Dear Friend
*who’s trying to make FB Ads work
Facebook Ads are getting harder to turn profitable than ever before… after all, you’re not just competing with local mom-and-pop shops
You’ve got brick-and-mortar, online stores and global multinationals who can easily undercut your pricing or outbid your business
But, it’s not just the insane amount of competition you face. It’s also your customer’s lowering attention span and distracting content
Honestly, it’s hard to make Facebook Ads profitable with old techniques
So, how do you *still* create Wildly Profitable Facebook Ad campaigns through all of this chaos?
The answer starts with a simple principle: Always pick Practitioners over Pretenders
The ones that don’t waste time talking and go straight into finding the best ways to profitability. Everyone else is just trying to do the least to save their job or just get by with average results for their clients.
That’s why I urge you to read this entire document all the way to the end–what I’m about to tell you could fast-track your marketing, put more money in your pocket, and ultimately, change the future of your business.
I’m going to say it out loud: Most agencies or freelancers running Facebook Ads don’t know a thing about marketing. Why? Because all they’ve done for most of their campaigns is spend a bunch of money and pray that it sticks. Worse yet, if it doesn’t stick, they keep asking for more budgets. And I find it sickening that unsuspecting business owners fall for it or rather don’t have much of an option but to give in.
I don’t know about you but I’d be pissed off if I had to pay 4, 5 or even 10 times more than the actual cost of something. That’s what most agencies out there are making their clients do.
Instead of running unprofitable or expensive but mediocre Facebook Ad campaigns, imagine if you were able to do it faster, easier & at less cost all while your high-ticket potential clients eagerly wanting to work with you
Would that interest you?
What you’re about to read are 25 POWERFUL Facebook Ads tactics to make your Facebook Ads wildly profitable
Do just a few of them correctly and you’ll see better results from your campaigns.
Most agencies don’t even know about some of these things and forget about them actually implementing them
If you’re a business owner: it’s an easy read for you to get a good grip on your Facebook Ad campaigns so you get the most out of your marketing team or your current agency
If you’re running marketing for a business: study these well & start implementing them in your campaigns today
Time to dig in
A lot of the heavy lifting happens EVEN BEFORE you touch Facebook Ads..
Customer Journey
Every customer follows their own journey to finally purchasing a solution to their problem or attaining their desire.
And a good understanding of that journey your customers take enables you to show the right ads to the right people at the right time:
The classic approach to understand this is mapping which one of the following stage the customer is:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Consideration
- Action
- Loyalty
But this isn’t enough
It’s important to also understand Urgency, Problem awareness, Solution awareness, Competition (immediate and distant options your customer has), core motivation & ultimately the general sentiment of the market..
Most Facebook Ads campaigns disregard this and focus only on Facebook Ads – and that’s never going to be enough. Especially in saturated markets where the awareness levels of Customers is already quite high (meaning, they’re savvy customers who will not just buy because you’re selling. They’re going to evaluate things more deeply)
Campaign Economics
Competing on tactics is one thing but the most powerful strategy of them all is out- competing using basic numbers.
If you’re running a campaign for the first time, you need some baseline numbers and it’s strongly recommended that you do a small test campaign to get those numbers.
If you’re already running campaigns, go deep into your baseline numbers and explore ways (within Facebook or beyond) to work on them.
At a business level, the focus should be on getting ROI from your marketing efforts instead of thinking of it as an expense.
$1 in, 1$ out is a pretty strong result for most businesses because you can then sell any other service/product at a profit at the backend.
Closely monitoring not just Facebook Ad metrics but the overall campaign economics & what it means to the business allows for better decision making and not wasting a lot of time on unnecessary metrics that don’t move the bottomline.
Platform Selection
Is Facebook even the right platform for your business?
Interesting question – no?
Most marketers don’t hesitate to say Facebook Ads is the answer to literally sell everything on the planet but the reality is, FB Ads work really well for certain industries, and they don’t for others.
