Our goal with this Cheat Sheet is to help you rethink how you’re building brand. Running ads is just a tactic. Instead, build brand and increase conversion. Build brand and yield more organic sales. Better yet, build brand and you’ll be in a better position to scale advertising and any other marketing tactic.
Blueprint Creative’s Facebook Ads Cheat Sheet
1. Link ad objectives to the end goal.
Yes, your ultimate end goal is to increase revenues, but what is the purpose of these Facebook ads that you’re currently running?
Each ad campaign should have a specific purpose so that the strategy and all of the creatives are aligned.
There's 8 ad objectives available to you. It's so easy to pick the objective that seems to be self explanatory. For ex, Traffic when you want to drive website visitors or Video Views for the obvious reason.
Do you realize that each objective:
a) serves ads differently to different people in your audience,
b) has different cost outcomes, and
c) can yield a different type of interaction from your audience?
For example, our experience has been that Costs Per Impressions (CPM) for the Brand Awareness objective is often times much higher than the other objectives and that the Post Engagement objective gets better quality interaction but with slightly fewer clickthrus to the website or landing page. Similarly, the Lead Generation objective can be very effective but often costs more and with fewer impressions.
The point is that you need to match the right objective with your desired outcome. Some ad campaigns can be a CRM play to simply grow your contact list while other campaigns could be a call to action to a landing page or to get audiences to interact with the brand.
And keep in mind that you won't always yield the same results even with the same campaigns and that outcomes can vary depending on ad competition, seasonality etc.
Our go-to strategy for every campaign is to experiment the same audience and creatives with different ad objectives. In other words, we may use 2-4 different objectives and test for a short time, and then scale the objective that produced the best outcome.
2. Experiment with your audience.
You can spend more money than necessary making audience assumptions. And oftentimes than not, your target audience may be too big.
Don't believe me? Then microsegment your audience into multiple identical ads and watch how much better you'll discover your sweet spot.
The reality is that everyone that fits a specific age, geographic, and demographic criteria isn't your target audience. Yet, many small businesses underutilize interest-based and affinity targeting although the targeting options are endless.
We try to understand the mind and personality of a brand's true target audience so that we can select the points of affinity that we believe they'll be most interested in.
For example, for the law firm in our initial example, how do you identify and target the right people that would most likely need legal services? You can’t...it’s hard to pinpoint.
Instead, we'll analyze the law firm's most profitable current client and look for common themes to use as interest-based targeting. Maybe we find that the typical client likes outdoor adventure. So we'll target interests around all things related to outdoor adventure and have the creatives and copy reflect this interest and then layer the brand. You see how we didn't make a beeline to just legal.
3. Ad creatives and copy should not be self serving.
Most small businesses create content that is self serving - me, me, me. And the ad creatives reflect that. Your potential customers could care less about your business. It’s about them - their needs and their pain points. This is why we emphasize building brand.
Like in the law firm example, because we knew that their typical client is an outdoor adventure fan, all of the content and messaging connected with that interest. In other words, build brand around an interest with your brand layered on top.
Similarly, the easiest fix is to ensure that your ad creatives are not about your company or services. Your page name and handle tells them who the ad is from. The content should be personal to the viewer and not the business just doing more bragging.
4. Drive traffic to a landing page that speaks to an audience of 1.
We see a lot of ads that drive traffic to a website or a product/service page. There’s two reasons why we don’t like this - 1) it makes it too easy for the visitor to navigate away from the page and browse to other pages on the site 2) the content on the page may not be speaking to one single audience.
We strongly suggest creating campaign-specific landing pages that speak to one single audience and where the content matches the ad creatives. Landing pages help to keep the visitor focused on the end goal and should have a prominent call to action above the fold - at the top half before needing to scroll to see more. There should also be very few navigational links. We want them to stay on the page and convert. We don’t want to risk them browsing around and losing where they were.
5. Experimenting with ads is a must.
Your ads will get stale fast, and then ad fatigue will quickly set in and you’ll start to see results decline from there.
That’s why you should have multiple variations of the same ads experimenting with the creatives and copy as well as the targeting. You can easily break up a big audience into very small chunks segmented by age, for example, and then having multiple variations of the ad.
This allows you to pinpoint what works well and what doesn’t and who the best performing micro targets are.
There’s more.
We hope that this list of 5 tips immediately help improve your ads. There’s a lot more in the Cheat Sheet but it would be way too long if we included it all in one shot. So we’ll share a cheat sheet later on lead generation and scaling brand awareness.
90-Day Blueprint: Restructure your entire marketing strategy in 90 days or less!
This is for you if:
Your marketing is underperforming, at a standstill, or non-existent
You have little to no brand awareness or your brand is stale and needs a refreshing
You have no lead generation strategy and need to build an organic pipeline of leads
Your content strategy sucks
Your business needs to scale and grow to its next level
COVID-19 has forced your business to restructure
You don't want to keep making the same branding mistakes in 2021
90-Day Drip: Restructure Your Entire Marketing Strategy
We've created a practical system to help B2B companies restructure their marketing infrastructure so that it ultimately results in a funnel that generates, nurtures and converts new business into revenue.
How to Build Brand
B2B businesses typically fail to think about branding in the larger context of how it builds thought leadership, establishes credibility, raises awareness, and organically drives sales and new business growth.
Here's 12 ways to transform your B2B marketing into a lead generation machine. The beauty is that you can create an organic sales engine without having to churn leads and smile and dial.
Your business may be innovative, but your content doesn’t scream it. Content is undervalued because it’s underutilized in the sense of it being the driver to building brand, accelerating your pipeline, etc.
