When it comes to advertising (or anything worthwhile for that matter), organization and prioritization will help you achieve your goals quickly.
But sometimes there’s no time for organization. No time for prioritization. You just need to get something up to prove that you’re not wasting your time, energy, and effort.
Sound familiar?
There’s a simple process that if followed will allow you to enjoy the fruits of your labor:
- Build Your Audience
- Build Your Leads
- Sell Your Products/Services
Build Your Audience
There are A LOT of businesses and advertising agencies throwing money at Facebook ads. Most of them are doing it all wrong. They select a very broad target, start the ads at $50-$100 a day and then hope and pray something happens. We’re not going to do that.
Understand that when you begin your campaign, you’re not looking to make sales. At least not initially. Your entire goal at the very beginning is building an audience. You want to have broad targeting to start out. Here’s how to do that:
- Select targeting that gets you about 500K people to start
- Advertise something helpful like a blog post or a video
- Create a custom audience of people who engage with your content
Build Your Leads
After you have your custom audience, you’re now ready to start getting some leads. Remember, the audience you advertised to initially is NOT the audience you use for this step. The audience you’re advertising to now is a custom audience of people who engaged with your video or blog post. Those people have already expressed an interest in what you have to say. Now, it’s time to bring them into your world.
For this step in the process, you need to:
- Create a new ad set (this is where you select your targeting and budget)
- Select your new Custom Audience
- Adjust your bidding
- Create a new ad that asks people to take the next step
This step is called re-targeting.
I forgot to mention…
Make sure you start your initial ads at $5-$10 per day. Don’t touch it for 3 whole days. Evaluate after 72 hours to determine if you want to continue running the ad or if you’re ready to pause it. When it comes to re-targeting, you can run those ads at $2-$3 per day.
Sell Your Products/Services
Now that you’ve built an audience and ran an ad that asks them to take the next step (opt-in, download, register for webinar, etc.), it’s time to be a little more direct.
You could create another new ad set of people who interacted with your leads post, but that might bring your targeting down to a number less than 100. It’s totally optional. You could just as easily run your direct-to-sale ad to your custom audience. I’m not partial to either. They both work. Test which works best for you.
You are following the same steps from the Build Your Leads process. The only difference here is the ad. The ad should be direct but polite. Ideally, you would send people to your sales page or your consulting page.
Here’s a snapshot of my sales page and consulting page side-by-side:
Your Turn
This is a simple process that can be used by all advertisers, regardless of experience. Did I miss anything? What would you add?
Let me know in the comments below