It’s important to take that call before spending all this money & energy on running a FB Ads campaign.
Some of the things to consider when doing so:
- Am I looking for high intent buyers who want to purchase right away? (Google search ads may be a better option)
- Are we trying to sell to buyers that may not be spending a lot of time on Facebook at all? Think CEOs, Founders, C-Suite etc (Content marketing or Ads on Linkedin, Twitter maybe a better option)
- Am I selling something expensive that requires a lot more than just running Facebook Ads.
Campaign Building
Let’s get to the good stuff inside Facebook Ads
We’re not going to bore you with the basics you hear from everywhere. We know you know the simple stuff.
We’ve tried these Facebook Ads-specific strategies and they work. Like *really* work.
So let’s go!
1. Use Social Proof
You must use social evidence to sell on social media, and it must be the right kind. This can be done through User generated content, product reviews and other testimonials.
People see a suggestion from a person they trust, not an ad tossed at them about a brand, when content generated by customers (and Facebook friends) is integrated.
Ultimately, this means that depending about whether people are acquainted with your store or are first-time visitors, you can use a different type of review in your Facebook advertising. Brand reviews are more successful when it comes to gaining clicks and traffic.
2. Pattern interrupt designs
A pattern interrupt is something which attracts the attention of the viewer, interrupting their normal behaviour.
On Facebook, normal behaviour is scrolling down your news feed, moving from one Facebook post to the next without paying much attention then…BAMMM!!!…a video of something weird, amazing, and visually striking comes onto your newsfeed.
You say ‘What is THIS?’ You’ve just GOT to check this out. And that my friends is a pattern interrupt.
Powerful concept. Use it wisely in your ads.
3. Value Offers
Clever, funny, and interesting are all great angles to take to Ads but what’s better?
Value offers.
Especially something that’s put together really well and provides answers to questions your prospect may have. You’re currently reading one such value offer. It’s different to our core offer but a lot of the people reading this will get an idea or two where they can improve.
And why is that better?
It’s better because it helps your customer upgrade their understanding of what you have to offer. And that’s important because they’re now more problem aware, solution aware and have a better understanding of things.
That helps you sell to better, more educated prospects because they now understand you.
It’s always frustrating to sell to customers who only care about price and never about the little nuances your services offers.
Further, educating the prospect through value offers helps bridge that gap.
New age value offers come in the form of Checklists, eBooks, Templates, Masterclass, Webinars, Workshops, Books etc.
4. Use Video Ads
Look, Video sells.
It’s 2022 and the world, especially when it comes to Facebook Ads, is running video ads.
Audiences love them.
There’s so much you can do with them – showing the product in action, social proof of customers talking about your product or service, client testimonials if you’re a service-based business and so much more.
Video ads have been shown to perform really well when it comes to Facebook Ads and is highly recommended.
5. Run ads for different buying groups
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to Facebook Ads.
There are different types of buying groups and creating ads that are catered to each one of them is more effective.
The way to do that is not just through different targeting, but also through different designs, better-suited tonality in copy & sometimes even a different offer.
While most marketers stop at just trying to different interests with the same message, trying different ads for different buying groups is a powerful strategy that can unlock better conversions.
6. Keep it simple
Who knew that keeping it simple is the best way to actually get your ad to work?
While everyone’s trying to ‘extra creative’ and ‘clever’ with their Facebook ads, a direct approach is much better.
Since your prospect is already overloaded with information, it’s best to give them something that’s straight to the point and appeals to a desire/problem/fear/outcome or benefit.
Keep it simple 🙂
7. Sneak Peak ????
Curiosity plays a BIG part in high converting Facebook Ads and there’s no better way (besides the clickbait stuff) to get your prospects curious about your product or service than to show them a sneak peak of what they can expect.
In some cases, product shots in action are also useful. That gives your prospect an idea of what it would be like if they had the thing with them. Creates an expectation & definitely appeals to their core desire of wanting your product or service.
