Facebook advertising is the world’s most powerful advertising platform. According to Statistica, they currently have over 2.7 billion monthly active users. That makes Facebook the most popular social media platform in the world. In other words, this is where your brand needs to be. Whether you monetize your social media posts, create profitable ads, or retarget store visitors, Facebook is one of the most profitable social networks for online retailers. Facebook’s targeting options are the most comprehensive allowing marketers to reach specific audiences to ensure they reach the right customer. Many have been able to reach their desired customer while generating a profit when marketing for ecommerce on Facebook.
Facebook Marketing Example
When customers visit Style Saint a pop-up appears offering them $10 to connect with Facebook. The Facebook login benefits store owners a number of ways. It makes logging into the brand’s website easy for customers. This is great for store owners who want to simplify the checkout process. Facebook is more trusted than an online store a customer is visiting for the first time. A customer might not want to receive emails from the shop. But best of all, it gives the store owner access to that customer’s Facebook data to better market to them. The downside to this is that not everyone has a Facebook account, which is why on their pop-up Style Saint also includes an email opt-in option.
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How to Master Facebook Ads
There’s been a growing trend of stores creating video ads on social media. The style of video ad that’s become increasingly popular among ecommerce store owners are the Business Insider style videos. They often get great engagement, they’re easy to follow, text is short and sweet and the videos typically last a minute and a half. Brands are using these types of videos to explain the benefits of their products, the problem their product solves while showing off their product’s features.
Esther includes a ‘Message Us’ on Facebook icon on all their product pages. This has two benefits. First, it allows customers to have their product questions answered in chat which is often preferred over email which often has a longer response time. Second, it allows retailers to send Messenger ads to those customers in the future. See our tools sections to know how to add a Messenger icon on your store.
If you’ve never had a customer before, you can learn your customer demographics through Facebook. You’ll need to create a series of ads where use different sets of interests to determine who your audience is. Maybe the audience for your meditation bracelets aren’t people who meditate. Instead, you might discover that they’re interested in yoga, bohemian wear, or the environment. You won’t know which audience responds to your product the most until you test it. You’ll want to keep all the details the same such as location, age, gender, except for the interests. After you’ve narrowed down interests, you might narrow down location, age, gender or other key traits of your target market.
When targeting your audience, create a Facebook ad with World targeting but exclude Canada, USA, U.K. and Australia. You’ll likely find audiences with world targeting that you wouldn’t have marketed to otherwise. Most people market to the United States and neglect smaller markets. However, from personal experience we’ve discovered highly profitable markets from countries we’ve never even heard of. You’ll also want to have separate ads created for USA and Canada, U.K. and Australia. This will help lower your Facebook advertising costs. However, it’ll also prevent the World ad from biasing towards the biggest countries since they won’t be included.
Start with interest ads, when you get enough data (100 users in a custom audience), test lookalike audience for visits, lookalike audience for add to cart, and eventually, lookalike audience for purchases.
Experiment with ads. Most people create a Facebook ad that fails and give up. The reality is even stores making 6 figures have ads that fail miserably. Sometimes, ads are created and work well at first but fail overtime. The first ad I ever created back in 2013 failed so miserably I was ashamed to tell my boss. My second ad I ever created ended up converting really well. But if I had given up like I wanted to, I never would’ve succeeded. Even when you’re successful, you’re going to have a few bad ads. Experimentation is everything when it comes to Facebook advertising.
Direct your traffic to a product page. Your ad won’t be nearly as effective if you direct the traffic to your homepage. When creating an ad, you want to have a picture of a product and then direct to a landing page where to sell that exact product. Customers don’t want to browse your website to find the product in the ad. Keep it easy for them. You’re going to have to create ads for different products to find out what your bestsellers are in the beginning.
Your picture is everything. One of my best converting ads was for a car cleaning product. I had read online that a red-orange color contrasts well against Facebook’s white and blue background. So I found an image of an angle of a red-orange sports car. It converted at 4 cents a click. And we know it was the image, because when we kept the copy but changed the image it didn’t convert nearly as well. You also want to limit the amount of text on the image. I usually opt for no text. Also, use lifestyle images. Having your product photo on a white background won’t convert nearly as well as a lifestyle image of someone using it.
Ignore the $5 ad rule. A lot of experts say to create $5 ads. You’d be lucky to get a sale from one $5 ad. Very few achieve anything more than that. If your product costs $24, create a $24 ad. Price match your ad to your product price. You’ll be more likely to get a sale from a higher ad budget while staying on the conservative side. It’ll give you a better chance of finding the right audience. Also, remember this: no million dollar brand spends $5 on ads. It’s okay to start small. But the reality is you’re going to have to spend money on ads to make sales.
