If you’re here you probably already run Facebook ads.
And if you’re on Facebook ads you already know that it’s hard to break even, most businesses just run Facebook ads because they have no other options but at the end of the day it’s only Facebook that ends up making the most money and not the business owners.
Still, most business owners who start running Facebook ads continue to use it because it’s guaranteed results! Without a flow of leads, your business does not exist but once you start paying money to Facebook you can guarantee that you will start getting leads. All that is fine but spending three times the amount on ads is not a sustainable strategy unless you figure out a way to optimize your marketing strategies such that the net amount that you are spending on running the ads is far lower than the amount that you make from converting those leads.
Figuring all this out by yourself can be a daunting task but fear not, as a co-founder at a CRM company that offers extensive Facebook ads CRM integration, we have ourselves run Facebook ads to the tune of thousands of dollars per month and we observed Facebook ads of companies to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars every month.
Here are the key strategies that you can use from each of these business owners to create immensely Facebook ad funnels where you get leads at low cost and then you create a funnel to start converting those leads at an even lower cost hence increasing your overall net profit and making the Facebook ad panels far more feasible and profitable.
But if you use the right strategies you can not only break even, but you can also create a highly profitable scalable business and revenue model around paid advertising on Facebook.
- Use custom audiences
One of the biggest mistakes that most beginners make with Facebook page advertising is they use the vague options available for targeting on Facebook like interests, communities, pages, like, etc. This is vague and these are not the people who are likely to convert whereas if you identify the likely buyers first and then use them or target them in your ads it is far more likely that they would convert into leads that can go through your funnel. For example, if I am running ads for a telesales CRM then the people who are interested in sales could be one way to target but if I download the list of all the people who have previously shown interest in a CRM either from Justdial or from my website and I retarget them on the Facebook ads it is far more likely that they would actually want the service and hence convert as a lead. And when you target relevant people the overall quality of the ad goes up and the cost incurred in running those ads and creating leads from those ads is reduced. You can also connect the Facebook ads data to Google sheets for better visualization of your data.
As a result, you end up having a higher number of leads at a lower cost per lead which is the intention of any optimization.
You can create fittable ad targeting models on Facebook but unless you engage those leads, those leads will not convert into sales all by themselves. And unless you convert leads into sales, it is pointless.
And the biggest reason why leads don’t convert is that business owners typically take a long duration of time before reaching out to the leads. Facebook leads are not the same as google leads, these are not the people who need your service and need it badly so they’re just exploring and if you call them back 48 hours later then it is highly unlikely that they would even remember clicking on your ad so you must engage those leads within the first few minutes of them submitting the form so that you don’t spend any time explaining why you are calling them or reminding them about your ad or product offering.
Instead, on that particular interaction and engagement, you can straight on sell them what you have to offer and since they already remember your ad, it will be far easier to sell.
Hence, it is super important that you get in touch with them as soon as possible and you ensure that all the follow-up calls are taken promptly so that at least for those people who are already interested there is no lag and they do not miss out just because somebody from your team missed a follow-up call because of confusion due to excel sheets or something like that.
Create lookalike audiences
The previous approach works wonderfully if you have thousands of leads who are interested in your service but what if you don’t? What if the number is low, you are just starting and you only have about 100 to 150 leads who are interested in what you’re offering.
Facebook has an amazing feature called lookalike audience where you can use your existing audience to create a much bigger subset of the audience that is look-alike to your existing audience. So essentially you are using that small audience size to identify other people who are exactly like them and using that advanced facebook algorithm to target all those other interested prospects who are highly likely who convert into leads for your business.
The steps for this are very simple, first, you create a custom audience and then while setting up the audience for your ads you create a look-alike audience from the existing audience. Facebook also gives you the chance to define a percentage of how much this audience must look alike so that you can decide whether you want a higher number of prospects to target or more accuracy in terms of whether this audience is exactly like your existing interested audiences.
What’s more, you can also use look-alike audiences after you have generated leads from Facebook itself. So you generate leads from the initial Facebook campaign and then upload those to the custom audience and create a lookalike audience from that subset such that now you have a much bigger list of audiences to target who are exactly like the people who are interested in your product or service.
What this does is it helps you target an audience that is much more likely to actually convert into leads and eventually sales.
Use 2 level ads – first brand awareness and then retargeting the people who interact with your ads
Most people who want leads from Facebook ads make the mistake of running lead ads on Facebook directly. This is what makes it so much more costly for them instead if you don’t have the above three options and cannot create a custom or lookalike audience then you can start with brand awareness ads to see who are the people who are interacting with your content and people for whom your ads are relevant and interesting and then you can re-target these people and run lead ads specifically targeting these people so that you can then convert them far more easily and at a lower cost per lead. Hence reducing your cost per lead while increasing the quantity and the quality of those leads.
The steps for this are very simple – first, you choose relevant content for brand awareness ads and then you run another ad retargeting the people who interacted with your previous ads.
This approach will not work perfectly in the first iteration itself but after a few iterations, this is overall a much more profitable model for running Facebook ads as it gives you reduced cost and higher quality of leads.
Retarget the people who visit your site
So far we have discussed approaches around building and targeting custom audiences but if you are a business owner who is just starting it is very difficult to generate leads nonetheless you will run some campaigns, ads and stuff like that to get visitors to your website and if you retarget visitors that come to your website using Facebook ads that can work as an excellent growth hack to get relevant leads at a lower cost for you.
The process for this is very simple.
You just have to make sure that there is a pixel on the website and that pixel is used for targeting people when your Facebook ads.
Conclusion
You can either blame the situation or Facebook for sucking up all your money and profits or you can understand how it works and how you can leverage the system with the right strategies to create a profitable business model for yourself around Facebook ads. Because the rules are not going to change anytime soon just because you want them to. Hence a much better approach is to just understand it once and for all and use that understanding rapidly to grow your business while audio competitors are struggling, not breaking even and leaking money every single day.
You have to realize that everybody and their moms are boosting posts on Facebook without any results, they are just paying Facebook the money in return for some attention, that’s it. But that is not how a scalable business can be built and if you want to build a scalable business model around Facebook ads then you need proper strategies to convert traffic into leads and leads into customers which include retargeting to generate leads and then using CRM with proper follow-ups etc. to convert those leads into sales.