8. Use Emojis, Gifs & Memes ????
Your prospects use emojis, gifs & memes in their daily life. You probably do as well.
So why not use them in your Ads?
✅ Relatable
✅ Entertaining
✅ Different
✅ Attention-grabbing
When analyzing the values of the same ad with and without emojis, in many cases, adding them to advertisements resulted in significantly higher click-through rates and interaction.
Emojis can also boost the number of responses & feedback on your ad.
You want to elicit a deeper emotional response from your audience, particularly because Facebook’s algorithm prioritises reactions other than likes.
9. Clever budgeting ????
Few businesses have a LOT of money. So what about the rest who like to test things before pushing?
Facebook Ads is the perfect place to actually test things without burning a hole in your pocket.
How?
Run a test campaign with clever budgeting.
If you’re unsure about whether Facebook ads will work for your business or not, start small, keep it simple. Start with the Minimum Rapid Testing System (MTRS)
MTRS = Lowest possible budget that would allow for quality baseline numbers to be established over a short period of time.
Depending on your niche, this could be anywhere between 1$ – 10$/day to reach some critical mass.
10. Optimizing ????
It’s rare to see campaigns perform exceptionally well right off the start. The only real way to turn that around is to optimize them.
A simple way to understand what to optimize is to look at relevant metrics of conversion points:
Impressions & Reach: this tells you if your Ad reaching enough relevant people
Click-through-rate (CTR): this tells you if your creative (design, copy) is compelling enough to deserve a click
Optin/Conversion: this tells you if the landing page is converting prospects into leads
Calls scheduled/Applications received/Sales: this tells you if the overall campaign is working
Optimising based on conversion points is better than tinkering endlessly within the Facebook Ads manager & hoping things work.
Once you analyse what the bottleneck is, you can make relevant changes to your budget, ad creative and targeting.
11. Ad Fatigue is real ????
Even the most popular Facebook ad campaigns will suffer from ad fatigue. It happens when the duration of your campaign is too high, causing your target audiences to see the same advertisements over and over, and therefore become less receptive to them.
Ad fatigue will strike every campaign at some stage. It makes no difference whether you spend millions or just a few thousand dollars on your Facebook campaign.
You must be able to recognise ad fatigue in order to overcome it in your campaigns. To do so, look at your campaign’s return on ad spend (ROAS), which calculates how profitable your advertisements are.
Then, at the ad level, concentrate on four main metrics: cost, relevance, frequency, and CPM. This research will assist you in determining which advertisements in your campaigns are performing poorly.
12. Exclude the existing list
If you’re in the market to acquire new customers, it might be prudent to exclude existing customers from your Facebook Ad campaigns.
This is not groundbreaking but you’d be surprised how many campaigns don’t actually do this.
This simple tweak will:
✅ Save your money
✅ Keep your Ad data clean
✅ Not confuse existing customers
✅ Help the algorithm target better
Do it.
13. Safety & social media aren’t the best of friends
Take more risks with your ads
When you’re competing with cute babies, fancy models, flashy cars and all the millions of cat & dog posts, it’s safe to say that taking a safe approach to social is the single biggest reason why most ads are ineffective.
It takes a lot more than just saying what you sell. The old features/benefits are not enough. You must take some more risks with content.
Pushing the boundaries is important and being edgy is a good way to get better-performing ads.
14. Trust the Algo gods!
Everyone who runs Facebook ads will tell you how they’re great at producing results with ads but what they don’t tell you is that without the algorithm gods blessing them, it’s almost impossible to have a high performing campaign.
Facebook has one of the most well-trained algorithms and it’s best to, sometimes, just let the algorithm tell you what’s working & what’s not.
No amount of research can replace actual testing & letting the FB algorithm work its magic.
The best advertisers know this & do this really effectively.
15. Pruning is good
Firstly, stopping an ad if it’s not performing is good practice.