To master Facebook ads, you need to come up with a compelling offer. You might have ‘Buy two, get one free,’ ‘50% off’ or ‘only $19.99 + Free shipping’ offer that drives customers into purchase. If your customer is interested in the product, the offer can help encourage the click through. Offering something for free like shipping or a BOGO offer can help drive the sales. Avoid doing free plus shipping offers as Facebook has been known to crack down on those.
Focus on sales. A lot of new store owners will obsess over how many likes or shares their ad got. Vanity metrics don’t matter. Sales matter. As a store owner, your Facebook advertising goal is to increase sales not increase likes.
When it comes to scaling your ad, you’ll need to create a second ad. A lot of new entrepreneurs may increase the budget in a big way only to have fewer conversions. If you plan on increasing your budget, increase it by 10-15% at a time to ensure it stays optimized. If you go from a $5 ad budget to $500, you may break the ad. Instead, focus on creating a second ad with a similar demographic.
Retarget your audience. This can be a money-maker. But you need to have some stable traffic for it to work well. If you’re on a budget, you can drive traffic for free by marketing on social media, creating unique content and tagging influencers and more. The retargeting ad is typically cheaper and will usually perform well. You can also create Facebook ads catered to your store’s customers since they’re proven to convert. Avoid exhausting this audience with retargeting ads as they’re your most profitable audience. To learn more about retargeting, check out the retargeting section in this ebook.
Facebook Marketing Tools:
Facebook marketing tools like Kit help automate your Facebook marketing. You can use it to create Facebook ads, retargeting campaigns, and post on social media. The app will send reminders regularly to ensure that your marketing is always running to help you generate sales growth.
Shopify’s even created other Facebook marketing tools like it’s Shopify Facebook Channel app where you’ll be able to create a Facebook shop tab, sell products on Facebook itself, and where customers can buy products without visiting your website.
Messenger Channel is another Facebook marketing tool by Shopify. The messenger app that allows store owners to sell their products to customers via instant messenger. As Facebook Messenger ads grow in popularity this app will prove to be more important to the Facebook marketer. As of right now, customers can use the app to track purchases, view shipping details and communicate with brands easily.
Another one of the most popular Facebook marketing tools is Storeya. It’s a tool that imports your store onto Facebook so that customers can shop directly on Facebook. The app also includes a tool where fans of your pages can promote products to their friends to enable exclusive deals that require a minimum number of users. With over 160,000 users using this app, it’s worth checking out if you plan on marketing on Facebook.
Facebook Messenger Remarketing is an app that does retargeting ads through Facebook Messenger. The app uses a chatbot to help recover abandoned carts. It has a higher open and click through rate than email.
Ripl turns your images into a video. You can add text to your video that moves into the screen to create a more engaging ad. This is a great app to use if you don’t have the budget to create video content and have lifestyle images that would look great in video format.
Facebook Power Editor makes it easy to manage multiple ads. The Facebook advertising tool even lets you create custom reports, edit your ads, and more.
Text Overlay is a Facebook marketing tool that tells you how much text is on your image. Facebook doesn’t allow text heavy images. Ideally, you should use an image with no text to receive an OK rating which will allow your ad to run normally. The more text added to your image the less effective your ad will be. You can use this tool before creating an ad to ensure that your image won’t interfere with the ad’s effectiveness.
Ads Manager App is an important tool for store owners who regularly run ads on their store. It allows them to view Ads Manager on their mobile devices. That way you’ll always know how your ads are performing and if there are any issues with them. With the app you can track ad performance, modify your ads, budgets and schedules and more.
Facebook Page Barometer tells you about your Facebook fanpage’s performance. You’ll know the patterns within your organic reach and whether or not your page’s activity is increasing and by how much.
Likealyzer is a tool that tells you how well your Facebook fan page is doing. Simply search for your fanpage on the platform and you’ll learn where you can improve. The tool tells you how you can improve user engagement, which Facebook features or tools you don’t use enough, what the overall impression a user may have when visiting your fanpage and more.
Facebook Advertising Resources:
- I Spent $191,480.74 on Facebook Ads. Here’s What I Learned.
- 21 Facebook Ads Experts Share their Winning Strategies
- The Facebook Pixel, Explained
- 15 Facebook Ads Examples to Use as Inspiration
Facebook Influencers:
