Facebook Ads is one of the most powerful tools available for digital marketing. For many years, marketers have considered it mainly as a branding tool—optimized to grow your audience, bolster your brand’s reputation, and communicate with your customer base. While Facebook is great for that, it has emerged as a powerful tool for generating leads and getting conversions.
Envisioning your Conversion Pipeline
To get the most conversions out of Facebook Ads, it’s not enough to just run campaigns on autopilot. You need to have a clear vision of your ideal customer journey—especially your conversion event. Facebook has its own predefined conversion events, including viewing your content, and initiating checkout. You’re free to define your own conversion event if you don’t see yours listed. Your ad should also have a strongly-defined call to action (CTA), such as “Learn More” or “Buy Now” to help initiate the conversion event.
Your conversion event will lead your customer to a landing page or an order page on your company’s site. It’s important to consider these pages as part of the conversion pipeline—if people see it all the way through and make the purchase, that’s great. If they end up backing out, the fact that they got this far will give you the opportunity to remarket down the line. Facebook is a great place to net “soft conversions”—in other words, conversions that don’t necessarily involve a purchase, but put your audience in a position where they’re much more likely to make a purchase down the line.
Facebook’s technology will help you track your customers’ position along the conversion pipeline. Facebook Ads has a tool called Pixel, a small block of code that helps you track how users interact with your advertisement. Pixel will even make adjustments to your ads automatically to optimize conversions.
Creating Custom Audiences for Optimal Conversions
There are virtually infinite ways to define and segment an audience on Facebook Ads. Most people are familiar with the demographic targeting tools, which allow you to identify people who live in a particular area, or make a certain amount of money. There are also the more precise targeting tools, which allow you to pinpoint customers based on their previous interactions with your ads. This feature allows you to remarket to people who have dropped out of your conversion pipeline. You can layer targeting options to create very specific audiences. Especially if you’re advertising a niche service like wedding planning or real estate, the ability to target people who just got engaged, or recently relocated, can be a game-changer. Facebook also has a built in option called “targeting expansion,” which uses an automated algorithm to identify new audiences.
Don’t Skip The Basics
Inasmuch as Facebook’s highly sophisticated targeting and conversion-tracking tools can take your digital campaign to the next level, it’s important to not forget the basics. There’s no substitute for a distinct, visually-enticing advertisement that will make users stop scrolling to look at your ad. Also, be sure to not be overly verbose in your copy. Be succinct, avoid specialized jargon, and speak directly to your audience.
Facebook Ads is an expansive suite of tools. When used properly, they can net you tons of new conversions; at worst, they can stall your marketing strategy in limbo as you market in the wrong way to the wrong people. By conceiving of a full conversion pipeline, and then creating specific audiences based on their interactions with your ads, you’ll be able to harness the strengths of Facebook Ads to yield tons more conversions.
Sky Advertising has proven experience developing robust Facebook campaigns that harness the best aspects of Facebook Ads to yield more conversions, re-market and re-target to customers who drop out of the conversion pipeline, and identify new untapped audiences. Contact us for your free consultation.
