Some of the biggest lead generators for your business are ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But the steps to create ads that reach your audience and make the impact you want can be challenging.
Maybe you haven’t used Facebook ads or Instagram yet. This article will help you hopefully feel a little bit better about it.
Or maybe you’re at that point where you’ve tried them and you gave up because they didn’t seem to work for you. This is the post for you!
This week is an interview with Tony Christensen, a.k.a. Tony Does Ads. If you haven’t met Tony, he’s all about Facebook and Instagram advertising. He’s a creator, a speaker, and basically a nerd on this subject.
He’s created optimized advertising campaigns for keynote speakers, for conferences, and for eCommerce businesses around the world with budgets as high as millions a month in advertising. He’s seen enough of them for him to be able to share this knowledge with you.
WHY FACEBOOK ADS WORK SO WELL
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:02:47] Why is Facebook such a useful tool in our lead generation toolkit, especially right now?
Tony Christensen: [00:03:55] Facebook, compared to other advertising platforms, has so much data. I think that’s really the bread and butter of Facebook, kind of to a creepy extent to where you have people asking, “Is Facebook listening to me?” Those kinds of questions pop up.
They’re not, but their algorithms are just so advanced now. They have billions of sets of data points that they can connect and find all these crazy patterns.
That’s the real value of Facebook ads right now is that you can dive in and you can start making ads and your targeting (compared to five-ten years ago,) can be way more vague.
Facebook kind of knows who you’re looking for to accomplish what you’re trying to do. Some of those other ad platforms are starting to catch up, but they’re still years behind. It’s incredible and it’s still fairly cheap to an extent, compared to traditional media. I’m a nerd, so I’m always going to say, “Facebook ads all the way!”
LEVERAGE YOUR ORGANIC ENGAGEMENT
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:04:52] When you run Facebook ads, it’s also an Instagram ad. It’s a bit like a Swiss army knife. There are so many objectives you can accomplish at this point. What are the things that you get asked the most? What are the kinds of things you’re doing a lot for people right now?
Tony Christensen: [00:05:34] I have an interesting approach with ads where I am very straightforward with a lot of people.
Sometimes it can be a good thing and sometimes it can be a bad thing. I dive in and I look at things like their website. I look at how many customers they have that are interacting with them currently online. Before we even start running ads, how are your organic sales beforehand?
It depends because I’ve done a lot of bigger eCommerce companies that have had huge spending. They’ve got funding and they say, “We don’t care about the organic side yet. Who cares? That will come later. Let’s just start running ads and grow this thing quickly.”
SMALL BUSINESSES WORK DIFFERENTLY
It’s totally different than working with a small business. It’s a big smorgasbord of everything going on. It’s really just diving into what the business is trying to find out. What is the business goal that they’re working on? What do they have right now? Where are they foundationally? Is their branding figured out?
If it’s not, I might just say, “You need to figure this out and then come back to me in six months to a year, however long it might be.” Or I’ll say, “You know, this is the option. You can do that route, the organic route. Or we can spend money and test, and you’re going to be wasting money because you are testing.”
BUILD A COLD AUDIENCE WITH FACEBOOK ADS
What is cool about that and what’s really nice about Facebook ads is you can do all of this cold audience building. With a lot of these other platforms, it can be a lot more difficult.
We can really focus on what we can create that gets people really interested in your brand. What kind of entertainment, what kind of value might we be able to create so people can really start to get invested in your brand?
It’s a very political answer to your question of what’s the most common question I get asked? I would say a lot of times the questions are very specific things. I do speaking and you always get people raising their hands at the very end of the speaking gig. It’s always something very specific.
“Hey, how long should my video be?”
I’m thinking, do you want me to just say forty-three seconds or something? It doesn’t make any sense, so I try to get people to change their mindset in a lot of ways to think about what are you actually trying to accomplish?
Then, how can you work on that day-to-day and increase that to get closer to your end goal?
HOW TO KNOW YOU’RE READY FOR FACEBOOK ADS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:07:46] Not everyone is perfectly ready when they’re starting to think about ads. What does it mean to have an offer that’s working and ready for Facebook ads?
Tony Christensen: [00:08:03] When I say offer, it can be so many different things, I guess. I’ve worked with a lot of people that work on personal brands. I like to think of who are you serving? It gets back to figuring out all of this brand identity stuff.
