Having recently received my certification as a Customer Acquisition Specialist through Digital Marketer – the gold standard for digital marketing – I thought I would share some of what I learned while preparing for the exam. In this post, I focus on five Facebook advertising strategies you can use to give your campaigns a boost.
Tip One: Develop Avatars
It’s a tried-and-true marketing technique that works. Rather than creating one advertisement that tries to appeal to everyone, identify the unique attributes of different potential customers/supporters that may be interested in your offer. What keeps them up at night? What is their average day like? What publications do they read? The more you know about them the more effective you will be at explaining how your offer can improve their lives. This worksheet will guide you through the process of getting inside the heads of your potential customers.
Tip Two: Use Hooks
After identifying your avatars, write ad copy that speaks to each of their pain points. For example, an organization providing after school tutoring for at-risk youth, may have developed an avatar around educators. By writing ad copy that addresses the challenges teachers face in helping underprivileged students and asking them to support your mentoring program as a way to make a difference, you have a better chance of convincing them to act. Each avatar can be targeted with several different hooks to see what resonates.
Tip Three: Use the ‘No One Else Would’ Technique for Targeting
When choosing your interest targeting for each audience, don’t just go for the obvious choice. Instead, research everything you can about your audience, including the publications they read, events they attend and the Facebook groups they follow. This helps ensure you find people who are most passionate.
For example, if you sell golf equipment, ask yourself if choosing Tiger Woods as a target makes the most sense – probably not. Tiger Woods is a celebrity in his own right and probably has people following him who don’t even care about golf. Choosing Bubba Watson on the other hand would be a better bet, because no one else except for a golf lover would likely know who he is.
Tip Four: Follow the Customer Journey
If someone is new to your organization, asking them to donate or purchase right away is akin to asking someone to marry you on a first date. It won’t work. Instead, introduce them to your brand by offering content they will find informative such as a blog post, checklist, or webinar. Make sure the content directly relates to your core offer.
A prospective client of mine who sells the work of famous cartoonists has identified meeting presenters as a potential customer. Sending them to a blog post that explains how cartoons can help break the ice and foster meaningful conversation at meetings would make sense. Once they have read it and understand the benefits, following up with a remarketing ad that asks them to make a purchase will likely produce better results.
Tip Five: Scaling
After your ads have run for a while (give it a week), measure each ad’s performance. An ad grid like the one below can help map things out by matching the hooks used in each ad to each audience (avatar).
For the winning ad, you will want to increase your budget. A good rule of thumb is to make sure you don’t increase the budget by more than 50 percent over a seven-day period. Otherwise, Facebook will have difficulty with optimization.
You will also want to double down on the avatar with the winning ad by identifying additional interests associated with that avatar. To ensure proper optimization here as well, create an additional ad set for these new interests.
Conclusion
The common thread running through these techniques is specificity. By creating ads that strike a cord with someone, your chances of converting them will go up exponentially. Give them a try and let me know what you think.