In Part 1 of our blog about Facebook advertising – https://3twelve.co.uk/blog/getting-started-with-facebook-advertising-part-1/ – we looked at the fundamentals of this type of digital marketing and how to make it work best for you. In Part 2, we’ll be talking about how to create compelling messaging, build audiences and of course, how to launch effectively.
Once you’ve worked out who your target audience is, you need to think about your service offering and develop a series of core solution messages. Think about what’s included in your product or service and why it’s part of what you’re offering. For example, say you provide Facebook advertising for people (like we do!) – you need to think about the elements that are part of your service – in this instance, these could include customer persona identification, funnel blueprint, creative, ad copy etc., then list why each of these things is included and outline the problems that they solve for people. So for customer persona, you’d say that it was included as part of your service because you want to nail your messaging and create audiences that are as relevant as possible to the people you’re showing ads to. You then use this information when creating your ad copy.
Next, you need to test your campaign out. A great way of doing this is through what many agencies call rapid-fire testing, which is simply a process for validating the product you’re selling and the persona you’re targeting. This process will also help you to avoid wasting money on ads that aren’t going to give you a decent return.
There are three steps to the testing stage. Rapid-fire test round 1 tests out different personas. If you feel clear about who your target audience is you can skip this part. Next is rapid-fire test round 2 where you will look to test out your copy, hooks and lead magnets to entice your audience to engage with your brand and service further. For example, if you’re using PDF downloads, newsletter opt-ins or white paper content downloads to gather contact information to market back to, this is where you’ll find out which approach is going to work best.
Finally, in rapid-fire test round 3 you will test out alternative copy and creative, although this is something that you never really stop testing. You should always be looking at how you can improve what you’re doing and change it up a bit to make sure your creative and messaging stay as effective and relevant as possible. It can take up to 3 months to ‘crack’ your Facebook advertising funnel, so be prepared to be patient and test what you’re doing as much as possible. For the rapid-fire test rounds, a budget of around £200-500 should be reserved, so again, be prepared to make this investment to maximise what you’re doing, and find out if there is a market for your service and product on Facebook ahead of diving into a fully-fledged campaign!
Once you’ve finished the testing stage, you’re ready to look at launching. If your campaign is doing well during the testing phase, then you’d want to scale this up, there’s no point in fixing what isn’t broken, right? You could increase the size of your audience or your daily ad spend when you start to see decent results from your testing. Or you could roll out a new campaign similar to the one you used in the testing phase, trying different audiences and targets. Your launch depends on what you want to do and what you want to achieve.
Essentially, when launching your campaign, you will need to look to create the following steps:
Top of funnel (TOF) – this is the first part of your target audience’s journey with your brand, where you spread awareness of your product or service and drive traffic.
Middle of funnel (MOF) – where your audience is searching for a solution to a particular pain point. This is where you can provide something of value, i.e. a free PDF or an invitation to a webinar.
Bottom of funnel (BOF) – here you would look to re-target the people that have interacted with the top or middle parts of your campaign or an audience that is already familiar with your brand and services – like website visitors, or other previously warm audiences.
You do need to carry on optimising your campaign depending on the results you get and look at whether you want to increase your budget or increase your audience to maximise ROA’s (Return On Ad Spend). Just keep your eye on things and keep it moving.
So that is, in a nutshell, how you set up, test and manage an effective Facebook advertising campaign! Please do get in touch if you need any help with validating your business on the platform or running a campaign for you. We offer a free 30-minute strategy call to ascertain whether Facebook advertising is right for you!