Why are you doing business? Who are you actually trying to help? How are you going to help them? You’re taking a lot of steps back and trying to figure out how can you actually be of service to people and help people out, providing whatever solutions you might provide.
When it comes to the lead generation side of things, it’s just that exact thing. For example, if I’m targeting eCommerce business owners, what can I create now as a tool or a download that might help them? They might want to know how much agencies typically cost. What’s the pricing structure? What’s it like working with an agency?
What are questions I might ask interviewing agencies, what are red flags working with agencies, all these kinds of things? You have to really dive into their mindset.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
PEOPLE WON’T BUY UNLESS THEY KNOW YOU
I see that as a big issue a lot of people deal with when they’re trying to sell their products. They’re trying to sell right away. They say, “Buy my item.” However, no one knows who you are and they don’t care, honestly.
You really have to figure out how you can provide them value upfront and get them to go through that know-like-trust factor.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:09:27] What’s a good way to start? If you’re putting your products online, how do you know this stuff can sell without running ads as the first thing? Or can you?
Tony Christensen: [00:10:16] When it comes to e-commerce, I hope you’ve already done that work by the time you’re trying to run ads.
I just listened to your John Lee Dumas episode, and I think he mentioned a great tactic that he did. He put out so much content upfront and he built up that audience. Then he asked them, what do they need? How can he help them?
I think that’s such a great mentality to have, and that’s kind of what I was getting to as well. When you’re looking at your products and services and how you can help people, it’s really finding that out.
I’ve had people reach out to me just for simple things like how do I name my ad campaigns? I actually have a blog post now that’s ranking for that. It’s just a free download that I created that was just the need that I found.
ASK YOUR AUDIENCE QUESTIONS
Just start to talk to who you think your ideal customer is and ask them the questions. What do you look for? I have a weird background, but I used to sell yoga pants and leggings for this company. I used to model them.
I have a fairly good network of people that wear yoga pants and leggings on my Facebook and Twitter and all that stuff, so I just posted questions on my profile actually.
I asked, “What do you look for when you’re buying expensive yoga pants, like Lululemon type yoga pants? Why do you buy them compared to other yoga pants? What do you not like about yoga pants or these certain brands or whatever it might be?”
If you have a product that you’re launching that’s similar to another product, really dive into that side of things and just ask people, “Hey, what do you like about this product? Why do you choose them over these other ones?”
It could very well be they have an awesome brand to start with. It could be the quality or the experience. I think a lot of times that can be a big factor, or their friend had it or whatever it might be. You really just want to dive into that sort of thing and take it from there.
USE YOUR SURVEY INFORMATION TO BUILD YOUR ADS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:12:13] What do you do with that information? I hear this side of it, that you should survey your audience and ask them these questions. As someone who’s building Facebook ads, what do you do with that information?
Tony Christensen: [00:12:25] Depending on what they say, I’m using that for feedback to the creative team.
I have a template that I made now where I dive really deep into reviews that people have written. I look for them actually talking about who they are, their demographics, and their interests. A lot of people spill their whole life sometimes in these reviews, which is amazing for an advertiser.
FIND WAYS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS
It does take a lot of time, but the campaigns I’ve made out of that are so valuable. It’s diving into that and sorting the data to see, “Here are our top five pain points that our product solves. Here are the top three things that people are saying about this.”
I just was doing this for a water bottle company. People said it motivates them to drink water because it has little tracking lines on it. A huge group of people said it was so cute too. I think, okay, I’m getting this. I sell feminine products I guess.
But I was thinking, there you go. We can really make the campaign now. I can talk to the creative team. We can make videos about people staying motivated to drink water. Some people have parents that might have got feedback from a doctor saying, “Hey, you’re dehydrated. You’re not drinking enough water.”
CREATE AND THEN TEST
You can start to dive into these pain points and give feedback to a creative team to create videos based on that. It goes into everything. This could be your sales copy too. This could be your ad headlines, the things that you’re saying in the videos, as well as your organic posts.
Then it’s diving into testing even more and seeing what people respond to the best if it’s a video, the type of ad, or whatever it is.
That comes back to that question that you had, the most asked question. It’s always something very specific. I usually have two answers.
