I come across a lot of ecom brands that use Facebook Ads to drive traffic to their ecom stores. No doubt it’s one of the best ways to acquire new customers & sales for your brand.
BUT…
I also notice an issue with these brands when they use the Facebook ad platform. The issue is how they structure their campaigns. You see it’s simply not just about creating ad copy, creatives and targeting that gets you more customers & sales. It’s also down to how you structure your campaigns and the various engagement touch points or visitor events you receive with your brand.
If you don’t structure your ad campaigns properly, you’re going to have a hard time understanding what works and how to scale out your campaigns to drive more customers and sales to your store, with better ROI.
Today I want to briefly break down how your campaigns should be structured in your Facebook ads account. This is how we at Byrne Media do it and it consistently gets results for us and our clients. This is how you drive targeted traffic to your site and how you increase sales for your store using a sales funnel that includes cold audiences and different levels of warm audiences.
This process can be pretty complex, but I’ll go over it in simple terms. There can be a lot more to it within each segment. In a later article, I might show you a more complex version.
With that said…
Let’s dive right in.
Prospecting “Top of Funnel” Campaign (Cold Audiences)
First up is the prospecting campaign. This is considered your “Top of Funnel” campaign where you are testing & driving cold audiences into the beginning of your funnel and testing different combinations of ad creative and audiences.
With your prospecting campaign, you’ll only be targeting cold audiences who have not engaged with your brand (no customers, social media followers/engager’s, events on site etc). So interest/behaviour based targeting, look-a-like audiences, demographics etc, will be your focus as you gather like minded audiences into the beginning of your sales funnel.
Things to keep in mind for Top of Funnel ads:
- When it comes to the theme of your ads, your message should convey the direct impact the product offers towards your target audience. Speak to your audience directly and be on point. The creative you use within the ad should show the product and how it solves a problem and/or fill a desire/need in a concise way. The audience should recognize what it’s all about within the first 3 – 5 seconds.
Video is usually the better option as it does a better job of demonstrating what the product does. From solving your target audience’s problem. A really good eye catching, attention grabbing ad will do wonders to engage your target audience to stop scrolling their newsfeed and pay attention to what you have to offer.
Your video should be able to sell the benefits of your product. Paint the picture of what their life would look like if they purchased the product. It’s not so much the product you are selling… but rather the transformation from point A to B. The pain/struggle/discomfort or challenge they are experiencing… to relief, pleasure, good feeling etc. This is what you want to convey
- When it comes to the adcopy of your ad. You can use a similar formula to what we use. That is.
Formula = H. A. N. S. O+C
H: Stands for “Hook”. You need to hook the person, problem & pain point they are experiencing. It’s the headline of your adcopy and it needs to do a good job of grabbing your audience’s attention.You can always test a headline within the first couple of seconds of the actual video creative. (This can help draw your target audience into digesting the ad further)
A: Stands For “Agitate”. Sometimes it’s a good idea to agitate the pain experienced by the problem. Test the idea of using copy that agitates the problem and pain points that come from this problem. This can help to keep your audience’s attention, engagement and unearth feelings of displeasure. You can also demonstrate pain points within your video ad creative. Using visual demonstration can help to better acquire the attention of the target audience. Perhaps more so than adcopy itself. But as with anything in marketing, you have to test your ideas to see what resonates with your audience.
N: Stands for “Need”. Now you can create feelings of need and desire within the adcopy by explaining what life would be like if they eradicated their problem. Conveying feelings of pleasure and transformation. Here you are trying to turn your prospects pain or pleasure points into a burning need for what you have to offer.
S: Stands for “Solution”: You’ve called out the problem and the pain point(s) of your audience, created a desire and need for what life would be like without the pain points being currently experienced and now you can present your solution. Your solution of course is your product. It’s the bridge that takes your audience from point A, (Pain) to point B (pleasure). It’s all about selling the end result.
O + C: Stands For “Offer & Call to Action”: Here you want to make an offer that will really make these cold audiences want to visit your website. If you can, why not create something irresistible that’s specific for these first time “would be” customers so they actually find it difficult passing up on your offer.
Stack value on your offer so the ratio of cost vs value is value heavy.
You don’t have to use all these elements to make up your ad. You should use H, S & O+C as compulsory elements as these are important to the success of your ad getting attention and getting clicks to your website.
At this stage of your sales funnel, you have to remember that these cold audiences most likely don’t know your brand, so you engage with these audiences by calling out their problems/desires, pain/pleasure points and how you can bring solutions for them.
It’s how you emotionally engage and garner attention from people who have never heard from you before. It starts a conversation and intrigues your target audience to delve a little deeper into what you offer and what your brand is all about.
As you’ve probably heard of before, it takes a number of touch points from a prospect before they become a customer. This means that most of these cold audiences won’t purchase your offer right away until they build more trust and become more familiar with your offers and brand.
