Why use Facebook ads?
Facebook are far more advanced than most Social Media platforms. Facebook does a lot to help small businesses find new clients online. They make it easier to get your messages heard by your perfect potential clients.
If you already have lots of information on your business page, start by targeting these businesses first.
It’s the most cost effective way to target on Facebook, since you don’t pay as much when you target your own fans versus a new audience. This is a real chance to strike a very cost effective quick win in your marketing strategy.
Start by targeting fans of your own Facebook page
Next, create your perfect audience. Essentially telling Facebook that you want to market to the people who fall within your set criteria. Eg. gender, interests and even location.
If you already have a marketing email list you can also upload it to Facebook. Facebook will slightly analyse analyse list, if they find a match, they'll put the contact in a folder. Which will allow you to target people who are already on your email list with a new opportunity. You can even ask Facebook to find people who are similar to the people already on your list.
Target fans of other Facebook pages, such as your competitors or people who are aligned with your business. So when setting interests search for you competitors and add their clients to your targeted audience list on Facebook.
This is analyse more advanced but very useful is to re-target your website visitors. Facebook essential place a pixel on your website (they can do this even down to a specific blog post), they can then start driving traffic to your blog. Facebook can also track the visitor. If the person also has a Facebook account, they go into your folder and you can re-target them with something like an offer or product that’s related to that blog post topic.
You can get even more specific. As an example, if you are driving traffic to appointment booking page, you can set it up to re-target people visited that page but never booked.
There are three types of Facebook ads: sidebar, news feed and mobile
When you set up your FB ad, if you have small budget start with a news feed ads. These appear just like any Facebook post in people's news feeds.
Spend the bulk of your budget running both desktop and mobile news feed ads. Facebook will show a preview of your ad both ways.
Remember, if you’re promoting content on mobile make sure its fully responsive beforehand.
Facebook ad text
For Facebook ads, create a headline below your image and add a description. The most important text for your ad is right above the image. We suggest you lead with an obvious rhetorical question.
For ad text try starting with a rhetorical question, answering it and then providing more information
For example, if your salon offers a great hair extension service, your rhetorical question might be, “Have you struggled to find a salon that offers high quality extensions?” Then write something like, “If that’s you, don’t hesitate to book your free consultation at our salon.
When you start an ad this way, you get your audience’s attention. This kind of setup with text has proven to be really successful over the years.
Use the following format: "Your question."
"Then write just two sentences to tell your Potential client what to do." Also, include either the link in the text or write “click below” to lead the readers to the link in the ad.
Start making your ads using Ad Creator the Ad Creator tool, because it’s a lot easier. However, you only get 90 characters of text.
We suggest setting up an ad from scratch (rather than boosting a post), because you have more flexibility and options. For instance, when you set up an ad in the Ad Creator tool, you can choose a call-to-action button such as “Book Now,“ or “Call“
Your ad budget
We suggest to start by spending £5 for each ad you run. To set up an ad, you create a campaign, then an ad set and finally an ad. Once the ad is in your campaign you’re all set. You can view your analytics to see how many leads are generated, if it’s positive you could then boost them up a bit.
Start with a budget of £5 per day.
Aim to get up to £20 per day for a period of time. At least a week would be great. It's common to fret if you haven’t gotten results in 24 hours. But give it at least 72 hours. When you run ads for New clients, your cost per lead will be pretty high, like £6 or £7 per New client (depending on your business and other factors). After that 24-hour period, it will go down. You have to give it time to mature and show results.
When it’s time to change your ads
When testing the effectiveness of a Facebook ad, pay close attention to cost per booking or cost per sale. The obvious rule of thumb is to keep this as low as possible, keep it to £5 or less per new client. If you’re paying £1 to £5 per new client, you’re doing really well. But you should also take into account the client spend over a 12 month period. With a view to spending between 3-5% of the average annual spend per customer on lead acquisition.
However, if you’re not happy with something, like your cost per new booking, there are things you can do. We always start with changing the image. Let it run for three days if the results don’t get better, then change the text. Remember make changes step by step. Don’t change everything at once. It's important to analyse the effect that each change has on your conversion and fine tune your ad until the cost per lead makes sense financially for your business.
One more thing: When you set up your ad, you can click to get the URL, so you can check it for comments regularly.
*Get your audience set up correctly, make sure your ad is being seen by your perfect audience. Getting this right will see your cost of acquisition drop considerably.*