It’s either, “It depends” and “Test it”. I’m always telling people you just have to test a bunch of different things and see what people do because I could have certain results. I could have found this for our product, our industry. Your brand could be similar, but you could be serving a totally different market or have your own spin on it.
You really want to dive in and listen to what people say, maybe test certain things. You want to be your own scientist in a lot of ways, dive into that. See what people are responding to, then iterating and optimizing based on the data and results that you’re seeing.
IMPORTANT TIPS FOR FACEBOOK ADS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:14:45] I think that that’s great advice. Here’s the thing. Facebook ads are not new. For most people, they’ve heard a lot of this but still haven’t tried it. Or they tried it and it didn’t work for them so they stopped.
Why are Facebook ads so difficult? They make it user friendly, but it’s not easy to execute successfully. Why do you think that is?
Tony Christensen: [00:15:57] This is great. This is a lot of the ad accounts I’ve dove into. I can tell you exactly what I see.
I see someone go in, and the easiest thing to do is make a campaign for a cold audience. People are making that campaign that says, “Buy my product” to someone that’s never heard of their product. They’re not really giving them a good reason to buy their product. They’re kind of writing an ad how they think an ad should be written.
DON’T WRITE FACEBOOK ADS BASED ON ASSUMPTIONS
That’s why I always emphasize the research. You could really find how people are actually viewing your product and talking about it and thinking about it. That can help you in so many ways. I think that’s the main issue.
Yes, they do over-complicate a lot of things. Facebook ads are made for big agencies. Big corporations use it, and they have so many different permissions. If you’re working with a small business, it’s almost a huge pain to try to get the access that you need.
They don’t make it easy, especially for the smaller businesses. I think that’s the main thing is they’re kind of setting you up. The targeting that you see, (for the most part, when it’s your first time going into the ads manager,) is that cold audience targeting.
They don’t really tell you, “Have your pixel installed and create that website, visitor audience, or upload your email list.” Right when you go to that ad, you create it. That next page is the ad set. That’s just pretty much it.
It just gives us all the demographic information that you’re looking to target. That’s what people do, and then make those sales ads. That’s the biggest issue that I see a lot of people do.
SET UP YOUR PIXEL
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:17:28] Let me translate before you get into another piece of it. For the people that aren’t the digital strategists out there, what you’re saying is the best audience is one that knows you. They have been to your website.
If you haven’t set the Facebook ads thing up correctly, (which they’re calling a pixel,) if you haven’t set it up to capture those people and send them an ad after they visit your website, you’re missing the most important part of the targeting.
What most people do is turn on an ad that’s just reaching everybody within their targeting set, not people that have visited their website. People that have never heard of them before, which we call cold audiences.
How do we reach people for the first time that have never heard of us? How do we reach people that have visited our website and left, and then everything in between? Is there a strategy involved?
UNDERSTAND YOUR DIFFERENT AUDIENCES
Tony Christensen: [00:18:39] Going back there, the Facebook pixel is a snippet of code. Basically, you install it on your website and that tracks everyone that goes and views your different products, your landing pages.
If you don’t have that installed right now, and you’re listening to this, go do that ASAP because that’s not something that can collect data retroactively. This does help you create some of those most valuable audiences that you’re talking about.
We call them warm and hot because they’re more interested in buying from you. They’re showing intent by going to your website.
You really want to make sure that’s installed first. When it comes to then running ads, those are almost the first people you should be advertising to, especially if you’re a small business owner. You might not have a bigger budget.
You might want to target those people because those are people that are already going to your website. They just might need a little bit of a nudge to come back and buy it.
YOUR AUDIENCE IS DISTRACTED
People get so distracted so easily these days. Now everyone’s working from home, so I see people’s kids in the background, jumping up and down on their beds and doing all sorts of stuff behind them in calls.
That’s what happens. People go to websites, they start looking at things. They might get a call or they might have their kid run around behind them or do something right? People get distracted easily.
A lot of times too, when you’re starting to hear about a brand and you’re starting to dive into it, you don’t buy on the first time. It can come back to what the price point is or whatever. It doesn’t matter though.
There are a lot of times people are just looking at who is this brand or whatever it is, looking at the website and not buying. That’s why that first ad you might want to make is that remarketing ad towards all those people that the pixel contracts.
