It’s easy to get sucked in to the excitement of creating a Facebook ad (don’t worry – I still get excited too!)… but it’s important to take a step back and ask yourself these questions before publishing your campaigns.
What is the objective?
Are you wanting more eyes on your content, or are you wanting people to take a specific action? If so, which action? A lead? A conversion?
What you want people to do is exactly what you should use as your objective. Say for example, you want new leads but chose the “traffic” objective, Facebook will find people who are likely to click your ad link to your website, but NOT likely to convert to a lead. You can and do get leads from traffic, but you will get more optimising for conversions.
2. Am I using the right audiences?
Many business owners don’t realise the opportunities you have within Ads manager to target your customers. You can find out more about audiences here
Once you have chosen your audiences… do they overlap? Are you utilising your customers who are further down the buying journey by creating lookalike audiences, instead of saved audiences?
3. Am I duplicating my messages at different stages of the funnel?
Funnels sound scary, right? They don’t have to be. Every potential customer you will have will be in a stage within your “marketing funnel”, this means they be a completely cold customer, they have never heard about your business before, or they could have heard about your business, but never really taken much notice, they could even be a warm customer, a top fan but never quite taken that final step by enquiring. Your customers will all be at different stages of your marketing funnel, so it’s important your ad copy reflects this. After all, someone who knows your business well, doesn’t need to read the same thing as someone who has never heard of you before.
Below shows the different stages a customer is in within your marketing funnel.
4. Where am I running these ads?
When you run Facebook and Instagram ads, you have the option to choose placements within each platform. Placements include things like stories, feed, messenger etc. It’s not often I recommend selecting manual placements, unless you have a large budget and can test, or have a very niche audience that may only hang out in certain places on the platforms, but it’s important to understand where you are running these ads before you go live.
5. Am I budgeting enough?
Budget is another question I am asked about a lot – how much should I be spending on Facebook ads?
The answer isn’t a simple answer.
There are many things which will have an impact on your overall costs, these include things such as;
- How well your Facebook page performs
- If you have run ads before and have tested variables
- How competitive your industry is
- How well your website performs
- Your brand reputation
- Your overall product/service and their prices
To keep it simple, I always recommend investing at least £10-£20 per day to your cold (top of funnel) audiences. Your bottom of funnel campaign should be at least 20% of your top of funnel spend.
It’s important to ensure you have asked yourself and can understand the above, before spending money on Facebook and Instagram ads.
If you do not have previous data to use as a benchmark, allowing at least 3 months to invest in learning and gathering valuable data, will help you achieve maximum long-term success with your ads.
If you would like any help with your Facebook and Instagram ads, click here to see how I can help you.
