Your business has tons of potential for generating leads/sales on the world’s largest social media platform. The problem is you may have never advertised on Facebook before, or you have before and seen little to no results come about from it. The truth is if you don’t have a proper understanding of Facebook/Meta ads and your campaign/targeting setup is incorrect. You will probably see little to no good results. My name is Luke Brenner, and to put it quickly, I spend people’s money for a living (professionally, of course) to make them more money. How? That’s through advertising, so I know a thing or two about how this all works and I wanted to share my TOP 3 tips with you that will help you a lot.
Understand Who You Are Targeting
Luckily, Facebook’s ad manager makes it easy to target certain interest groups. For example, I can target people who are interested in Pet stores, meaning they might have pets, so they might be interested in a dog-walking service. If you’re targeting the upper class, you can try and target an expensive cigar company (go figure, only they can afford the expensive cigars).
The use of interest targeting in Facebook advertising, though is starting to matter less as Facebook’s algorithm has improved greatly over time and can get your results without targeting interests. Normally I have seen Facebook’s algorithm do the best with no targeting once you are already seeing consistent results with interest targeting since the algorithm basically tells itself “hey we figured out where everyone is, target this way”.
Either way, understanding who you are targeting is the most important factor so that you can tailor everything else in your ads to that audience, which we will get more into later.
Just Like Real-Estate: Location Matters
If you are running a small budget and trying to compete on a national or international scale; it’s very unlikely that it will work out for you. Some Facebook advertisers spend hundreds, if not millions, of dollars a month, week, or, in some cases, a day. If you are in one of those markets, you will be consistently outbid to the point that you will not be able to compete.
I’ll give you a great example – you might see your campaign starting to get sales or form submissions on a national or international scale, and then all of a sudden, you start having bad days, consistently bad days, all kinds of ups and downs. That’s because someone is above you, spending a lot of money on certain days and hours to get the most sales/leads. When they do these kinds of tactics, it can tarnish your campaign since customers might get targeted with mostly their advertisements (even if it’s a completely different industry).
You’re not just competing against the same guy running pet care ads; you’re competing with the pet stores themselves. Sure, their targeting is much better since they have more data, but they still run campaigns to learn more and reach new audiences, which might overlap with yours.
My point is you can combat this by starting on a smaller scale; for example, if I were the only person in Berks County, PA targeting people interested in pet stores, but a big company was targeting them nationally – my bid would be higher. Why? Because the big companies’ budget is spread across the nation, including every city, town, etc. Mine is condensed down to just Berks County, PA giving me the highest bid for my specific area.
Creative & Ad Copy
At this point, I’ve seen all kinds of creatives and ad copies work to get sales or leads. What stands out to me, though, is that the more creative you are with your advertisement and copy, the better your results will usually be. Of course, if you advertise pants to someone who is looking for pants, and as long as the advertisement does not look like a scam, it would work.
Now let me ask you something. Have you ever seen an Old Spice commercial? What did you notice about it? Well, it sells the product by being creative. It’s obvious that Old Spice has been successful with their campaigns since they keep running them and revenue keeps increasing. Creativity is pure gold, and people buy into it, whether it’s funny, sad, or grabs someone’s attention.
So, how do you make your ad copy and advertisements more creative? Well, to be fair, that’s a hard answer that takes a lot of brain power to figure it out. Some are born naturally, being able to think random creative things like a T-Rex shaving his legs to promote an electric shaving company and saying, “Don’t wait till extinction; stay freshly shaved.” If you ever need a hand with running campaigns or want someone to do it for you, reach out to us, and let’s have a discussion to see what we can do for you.