 objectives and where the current campaign falls within the full spectrum of your marketing and advertising plan, I can guarantee you will be confused by the results. And I always say,

Confusion Costs Money. Getting clear on your advertising objectives, your A/B tests, and your brand messaging creates revenue. Confusion on the other hand, costs time and money.

So let’s take a quick look at these 6 Facebook advertising objectives and see how they fit into the larger picture of your marketing plan.

Building Brand Presence

Whether you are an established local brand, a new online e-commerce store, or a small business looking to grow your client base, this first objective plays three important roles:

1. Audience Research At Low Costs: Meta advertising is probably the best place (as of 2022) to learn about potential customers at a low cost. Running ads that focus on the objective of reaching new audience is the best place to understand your target market.
2. “Warm-Up” the Audience: It’s rare, and not a good strategy, to go from unknown to loyal customer. Instead, the brand awareness ad objective is the most affordable way to spread your messaging to in a cold layer of ads. The goal here is the find potential customers, and build brand recognition with them.
3. Create Ad Recall: When building brand presence, your ads should create recall. This means that someone who views your ad should be able to remember it up to 2 days later. Usually this is done when they have another touchpoint (ad, social post, email, etc) with your brand.

Create Awareness

Creating awareness is an obvious advertising consideration, but it’s often overlooked. Often we, as small business owners, view awareness advertising as a waste of money. That’s logical. Awareness ads are not linked to bottom-level results such as lead generation or revenue.

Instead, creating awareness is about establishing a relationship with your audience and potential customers. It’s closely related to Brand Presence because is increases your reach. Creating awareness differs in terms of tactics. Here are three tactics to consider when creating awareness:

• Use free social media posts on Facebook and Instagram. Try creating posts that educate, entertain, or get your followers talking about your business. Then use the top-performing posts as ads to increase their reach.
• Stay top of mind with regular posting. Posting frequently helps keep your business relevant to your potential customers. For you, social media posts are research into what content your audience likes the most. That is an insight into the problems your business should solve for them.
• Create a monthly content plan. This tactic requires discipline, but discipline equals results. Planning your posts ahead of time helps you stay on a regular posting schedule and helps you prepare in advance to put out quality posts.

Social media posts are research into what content your audience likes the most. That is an insight into the problems your business should solve for them.

Demand Generation

A prerequisite for sales is the process of driving the discovery of your products and services. This process is so often overlooked that businesses will set up ads on Meta/Facebook Ads Manager, and then get disappointed when those ads don’t create direct sales.

The failure is often blamed on the ads or the landing page or the pricing. However, ads, landing pages, and pricing actually have a large margin of error. The key is helping a potential customer move on the journey from brand awareness to wanting your products and services. Demand generation on Facebook ads can show up in post engagement, commenting, communicating with a potential customer on Messenger, or simply increased video view duration.

The key is helping a potential customer move on the journey from brand awareness to wanting your products and services.

Generate Leads

This is where business owners, including myself, get excited. Rightfully so. This is the part of the process where the relationship with potential customers turns closer to revenue. If a marketing plan properly considers (1) brand presence, (2) creating awareness, and (3) demand generation then generating leads is the most natural and easiest next step in Facebook Ads.

Here are a few tips on Meta Ad Campaigns that Generate Ads:

1. Meet the customer where they are. Often we have a brilliant lead funnel or PDF download that we want the customer experience simply to generate a lead. Unfortunately, that’s a business-centric approach. A customer-centric approach gathers a lead where the customer is already (Instagram Stories, Messenger, Facebook Lead Form, etc.).
2. Use CRM integrations. Facebook ads offer a variety of customer relationship manager (CRM) integrations. Using those integrations simplifies the ad optimization process and helps you find qualified leads faster.
3. Use Facebook’s Lead Center. If you’re outsourcing your advertising team (such as the services I offer here), you can use Facebook’s built-in lead center to manage and delegate leads along each step of the customer journey. NOTE: Only Meta Business Manager admins have access to the lead center, so remember to assign access accordingly.

Boost Sales

When starting an ad campaign its normal to state “Increase Sales” as the objective. As we’ve seen with the first four Facebook advertising objectives, it’s not that simple.

However, it is simple if you’ve layered your advertising and properly considered how sales ads fit into your total plan. On Meta ad platforms, you have many advertising tools to boost sales:

• Messenger. Messenger allows you to answer frequently asked questions, provide customer support and even close sales.
• Ad Personalization. Reach the people most likely to buy with personalized ads.
• Use Facebook and Instagram Shops. In Meta Business Suite, you will find a Commerce section. This is where you can boost sales directly on Meta social media platforms.
• Carousels and Collections. Consider using collection ads to show your audience a range of products to discover.
• Traffic Ads. Drive high volume traffic directly to sales pages for your audience to view offers tailored for specific buyer personas (a service I can help you with).

Earn Loyalty

These 6 Facebook Ad considerations can bring your brand from unknown to trusted authority with entirely new segments of your market. And a fully-layered advertising plan can help you earn loyalty with customers faster than having no plan or simply running scattered ads. Here are a few tips:

1. Retargeting. Use brand awareness ads for customer affirmation and pride.
2. Physical location. Targeting a physical location with ads and matching the offers and messaging to that location makes your brand feel “closer to home”.
3. Events. Target Facebook ads to customers who have recently engaged with your brand (video views, website visits, purchases). Create specific events such as Facebook Live videos to welcome those customers into your community.

A fully-layered advertising plan can help you earn loyalty with customers faster than having no plan or simply running scattered ads.

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