I have worked in the advertising industry for the past 6 years and spent the last 3 years as a consultant helping advertisers promote their business on social media.

As a business, it is important to know how to reach the right audience and provide them high value content to grab their attention.

But the mistake many people make is to believe that Facebook ads will make them a lot of money right away.

You know, Facebook ads, this is the magic button every marketer wishes to press on in order to get a ton of traffic to their offer!

Unfortunately, or should I say fortunately, it is not that simple and requires some marketing strategy to be profitable. In my opinion, to be successful at Facebook ads, you need to think about every step of the customer journey, and make it look as clean and professional as possible.

But if you are already running ads, here are some advice I can give you to help you get the best results.

1. Use Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences

I am still amazed by how only a few marketers leverage the power of custom audiences and lookalike audiences.

If you already have an email list, or people engaged with your pages on Facebook and Instagram or a great website traffic, you can and you should create a custom audience of these people.

Those are your warm leads, they already know who you are, what you do and engage with your content, so why try to look for other audiences and waste your money.

A Custom Audience from a customer list is a type of audience you can create made up of your existing customers. You can target ads to the audience you've created on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network.

You need a list size of at least a couple of thousand for this to be effective.

Then once you found your ideal audience, you can create a lookalike audience. A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they're similar to your best existing customers.

i.e. Let's say your existing audience are people based in UK and you would like to find new customers in the US. No need to try and guess who these potential customers would be. All you need to do is used lookalike audience feature and Facebook will take care of finding similar people to your based audience and create a brand new audience of potential customers based in the US for you!

2. Avoid pausing ads or apply changed to your current running ad set

It results in your ad being taken out of the Facebook algorithm & when you start it again the competition might have changed (i.e more people targeting the same audience). Which may lead to you spending more money on ads and decrease the efficiency of your ad.

3. Give an ad set at least 48-72 hours before optimising

Every ad needs some time to get into the algorithm & show it's true potential. Give it some time before writing it off! I personally run my ads for 72h before analysing and optimising them. What is a good ad set? It depends on your campaign objective.

i.e. If you are running a conversion campaign for a product or digital service, you will want to look at the ROAS (return on ad spend) or cost per lead to have an idea of the margin you are making.

The goal of testing an ad set is to break even.

That means that you are not expecting to be profitable but are just trying to look for the right audience before scaling up your ad set.

If your ad set has poor results after 72h, stop it, duplicate it, change the targeting and run it again. Rinse and repeat until you find the winner.

4. Scale up by increasing your budget gradually

If you're starting off with a lower budget & your ad is doing really well (YAY!), and you're looking to scale up that winning ad set. You'd need to increase your daily spending budget to scale up and reach more potential prospects.

Make sure to only increase it 50% at a time. So, for example, from $10 go up $15. From $20 go up $30, etc...

If you jump from $5 to $50 dollars, you will flood your target audience and it will mess things up instead of increasing your ad success.

5. If you are getting leads but no sales, review your customer journey

The ad is only one part of the sales process - it's the start. If your leads are not converting, then you need to have a look at the next step in your process, your customer journey, and start tweaking until it works.

Split testing is the best way to optimise your customer journey. Also ask some fellow marketers to review your customer journey to have their opinion and get their feedback. If you do not know anyone, ask for a marketing consultant help. They do it on daily basis and have a trained eye on what works and what does not.

Bonus: Don’t overthink your ad copy

You don't need to be a professional copy writer to make a compelling ad.

Think about what would attract YOU to an ad before putting it live.

Know your ideal audience and the language they use. If you don't know, try and meet up with people that fall within your target audience and pay attention to the language and words they use. Then use these words in your ad in order to trigger their desire to know more about you and your offer.

What I noticed worked well are images with a long ad copy describing an obstacle your ideal audience is facing and how you overcame it with a call to action to take the next step to find out more. And also video with captions following the same principle.

Just give enough content to attract the interest of the viewer for them to take an action.

What about you? Are you using Facebook ads?How has been your experience? Let me know in the comments below.

If you are still struggling with Facebook Advertising and need help, do not hesitate to book your strategy session with me. I will be happy to help you get better results. Did I mention that the first strategy session is FREE!

Just click here to book your session with me.

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