HOW TO FIGURE OUT YOUR GOALS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:27:36] I think if we could just get some simple advice, this might help some people out. Let’s start with the right goal. If you’re helping a customer and they say, “Do I drive people directly to sales? I’m selling this thing, here’s the price. Or do I give someone a freebie to get them on an email list?”
How do you help them figure out the right goal? There are a lot of goals on Facebook.
Tony Christensen: [00:28:09] That’s a, that’s a tough question to answer. It comes back to where are they at currently? It’s one of those, “It depends” answers.
It really depends on how many people do you have right now that are engaging with you, that are going to your website?
WORK ON YOUR MESSAGING
What are your business goals? Is your product selling already? Most of the people I work with, they’re already selling their products. If they’re not, I typically just say, “You need to really work on your messaging and figure out brand identity.” There are people that can probably help them out even better than I can.
I would say really get clear on where you’re at in your business. Are you selling anything currently? If not, what are the steps that you’re taking to get there? Have you built your brand identity yet? Have you figured out your voice online? Have you figured out who you’re trying to serve, what you’re offering them, and what their pain points are?
Really get clear on that part of the business. I don’t typically work with those types of people. Sorry, if you’re listening, you’re great people. It’s just that there are better people that can help you.
WHO ARE YOU SERVING?
I like to work with those people that already have some sales coming in. They’ve already figured out their messaging. If you haven’t done that, really work on getting clear on your messaging.
I like to work with people with their ads too, on this. I say you should really have a voice. Not everyone necessarily should love it, which is weird to say. You hear so many people say, “I want to sell to everybody.”
Well, you’re not going to sell to anybody then really. You really want to get clear on who you’re actually serving. Listen to the Mike Kim chat that you had on your podcast. He said, “Who do you want to meet out of my friends? Do you want to meet my aunt? Do you want to meet my mom and my sister?”
I’m just referencing all of your podcasts now because I’m such a nerd.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:29:56] I love it. Great self-promo.
Tony Christensen: [00:29:59] That’s how clear you want to get. Who are you actually serving? Everything on your website, all of that creative that you’re making, even your product and how your product looks and your packaging should speak to that person in some way.
You want to figure out messaging that either repels or attracts people for the most part. Similarly with your ads, you want to do that in your landing page. Get really clear on that, I would say, first starting out.
WHO CAN HELP YOU OUT
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:30:22] I love that answer. Here’s the thing. If you go to a specialist, and you’re a business owner, you ask the specialist, “Hey, what do I do in marketing?” They’re going to tell you to do the thing that they do well know for the most part.
You asked the SEO guy, he’s going to tell you, you need to fix the SEO on your website. You talk to the Facebook ads guy, they’re going to say, run a Facebook ad. You talk to an agency, and they’ll say, “Just give us all of it.”
It doesn’t mean that’s what you need right now. What I like to tell people is that you have to talk to someone that understands a little bit of all of it.
Tony Christensen: [00:31:34] Yeah. And this is kind of the negative connotation that marketers and advertisers get sometimes because someone could come to me and say, “Hey, can you run my ads?”
I could say, yeah, of course, let me run your ads, knowing in the back of my mind that your website isn’t ready, your voice isn’t there. You have no brand identity. Your product might suck, whatever it might be.
You really want to look and find someone that you trust, someone that has your best interest at heart. Listening to people like you and like me, hearing people like me say, “I don’t work with everyone,” that’s a good indicator right off the bat where they might ask you prospecting questions.
What are your goals? What have you done thus far? Then they will be real and say, “You know, I would love to work with you, but you’re just not at that point yet. I hopefully could refer you to someone that can help you with that side of things.”
TRANSPARENCY IS IMPORTANT
You have to be careful as a business owner sometimes. I’ve seen it doing audits for companies, diving into agencies that have run ads and they didn’t even have their Facebook pixel, their data basically. Their website just wasn’t ready to sell.
They just wasted all that money. You have to be careful and really dive into looking for people, like you as a great example, that are putting out really good value because they care about the business owner and these people too.
That’s what it’s all about. I pride myself off that. You really want to find someone that’s going to be transparent with you.
I’ve done an audit for other businesses at times and said, you don’t need my help at all. Here’s your audit. You’re doing great; you probably want to fix your website. Your ads are fine, you’re getting good leads. You’re getting good click-through rates, but your website is pretty broken because your conversion rate is this.
Just find someone that’s going to be honest and transparent. I think that’s a huge thing that you’ve got to focus on.
WHO DO YOU TARGET IN YOUR FACEBOOK ADS?
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:35:00] Absolutely. I mentioned I want to talk about the right goal, the right target, the right message. We tackled the goal.
Let’s talk about audiences, the right target. This is, I think, the most complicated piece of Facebook ads. People type in one thing, and they don’t do any research. How do you get to the right target? At least give me something that someone can do to get started.
Tony Christensen: [00:35:29] Oh, I’m going like have to disagree with you already.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:35:32] Okay. Please do.
Tony Christensen: [00:35:34] This is kind of what I started with. Like I say, (always) it depends. If you’re doing it local marketing and advertising it’s a lot different because you are a lot more restricted on who you can actually target.
If I’m in a small town and I’m trying to target people that like podcasting, there might not be enough in that small town. Or maybe you have (a weird example) but maybe you own a podcast store in that town for some reason but there are not enough people there for it.
You might just have to target that town fifty miles within that town. It’s very unique with a lot of situations.
BROAD TARGETING WORKS BETTER NOW
When it comes to e-commerce, I generally dive into the avatar, how people are talking about things. However, Facebook is getting really good now at their targeting. If your messaging is good, if your creative is good, the targeting is almost the easiest part now, which is where I disagree with you on that.
That’s just because, as I said, even in the last year or two years, it’s been getting so much better now. You still have to be careful, especially with campaign budget optimization. That is where Facebook says, “Hey, step back. We’ll do most of the optimizations for you.”
You can target some pretty broad things. If there are age restrictions, of course, you want to do that, but you can keep it pretty broad. If you’re picking the right campaign objective, what you want them to do with your ads, (like sales conversions if you want those sales coming in,) they’re pretty good at finding who’s going to be buying.
FACEBOOK HELPS FIND YOUR AUDIENCE
Basically, when I’m targeting an audience, they sprinkle it around to the different types of people in that audience. Then if they see that these guys over here are purchasing a lot, they’re going to dump 80% of the budget at that segmented group in that targeted audience.
They’re getting good at it, but you still have to keep an eye on it and see how that’s working. Back to that water bottle company, for example, they have so many different types of water bottles.
You have all these different, very niche type categories of water bottles with the lingo that’s on them targeting a very specific demographic. You might want to split it out and target that different niche audience.
Again, it comes back to goals. Always. Do you want to sell as many products as possible or do you want to sell these products more evenly? If you’ve ordered a thousand of each kind of water bottle, then you might want to split that up.
If you’re more about the profit and you’re fine just creating the bottles as they’re getting ordered, then you might not even care. You might think, alright, if this specific bottle that’s targeting women athletes is really starting to do well, let’s put all our budget there and that’s fine.
LOOKALIKE AUDIENCES HELP GROW YOUR TARGET
Targeting is getting easier when you have the right messaging and when you have the right creative. Most of the time too, if you’ve already figured out your brand identity and who you’re serving, you already know for the most part who you are targeting.
Then it’s just trying to use the different variations of what you can do on that. One of the audiences that I typically love to use is a lookalike audience. Let’s say I have ten thousand people that have bought from me before.
I can say “Facebook, give me a 1% lookalike audience that are like these people.”
What they do is they scan everyone in the U.S. They say, “These people, the 1% of everyone in the US, have shared characteristics of these ten thousand buyers that you’ve had.” They’ll run ads to those people. Those typically do fairly well.
TARGET AND RETARGET FACEBOOK ADS
The other level that you can do is that 1% lookalike audience and add what I call a drill down. You can target again. If we’re saying the women athlete, you can then target those women athletes out of that 1%.
That gets to be really good because you’re getting people that are like those people that have purchased, sharing those characteristics, and then you’re squeezing it, targeting down a little bit more.
Those do fairly typically well. It comes back to is your messaging right in the first place and is your creative actually going to work and going to resonate with those target audiences?
YOU HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:39:47] What I love is you said it’s so easy, and then when you explained it, it sounded very complicated. Here’s where I think we meet in the middle. I think what Facebook is doing is trying to say, “Give us the opportunity to make your targeting better and better over time.”
However, you still have to pick something to start with. We’ve talked about the fact that you should start by targeting people that have visited your site. Not everyone knows that, so that helps.
For phase two, you’ve got to pick something that represents an interest of your people more broadly but still fits so that Facebook has the opportunity to optimize within that over time.
I don’t think that’s easy for everyone, so I appreciate having the conversation.
MARKETING IS ALWAYS CHANGING
Tony Christensen: [00:40:39] It’s one of those things, again, that is the ever-changing landscape of advertising. A year or two years ago, you had to be more specific with your targeting.
Now people are being a lot more vague with their targeting. If you have something like phone cases, for example, you can pretty much not target anyone.
Maybe you want to add the age range on there, but if you’re selling to the US you can just say the US, targeting whoever 18 to 35-year-olds, whoever might be interested in phone cases and you can leave it. They’re going to optimize that.
UNDERSTAND YOUR BUDGET LEVEL FOR FACEBOOK ADS
Again, in my mindset, a lot of this stuff is the bigger campaigns, bigger budgets. It’s a lot faster for them to optimize based on their spend too. If you have a smaller budget, you might want to be more specific.
You don’t want your dollars to stretch and get wasted trying to do all these different audiences in that, but you hopefully already have that brand identity built down so you know who you’re serving. Then you can target those people with that budget instead of that bigger broad audience,
Sometimes you then will have to layer those audiences. I’m trying to think of a great example off the top of my head, but I’m failing. Sometimes you really have to kind of narrow it down even more.
YOU NEED TO BE EXCLUSIVE
I’ve done veteran-owned businesses. Their ads can be very different than other political ads. They’re not politically related, but that’s the avatar that they’re going for. These people speak a certain way and they act a certain way.
If you’re doing a broad audience targeting and you’re showing a video that has the veteran lingo going on (and maybe it’s a little bit more macho man,) it’s not going to resonate with the whole US that might be interested in that product.
You really want to know who you are targeting. Again, figure out what you can do to target that audience, and if you are going to have people that are going to be impacted by that and not like it. Think about ways that you can exclude those people, however it may be.
Now it does sound complicated.
LEARN THE FACEBOOK ADS TOOLS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:43:12] I knew you’d to come around. It’s easy for someone who’s in it every day. What’s great is the research is now built into the data part of this Facebook ads tool. They’re taking a lot of that surveying and legwork out of it for you, but you still have to know how to use the tools.
Tony Christensen: [00:43:50] I think that’s why a lot of the smaller business owners struggle with advertising too. Like I said, just in the last year or two years, it’s changed so much. If you took a course a year ago or two years ago, they could have said to do that really narrow targeting. Now that’s not working as well.
Or they could have said to use this lookalike percent audience. Now that might not work as well. I like to backpedal and say, “Testings,” to everyone that I talk to. Even with this information I’m saying here, don’t think because I said it, it’s going to work for you and your business. You always should be testing a lot of these things and then iterating based on that data.
TIPS FOR UNDERSTANDING FACEBOOK ADS RESULTS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:44:29] Let me follow up on that real quick. There are a lot of expectations with this thing. People spend money on tangible things that get zero results and have no problem with it. However, you start spending $20 on ads, and the same person would quickly ask, “Is it working? Is it going to work?”
How long should someone wait to know that something’s working before trying something new or getting scared and stop it?
Tony Christensen: [00:45:19] The length depends on their budget. What’s cool too about if you’re spending more, you can run tons of more tests, and then Facebook’s going to tell you which one’s working. They’re going to dump all that money into that one that is working right.
As far as the timeline goes, it really depends on the budget. If you’re a small business, it could take a week. It could take two weeks depending on what you’re doing. You’re not going to be able to test as many things. Wherever your budget is, it might be only two little tweaks that you’re testing.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:45:49] I’ve gotten messages after $8, “Is it working?” Is $8 enough to know?
Tony Christensen: [00:46:00] Probably not. It again comes back to how narrow are you targeting in that too? If you’re targeting some of these remarketing lists that are smaller, they are going to cost more. That $8 isn’t going to stretch as far as if you were targeting everyone in the US where that $8 is going to be able to hit a lot more people.
YOUR FACEBOOK ADS GOAL AFFECTS RESULTS
You want to know that too. The more specific you get with your audiences, the more money you’re typically going to spend on showing your ads to those people. There sometimes can be a lot more competition.
For example, when I try to run ads to marketers, everyone wants to run ads to marketers because they’re other marketers and they just know how to run ads.
It’s just this thing that happens, so they’re a lot more expensive than whoever else, like “men in America” or whatever it might be when you’re more broad.
Going way back to your question, off on that tangent now. It depends on the budget. If I’m running Facebook ads for a few thousand dollars a day, sometimes that same day I’m going to know what’s working and what’s not working.
RUN MULTIPLE FACEBOOK ADS AT ONCE
A common issue I see sometimes is a business starts an ad campaign and they’re just running one ad. How do you know if that ad’s working? When you’re creating ads, you really want to at least have one other version to see which one is performing better, because it can be drastically different.
Even before that, you want to figure out what is your business goal with doing the ads. You might hear, “Oh, everyone’s getting this cost per click. Everyone’s getting this click-through rate.”
However, you don’t really want to think about it in those terms sometimes. When you’re trying to do the ads on your own, you want to set a baseline here. Let’s keep getting better as we continue to go on.
It always comes back to an, “It depends,” answer.
ALWAYS BE TESTING WITH FACEBOOK ADS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:47:35] There are nuances in this, but you know me, I’m a professional listener here. I help the audience out. There are two things. He doesn’t even know he said it, but he did.
How much are you spending? The second part is, are you testing?
Tony Christensen: [00:49:19] Yeah. There a lot of business owners that hire me and ask, “Hey, is this working?” And I ask them, “Well, what’s your business goal?” They’ll say, “Oh, what’s the business goal?” kind of thing.
I get people too that say, “I want to get this many followers.” I think, why? What are you trying to accomplish with that?
There are a lot of things that people might focus on too, even engagements and comments and that kind of thing. They’ll say, “I want to get a lot of comments.” Well, what’s the purpose of getting a lot of comments?
WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR FACEBOOK ADS TO DO?
You really want to get clear on what is your actual business goal. If you’re eCommerce, you had better say sales as horrible and weird as that might sound. Your business goal is sales. It’s easy for me if I’m working with you and you’re an eCommerce company. I know you just want sales and we’ll make that happen.
If you’re a local business, sometimes it can be a lot different. You might want to grow awareness in your community about your business. You might want to be seen as the thought leader, the resource that people can go to leverage. That’s where it comes back to. It depends a lot.
It comes down to price and testing and stuff too. All of the different campaign objectives, for the most part, cost differently too. You do different campaigns based on your objectives.
That’s another thing where if you’re trying to just get engagement for some reason, maybe you can run that a lot less time than a purchase, especially if you’re a new business.
You’re trying to get purchases online with Facebook ads, and you’re not selling much organically and you have a smaller budget. I would say you’re going to need three plus months, probably depending on where you’re at.
USE YOUR ORGANIC CONTENT
If you’re a business and your sales are already doing really good, I would say look at what’s selling. I know a girl right now; she’s selling financial products. I can basically tell her, pull those posts that are selling already for you organically and use those as your ads.
That’s why I always push people to work on your organic and your brand messaging really well off the bat. Then you can just leverage all that for your ads, and you’re not doing all this guessing game where you’re thinking, when am I going to get profits?
You already know your organic posts are bringing in profits, so you can leverage that for your ads and then show it to more people because it’s already working.
When it comes to your Facebook ads, just rounding it all out again, really focus on what your business goal is. Who you’re trying to serve and how they view their pain point, how they view your competition, how people are talking about it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Sometimes you’ll talk to the people that have accomplished the most things, and they’ll give you the most basic answer. You’re thinking, “I wanted more. I wanted a formula.” That’s exactly what I tell people. You need to talk to your customers. That’s what it really comes down to.
Figure out your messaging. If you don’t have it figured out, talk to your customers more, get it figured out, ask the questions, have people even give you feedback on creative that you’re making before you launch it. You can test things organically and then use that in your advertising campaign.
Before everything, figure out what your messaging is, who you’re trying to serve, how you’re serving them. And use their lingo and their thought processes to talk to them about that and leverage that in your Facebook ads. You can do it.
And if not, DM me.
GUEST LINKS
Tony’s Website: tonydoesads.com
Twitter: @tonydoesads
Instagram: @tonydoesads
Youtube: Tony Does Ads
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