Secrets to driving traffic with Facebook
To say social media marketing has been disrupted this year would be a gross understatement.
Nonetheless, 2021 ended on a very high note and I’d like to give you some insights on how one of my clients had a very successful month in November, and another one in December — a notoriously brutal month and quarter for all advertisers, especially the little guys. Q4 is all marketing hell breaks loose due to…
Walmart, Target, Kohls and other huge retailers open up their cash vaults and spend money like there’s no tomorrow, driving up the ad costs for everyone else and dramatically diminishes the effectiveness of the ads of local, small businesses.
In spite of the retail mammoths muddying the water, we were able to come out smelling like a white mushroom. Here are a couple of insights from the last 2 months that may help you get off the New Year on the right foot.
- Take a balanced approach when it comes to advertising objectives. Many preach that you should ONLY use the CONVERSION objective, and although it is very useful and gives you the best quality audiences in general, I disagree.
The reason is because there are “pockets” of people within your audience who tend to respond to ads a certain way, and they are categorized into audiences based on that.
That means there may be people interested in your product, but haven’t taken a “conversion” type action recently such as: buying a product, opting into an email list or scheduling an appointment etc… that Facebook will not be showing your ads to – even though they fall within your selected demographic.
I like using other objectives like Video Views and Engagement to broaden my net of people my ads reach in my target audience, and further build my retargeting pool of people who have at least shown some initial interest in the product or service.
You can also “retarget” these people with customized ads and sequences based on how much of your video they watched so you can funnel your budget more tightly to those in the audience who have demonstrated more interest.
These objectives will generally convert less, but the costs are WAY cheaper than conversion so it makes sense to use them as well.
- Segment your retargeting by both time periods, action type, and different objectives. I like to attack people within the first 7 days after they’ve clicked on my ad and viewed a product or site but did not buy because that’s when it’s still new and fresh in their minds.
After that I taper off a little on the frequency, but add a different angle(s) of the offer day 8-30 to try to keep awareness and stay top of mind, but also to give them extra incentive to make a purchasing decision.
For a more expensive product or service, I would follow up for a total of maybe 90 days or possibly longer, but put a decreasing amount of budget into those people and a cheaper distribution objective like reach or traffic.
- Utilize an email list to follow up. Give them a very good reason to give you their email address so you can follow up with them whether they purchase or not. You will permanently own that list and will not be at the mercy of Facebook or any other social media platform and forced to abide by whatever politically correct games they happen to be playing at the time, or may in the future.
The more consistently you stay in front of their eyeballs the more sales you tend to get so it makes sense on multiple fronts.
I think if most businesses take a more long-term view and not focus solely on the immediate sale, that in the grand scheme of things a lot more sales will be made.
Just my opinion based on the results I was able to generate.
If you’ve struggled to get results from Facebook ads and don’t have a primary paid traffic source… before you give up and scream “it doesn’t work for me”… perhaps take a look at making some strategic adjustments.
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