If you get no sales and little engagement within 72 hours of running your ad, you’ll want to review the whole campaign process.
Secondly, there are a lot of factors that could cause an ad campaign to fail; review your efforts starting from the beginning (audience and design research) all the way to the ad itself – is there anything you missed or something you could do better?
You could ask yourself these questions when pruning:
- Are your product prices too high? (lower prices)
- Is the design not suitable for that niche? (review design and message)
- Is the design right but your ad is targeting the wrong people? (review targeting and audience on Facebook)
- Does your ad catch the attention of your audience? (change ad image and text)
- Are you offering the right products?
- Are there any mistakes in the design or text?
16. Test! Test! Test!
Often when marketers say that Facebook ads don’t work for them, they simply haven’t tested enough variables or the right variables to accurately determine what’s working and what to improve.
They tend to change too many things at once or lose sight of the one specific adjustment that might make the biggest difference in their results. In either instance, it helps to be both strategic and systematic about testing Facebook ads.
Effectively testing Facebook Ads instead of trying to guesswork is the best way to approach Ads and it’s not going anywhere, as things get more complex, effectively testings ads is going to be one of two most important approaches: along with storytelling
Strats working right now ????
17. Interest Stacking
What we’ve found is that targeting prospects with single interests can be a hit or a miss.
But if you’re targeting prospects that share 3, 4, 5 relevant interests – the chances of you being accurate with your targeting is really high.
Example:
You’re selling football merchandise in Brazil.
And create targeting based on a single interest: Football for Men between the ages of 18 – 30
Now compare that to an interest stack where you create targeting based on multiple interests: Football, Beer, Apparel Company, Sports TV Channels. The likelihood that a prospect overlaps on all of those is low – but highly likely to be interested in activewear or merchandise since he mimics the interests of an active football fan who likes to go out, watch a bunch of Football with some beer & likes to buy himself a jersey or two.
Ultimately, it’s always important to know your prospects well but if you put in some early work, interest stacking works like a charm!
18. Behavioural Dynamic Retargeting
Your prospects leave clues when interacting with your ads, website, email and other digital touchpoints.
Using that to tailor your Facebook Ads campaigns is extremely effective through remarketing.
Some use-cases of retargeting:
- Firstly, reinforce your message to users who viewed specific pages.
- Show targeted ads to visitors who bounced.
- Upsell and cross-sell new items to past purchasers.
- Encourage visitors to learn more or complete a purchase.
- Remind visitors to come back to their abandoned cart
- Finally, show targeted ads to visitors who are actively engaging with your email sequences
And many more such scenarios.
Instead of just focusing on launching your ads, use retargeting to make them more effective.
19. Improve your customer ????
We try to reframe our campaigns by stepping into the shoes of the prospect and going through what they would go through (we try our best to mimic this)
And what we realise every time is that the prospect is looking for specific pieces of information to ultimately buy a solution to their problem or a way to fulfill their desire.
So your job is not just to ‘sell’ but also to educate your prospect in how they could solve their problem.
This goes beyond just your product or service.
For real estate projects, this could mean providing
Increasing the awareness levels of your prospects is one of the most effective ways to sell something to them later.
20. Low-risk commitments
You may not like this but most customers don’t wake up in the morning enthusiastically wanting to buy your product or service.
And with all the usual chaos going on in the marketplace, it’s extremely hard to sell to someone for the first time.
But what about the second or the third time?
The bottomline is that customers are more likely to buy from you if they’ve already bought from you before.
And the way to do that in the context of a Facebook Ads campaign is to lower the threshhold for your prospects to become your customers.
The way to do that is to allow them a small, low-risk commitment through your ads.
If you want to sell a large consulting contract, offer a free audit or assessment.
Want to sell expensive real estate property, offer a free webinar.
If you want to sell a high ticket service, offer an ebook, checklist or a free report.
What you’re essentially doing is lowering the risk for your prospect while increasing their awareness along with their affinity & comfort with you.