The next few segmentation’s of your sales funnel become more interesting!
Remarketing “Middle of Funnel” Campaign – Audience 1 (Warm)
With this part of the funnel, you want to show ads that are specifically tailored to people who are engaging with your brand.
You’ve got a couple of options in this case. You can target people who are following your brand on Facebook and have engaged with your content in recent times. You can also target people who have viewed certain content on your ecom store, such as product pages, but did not take any other action such as add to cart, or completed a purchase.
Things to keep in mind for this type of warm audience:
- Target only audiences who are following your Facebook or Instagram pages, engaged with your content, watched your videos and visited your website. This type of warm audience is familiar with your brand and is digesting more of what you got to offer. They may not have purchased from you before, but at least have some form of familiarity with you.
- When it comes to the adcopy, you need to use some objection handling type of messaging to push the audience a little further down the sales funnel. What are some of the objections you have about your offers that keep prospects from moving further down your sales funnel? You most likely will figure this out from the experiences your customers have had in the past.
Some common objections that shoppers have when purchasing from brands online are things like:
- Trust – You brand needs to come across as trustworthy & reliable.
- Misunderstanding the value from your offer – Be very clear on the value & benefits that are being offered to your target audience.
- Pricing – Be clear and upfront with total costs of your offer (taxes, shipping etc)
- Lack of social proof – Show other people that are similar to your target audience, benefiting from what you have to offer. This improves your credibility (testimonials & reviews)
- Window shoppers – You’ll always find these sorts of people. The best way to encourage this group to engage further is through a special offer. At minimum you want to be acquiring their email address so you can remarket to them over time.
- Remove any risk – Take away any risk involved when it comes to your target audience’s decision on making a purchase with you. Money back guarantee or even a free trial of your product will help to remove any risk of losing money and will increase the chances of a sales conversion.
You can also use some of the benefits that your product offers and list them as bullet points to make them stand out. Bullet points are a great way to convey your message, as they are easier for people to read, scan, digest and comprehend your offer.
Remarketing “Middle of Funnel” Campaign – Audience 2 (Hot)
This is the audience that has built up enough trust and a liking for you that they’ve moved further down your sales funnel and have actually added an item (or items) to their shopping cart, but haven’t actually completed their purchase.
This type of audience is one of the most fun to work with because they are close to completing their purchase with your brand and it’s up to you to guide them further with completing their purchase.
Things to consider when working with this hot audience:
- Obviously you want to target that segment of your audience who have added to cart, but haven’t purchased from your brand. This segment of audience is also referred to as shopping cart abandonment.
- To entice this segment to complete their purchase, you can offer added value in the form of discounting, free shipping or an added gift or service. It really depends on your market. Additional value does help to draw them back to completing a purchase. Scarcity & urgency on a valued offer is also a good way to have this audience complete their purchase.
- You can also include user generated content that shows other people using your product and having a successful outcome with it. This type of content can be very powerful and persuasive.
Remarketing “Bottom of Funnel” Campaign – Audience 3 (Customers)
Last part of our sales funnel when running ads is marketing to our existing customer base. These guys are the “holy grail” of our segmentation efforts and the ones we concentrate on the most as they bring in more value to our business than any other segmentation.
Not only have they purchased what we have to offer, but they also stand a much better chance of purchasing from us again now that we have earned their trust and delivered on our value to them.
You can offer an upsell to help increase the value of their transaction, as well as increasing the value and end result they are looking for. Or how about a cross sell that can also deliver a better end result?
Things to consider when working with this segment:
- You can get creative about the ads here. Show your customers a thank you image, a personal photo of your product, a video of you thanking them for buying etc… This increases the brand recognition, loyalty and the decrease of returning customer rate. It offers the beginnings of a great customer care experience.
- As mentioned above, test the idea of offering a cross sell or upsell to your customers. Sweeten the deal by offering a value heavy offer. This gives you a chance to immediately increase your average order value, as well as nurturing the life time value of your customers.
BONUS TIP:
We’ve talked about the idea of segmenting your audiences within your sales funnel and the importance of doing that will help you drastically in terms of communicating to the different behaviours of audiences within your sales funnel.
Doing this correctly will increase your sales conversion and return on investment from your advertising budget.
However…
Make sure you use exclusions in each segmentation of the funnel.
For example…
When you are prospecting with cold audiences, don’t forget to exclude your warm audience. When remarketing to your warm audiences, don’t forget to exclude your hot audience etc..
Does that make sense?
These exclusions are a VERY important step in order to drive consistent results and not have any audience overlapping issues!
Conclusion
This concludes this Facebook ads tutorial today. If you’d like help with this in your marketing to increase your sales & ROI, please reach out as we’d be happy to have a chat about it for you and your business.
