Facebook Advertising Tips for the Direct Marketer
Facebook has always been an attractive place for direct marketers. In the last year, it has become downright friendly, with optimized ad units and new ad targeting products designed specifically for direct response.
These include better audience targeting and ad types that, when tied to your business goals and outcomes, can deliver serious ROI. The challenge, of course, is to understand which ad types will work for you and how to target the most relevant audience for those ads. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Here are 3 tips guaranteed to make you feel right at home in the new DR-friendly world of Facebook.
1. Understand Segmented Audiences and Target Accordingly
As every direct marketer knows, targeting based on real people leads to higher accuracy. Facebook lets you do this seamlessly to ensure your advertising gets in front of the people you have deemed most likely to buy.
The trick is to choose your audience for each specific campaign and segment how you target each group based around reach, remarketing and acquiring.
Core Audiences: Segment and reach people based on interests, demographics, location and behaviors they have shared on their profiles.
Custom Audiences: Remarket to current customers based on the data you have collected off Facebook — e.g., an action taken on your website, CRM data, those who have watched your video on Facebook.
Lookalike Audiences: Acquire new customers who look like your audiences by identifying similar characteristics to your existing customers, prospects or fans of your page. This can be a great audience to leverage based around loyalty.
2. Customise Your Ad Type for Optimum Delivery
Here are the 3 ad types that we have seen deliver the best results.
Carousel Ads: Carousel ads are showing strong results. Facebook enhanced the performance of this type of ad unit so that advertisers can now automate which image is shown first based on performance and engagement. That may seem like a small thing, but in the world of direct response, small changes often have a big impact.
Lead Ads: Facebook’s lead ads provide a simple way for people to fill out forms on their mobile devices. Lead ads take people to a form within Facebook that’s pre-populated with the contact information associated with their account. Conversions from these ad types are effective and cost-efficient for many companies looking for lead generation.
Dynamic Product Ads: Dynamic product ads help keep your business at the forefront of peoples’ minds and capture sales from people already interested in your products. You can use dynamic product ads to leverage Facebook native targeting and multi-product ad formats across devices. It allows for cross-sell and upsell functionalities based on product type. You can also set separate bids and budgets by product set and category, allowing you to maximize ROI and profit margins.
3. Manage Your Metrics
Facebook offers a variety of bidding options per objective, so that your ads are being delivered to the right audience — at a cost you can live with.
But don’t forget to test the five action buttons: Shop Now, Learn More, Sign Up, Book Now or Download. Doing so will enable you to discover which converts your prospects to take action so you can tailor your CTA to the best-performing action button.
With the updated CPC, only clicks to your websites and apps (i.e., offsite link clicks) have costs associated with them, so you are not left paying for irrelevant things like Likes, Shares or Comments.
It’s also now easier to measure the conversions that are working. But don’t stop there. Identifying where the conversions are happening is key, too. If you see that more conversions occur on desktop versus mobile, then increase spend on desktop, eliminating budget spent on valueless clicks that don’t actually lead to an opportunity to convert.
Mobile Tip
People behave and convert differently on their mobile devices. Optimizing for mobile is key to bringing down the CPA and driving revenue from Facebook mobile ads. We suggest running mobile-specific ad sets to allow increased ad and bid optimization for mobile devices.
FB Is Your New BFF
If you’re a direct marketer, the new and improved Facebook is your friend. Get to know her. Facebook’s ability to focus targeting, combined with new ad products and continuous updates, allows direct response advertisers to get a serious return on their advertising investment — so go after it!