As a business owner, you are always on the lookout for an effective customer acquisition strategy you can implement in your business. The good news is that there are many marketing strategies that can work to grow your business when you implement them consistently. One strategy that can work incredibly well at a relatively low cost to get started is Facebook advertising. In this post, you’ll learn a simple Facebook advertising customer acquisition strategy that works for any business.
Why Facebook advertising should be a part of your customer acquisition strategy
There are several advertising strategies that can work well for your business such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and much more. Now you might be wondering why you should bother to use Facebook advertising as a part of your customer acquisition strategy.
Well, one main reason is that, compared to Google Ads which is search-based, Facebook ads give you the opportunity to reach new potential customers that may have never heard of you at a lower cost.
Facebook advertising uses interest-based targeting and demographic targeting. With a search-based platform like Google Ads, you’ll target specific keywords that hopefully have a high buying intent. This can potentially lead to a high conversion rate, but the more valuable the keyword, often the higher the cost per click is.
Facebook ads give you the opportunity to reach customers that could be a perfect fit for your offer, but that may have never considered your product or services before. You can target people based on interests and even lookalike audiences and your ads can focus on acquiring new leads and guiding people through the buyer’s journey.
Your ad spend can often be lower and see results because it isn’t based on targeting the same keywords your competitors also are bidding on. If you aren’t already using Facebook ads in your customer acquisition strategy it’s definitely worth looking into.
Essentials of an effective Facebook advertising strategy
When it comes to building an effective Facebook advertising strategy you’ll need a few things in place to ensure your success. They are value-based content, a quality lead magnet, a compelling offer, quality ad copy, quality ad creatives, and appropriate targeting and tracking.
When you have all of these in place it’s very hard to fail at running Facebook ads. If you have tried running Facebook ads in the past and Have failed you were likely missing one or many of these key components.
With all of these key assets you should be able to bring people along the entire customer journey from awareness to consideration, and finally to conversion. We’ll talk about each of these aspects and how using them appropriately drives massive results for your customer acquisition strategy.
Another part of this is doing preliminary research on your ideal customer avatar. If you truly know your ideal customer and their needs, wants, goals, and pain points, it can help you build the offers they want, target them correctly, and create messaging that will resonate with them.
Finding the audiences for customer acquisition
Finding the right audience begins with knowing your customer avatar. It also requires understanding potential customers’ steps in their buying journey. Part of building an effective customer acquisition strategy with Facebook ads will require targeting each level of the buyer’s journey.
To start off you’ll want to target what we’ll call an L1 audience which focuses on interest bases or that are built from lookalike audiences. We’ll cover lookalike audiences in the next section.
Choose audiences that fit the interests of your ideal customer avatar research you did earlier. For example, if you were trying to target business owners, you might target influencers in the business and leadership space like John C. Maxwell, or Brian Tracy. You can target influencers, magazines and books they read, common hobbies your ideal customers have, and more.
The next level L2 is going to be targeting those who have taken some kind of action, like becoming a lead, clicking on an ad, engaging with your content, watching a video, etc. Level L3 are those who have made a higher commitment than that, this could be people who have been to your sales pages but haven’t bought.
The L4 level is for people who have done things like initiating checkout or adding to their cart some of your products. Finally, the L5 level is for those who have actually purchased a product from you and are buyers. If you haven’t done so yet, you should set up audiences and tracking events for levels L2-L5 as you’ll use these later.
Use lookalike audiences to improve your customer acquisition strategy
As you gather data you’ll want to start to refine your targeting which can help improve your conversion rates. A simple way to do this is by creating lookalike audiences and letting the Facebook algorithm do the heavy lifting for you.
A lookalike audience can be based around many different activities such as visiting a website, becoming a lead, people who engage with your content, buyers, and much more. If you already have a list of customers that is at least 100 names and emails that would be the best place to start. You can upload that list and build a custom audience and then build a lookalike audience based on that list.
Using a lookalike audience based on your buyers can often work well as a targeting audience for your customer acquisition strategy. Facebook will try and match those profiles that match your existing buyers and show them your ads. Typically this can lead to a high conversion rate.
If you don’t have a list of buyers you can work backward and use pixel data to build audiences from people who take other high-intent actions. For example, you can start with those who took an “add to cart” action, then “initiate checkout”, then those who visited your sales page or became a lead, etc.
Then you can move on to building lookalike audiences based on engagement, like visiting your website, watching a large percentage of a video, and those who messaged your page, and much more. This strategy can take out some of the guesswork from deciding on what interest-based targeting would work best and can let Facebook do the work for you.
Using retargeting to optimize your Facebook advertising strategy
After you created custom audiences based on the different levels of the buyer’s journey you want to build a Facebook advertising strategy to reach them. This means that you want to guide people through the awareness stage from just hearing about your offers to becoming a customer.
Creating Facebook ads with a retargeting strategy is one of the best advertising strategies you can do to guide potential customers through the buyer’s journey. For example, you could start at the bottom of the buyer’s journey by targeting your ideal customers with purely value-based content. This could be an educational video or even a link to a blog post.