Useful approaches ????
21. Play the long game
If your expecatations from a Facebook Ads campaign is that you’ll suddenly become this overnight millionaire – I’m sorry to break it to you but it’s not going to happen.
Social media posts of some successful campaigns creates a false sense of ‘ease’ that doesn’t actually exist.
This is hard work and you gotta play it long enough to reap results from it – just like any other investment you make in your business.
But I can tell you one thing with certainty, Facebook Ad campaigns are a great way. to make your business goals possible – IF YOU STICK WITH IT!
Jump around by turning on and off your ads every other day and you’re unfortunately not going to be able to make it work.
Don’t burn money mindlessly but definitely give it enough time for this growth channel to prove itself to you
22. Secret formula: Educate, Entertain, Inform
• Educate: Your product usually is there to solve a problem, which means, you can educate your prospects about not just your product but all the different things in that domain. Eg. instead of selling email software, you could provide 7 ways to profit from email marketing.
• Entertain: Look, most people are on social media for casual entertainment. So if you can give them something fun or entertaining, they’ll give you a lot of praise and start exploring your brand, products and content a lot more.
• Inform: Your prospects love to be informed about new trends, analysis, news and shifts about something that impacts them. You could include news-style content to inform your prospects about a shift in something that’s happening in what they’re interested in.
23. Plan beyond Facebook Ads
Plan for more than just Facebook advertising. Make sure you have a high converting sales funnel, or a website ready to send your future customers to with a targeted strategy. Think long term.
Think of Facebook Ads as part of your prospect’s buying journey and not just a transaction. Map out possible future offers and other ways in which you could educate, inform, entertain and ultimately sell to your prospect.
24. Get a high converting sales funnel
All this traffic and attention that you get by running Facebook ads will only be useful if you’re able to convert these prospects into paying customers or highly interested leads.
The best way to do that in addition to having Facebook Ads is making sure you have a sales funnel that’s designed to convert. That way you ensure you maximise the attention or traffic you’re driving to your product or service.
25. Follow up with Email sequences
As much as people keep bashing email marketing, if done right, it’s one of the most profitable markeitng channels available right now.
Using Facebook Ads as a way to start a conversation with people and then moving that conversation to email is a great way to fully utilise the power of Facebook Ads.
Instead of thinking as each marketing channel in isolation, think of them as tools you can use to collectively have a great customer experience.
Use email sequences after you’ve received your prospects email ID through an optin or a lead ad or by selling them something low-cost upfront.
Don’t spam. Educate, Entertain, Inform and occasionally offer something worthwhile 🙂
26. Bonus: Key metrics to measure
There are a TON of metrics available with the digital nature of ads but which ones are worth your time?
A quick list of metrics that are helpful to track:
Business level:
– Cost per application: Average of how many leads convert into applications or get on a consultation call with your sales team.
– Cost of Acquiring a Customer (CAC): This is your ultimate metric that includes all sales & marketing costs per acquisition.
– Average Order Value (AOV): Also tracked as Avg. Transaction Value. This is the value of the transaction when the customer buys.
– Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This is the approximate value of goods/services the customer is likely to buy from you.
Facebook Ads level:
– Frequency – the number of times your ad is shown to people on Facebook. It’s important to keep things fresh if conversions start dropping due to high frequency.
– CPC – Cost per click. A high CPC means either you’re targeting a narrow group or there’s more
– CTR – Click-through-rate. Track this one like a hawk. A strong CTR with high relevance audiences is a great sign
– CPL – Cost per lead. Optimize for a healthy CPL. Be careful not focusing only on the cost but also the quality of the lead
Aim for “Above Average” with the following:
– Ad Quality Ranking: Explains how your ad quality compares to ads competing for the same audience.
– Engagement Rate Ranking: Explains how your ad’s expected engagement rate compares to ads competing for the same audience.
– Conversion Ranking: Explains how your ad’s expected conversion rate compares to ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience.