From there you can retarget those who visited your blog post or watched your educational video with an offer of a free lead magnet they could download. That way you can move someone expressing interest into a new lead for your business. In addition to that, you could offer an upsell to a small tripwire offer to those who downloaded your lead magnet.
The next retargeting strategy could be to show Facebook ads to those who opted into your lead magnet with a second chance to buy your tripwire. You could also retarget those who opted into your lead magnet with your full offer. That way you are continuing to drive people through your sales funnel and are targeting a warmer audience with your main offer which usually results in a much higher conversion rate.
How to use Facebook advertising as a customer acquisition strategy
Another part of how to use Facebook advertising as a customer acquisition strategy is choosing the right goal for your Facebook ads. A common mistake business owners that are new to Facebook advertising make is choosing the wrong goal.
For example, people often choose traffic for their goal and then choose link clicks that go to their sales page. The problem with this is that you aren’t letting Facebook optimize for the goal you really want. If you are sending people to your sales page, you most likely are wanting people to convert into sales. For that kind of goal, you should be choosing sales or conversions for your Facebook ads goal.
Another mistake is choosing a goal based on metrics that are vanity metrics vs those that actually generate results. For example, a lot of people choose to do like campaigns on their page thinking that will get them more exposure. These days organic reach on a Facebook business page is almost non-existent. This means that having a lot of likes and then posting organically will likely reach very few of those people who like your page.
It’s much better to choose goals that guide people along the buyer’s journey. For example, you could do a traffic ad but do that for driving people to a value-based blog post. Or you could do a video views ad for an educational video. Then retarget those with a lead generation ad or conversions ad that goes to your free lead magnet. Finally, you can do a retargeting ad with the goal of conversions sending them to your offer to drive additional sales.
Check out the video below for a step-by-step guide on how to set up a conversion Facebook ad.
Structuring your ads to maximize results from Facebook advertising
Most business owners struggle with setting up their Facebook ads because they don’t know how to structure them. The good news is that there is a simple 3 step setup to creating high-converting Facebook ads.
Now a common mistake people make is that they only highlight the features of their offer in their Facebook ads. Certainly, people care to some extent about the features of your product, but most people will buy based on the benefits, not the features. This means that your ad copy needs to highlight the benefits your ideal customers are looking for in relation to a common problem they are dealing with.
With this in mind, the first step of creating high-converting Facebook ads is to call out or address the pain points or problems your ideal customers are struggling with. For example, if you were selling a weightloss product, you might say something like, “Tired of spending hours at the gym, meal prepping, and trying the latest fad meal plan only to continue to struggle to reach your fitness goals”
The next step is to highlight the benefits of your offer and how choosing your offer will solve the problem you highlighted in step one. This might sound something like, “Well if you’ve tried diets and fitness routines in the past that haven’t worked you aren’t alone. That’s why we put together our specialized simple meal plan and exercise program for busy people. Most people who follow this plan consistently see results quickly and kickstart their wellness journey into high gear.”
The final step is pretty simple and it is to include a call to action that drives people to your offer.
Using Facebook Ads to drive traffic into your customer acquisition funnel
A final thing to consider in building a successful Facebook ads customer acquisition strategy is that you need a solid sales funnel on the back end of your ads campaign. Facebook advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your offers, but if you don’t have a digital marketing funnel that converts at a high level you could end up wasting your money.
Now with this in mind, if your current sales funnel isn’t converting that doesn’t mean it can’t be optimized to become successful or that Facebook ads won’t work. You just need to understand that there is going to be a period of optimization required to see the full results that are possible from your Facebook advertising customer acquisition strategy.
If your sales funnel or website is poorly developed currently you can also focus on keeping your traffic from Facebook ads on Facebook. This means you’ll likely use a process of a value-based video to a lead gen form ad, and finally to a sales page. That way you can keep people on Facebook as much as possible without sending them off of the platform until your sales page.
Another thing to consider is that if you don’t have extensive website development skills you might want to use a sales funnel system like Clickfunnels instead. When using a sales funnel system it can give you easy-to-use templates that already have a track record of success. You simply need to fill in your info in relation to your offer.
Conclusion
In conclusion, if you aren’t already using Facebook ads in your customer acquisition strategy you should be. It can offer a great way to increase sales and build a customer base at a low cost.
Facebook advertising gives you a simple way to target your ideal customers based on interests, demographics, and even lookalike audiences based on your customer lists. The key to running successful Facebook advertising campaigns is to target the right people, choose the correct goal, write compelling ads, drive traffic to your high-converting sales funnel, and finally use remarketing for the full buyer’s journey.
When you implement these Facebook advertising tips you’ll quickly see Facebook ads as a valuable part of your customer acquisition strategy!
By the way, if you’d like our help building and optimizing your Facebook advertising strategy, check out our Facebook advertising packages, and take advantage of our digital marketing audit. That way we can analyze what areas you can change in your marketing plan to dramatically increase your leads and conversions coming from digital marketing!
Source link