SBM 082: How to Scale Facebook Ads and Use Messenger Correctly with Ezra Firestone

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How to Use Facebook Ads and Messenger Effectively

There’s no doubt that the potential for Facebook and its Messenger companion app as advertising tool is something to be considered. After all, Facebook is one of the world’s largest social media platforms to date, if not THE largest, which means that forming a sustainable community of customers here will benefit your business greatly in the long run.

But this does beg the question, though. How can you use Facebook and Messenger for your advertising strategies? Don’t worry, these apps are highly viable places to do your marketing in. The question is in how you go around doing your advertising there and, to do that, there are several things that you have to know of first.

What has Changed?

Facebook, like any other website out there that wants to remain competitive, sees the need to constantly change itself. In the mid-2010s, the team at Facebook noticed that the platform was not used solely by private individuals wanting to record memories of their life and share it online but also by businesses wanting to reach out to a wider market and, well, form their own online communities.

This has led Facebook to introduce some changes meant for the marketing and advertising aspects of business. Whether these changes are beneficial or not for you is something that you would have to decide for yourself.

New Custom Audience Requirements

As of July 2018, Facebook has implemented new requirements for businesses on targeting custom audiences built through customer files. Basically, when you collect information from Facebook for advertising purposes, you’d have three new options:

• Directly From Customers
• Directly From Partners
• Customers and Partners

The way this affects advertising is that users can now clearly see why some ads are popping up in their feed whenever they click the “why am I seeing this?” button, especially the part where it details how the advertiser got that information. This would effectively give users the option to tune out certain advertising messages especially those coming from advertisers that got their information without their consent.

On the part of businesses, this means that they must use the Business Manager to an even greater degree and must agree to the newest Custom Audience Terms if they want to share customer information through their affiliates without looking shady.

More Customer Power

Aside from flagging down ads that took their information without permission, Facebook users now can even dictate a business’s stay in Facebook. The way they can do this is through the eCommerce Review tool which allows them to give feedback for every transaction they have just recently completed.

So what this does to businesses is that their rankings or the frequency of their ads appearing on feeds will be affected by the feedback given to them by their customers. If the shopping experience of people are generally good, then that business’s ads will be seen more. A few negative ones, on the other hand, will give your business a notification of sorts which, at the very least, gives your business the chance to improve its dealings with users.

Get more than a handful of negative feedback, however, and you can find that the reach of your ads are severely limited as well as the type of ads you can show on the site. Worse, Facebook might ban your account entirely especially if the experience people have with you are that bad.

Just keep in mind that not all user experiences with your business is going to be good. This means that your business won’t be penalized for one bad experience over a thousand good ones. It is only when Facebook notices a recurring pattern to your overall user experience that they will put their foot down and outright ban your account.

A Monetized Marketplace

The marketplace is not exactly new to Facebook. It’s just that Facebook now is pushing to monetize the place even more. And since selling never really occurs on Facebook, it being just a middleman platform of sorts for businesses and customers, the way that Facebook will monetize the marketplace is through ads and boosted listings.

In the next few months, it is expected for Facebook to implement this new monetization scheme where customers can now choose to see certain ads while they are actively shopping through the marketplace. The overall effects of this new scheme have yet to be seen but given its results when tested with larger brands, it can be seen that there is some potential for this new brand of advertising in the site.

The New Review System

Facebook’s current rating system allows only for a 1 out of 5 star review. It’s a quite dependable tool as it is but even the slightest shifts in ratings like 2 3-star reviews out of 100 4 to 5 star reviews considerably change the business’s overall rating. Facebook understands this and is set to introduce a new review system: the 1out of 10 rating.

This is more than just double the number of the current rating, though. The new review system will also take into consideration what is being said about your business. So a 10-star rating would not be enough for the review algorithm now. It must also detect key phrases and words in the reviews, testimonials, and recommendations to your business to give it a more accurate rating. In fact, Facebook has been slowly adding the feature by the new line underneath a business’s overall score that says “based on the opinion of xxx people” or “Recommended by xxx people”.

What this means is that businesses with consistently good customer experience will have a generally better rating on Facebook even with the presence of a few bad ratings. For those who are in the opposite, this should afford them a chance to change their rating considerably by improving on their current approach in the site.

Creating an Awesome Facebook Campaign

If you are quite new to the whole internet marketing experience, you can be assured that Facebook is one of the best places to do your marketing in right now. A great campaign should do a lot of things for your business including improving brand recognition as well as driving up a lot of traffic to each of your web pages.

The question is how you do go about creating an online campaign on Facebook. Here’s how:

• 1. Mine Data

  

  Any self-respecting advertiser out there knows that launching an advertising campaign on new market is risky if you don’t know what that market is. It would be best that you identify which markets have the highest possible chances of following through whatever call to action you have in your ads as this can save you a lot of time and money.

  To do this on Facebook, you would need to master the Audience Insights tool. This works by mining whatever data is available on the site regarding your target market based on the people who have visited or liked your page. This way, you’d know who to target and how to craft your message without spending a single dime.

• 2. Make Every Ad Unique for each Niche

  

  In recent years, the mass appeal approach has fizzled out in favor of more specific messages for equally specific target markets. Fortunately for you, Facebook does have some tools that allow you to tweak your ads so much that they can target two different people even if they carry the same message.

  For example, you might be the owner of a fine-dinging restaurant located in a popular tourist spot. Instead of delivering the same ad for different target markets, you can have one ad targeted towards those that want a fine-dining experience, another for tourists, and another for average food lovers. You are effectively selling the same thing here but the message has been crafted for three different mind sets. This way, you don’t alienate one sector over another and still ensure maximum returns.

• 3. Make Your Images Stand Out

  

  In this current marketing climate, the quality of your ad content will not be enough. It has to be accompanied with something that can quickly catch the attention of your audience. This is where imagery comes into play as a single image can be more compelling than a wall of text, no matter how good the message that wall of text contains.

  The good thing about here is that you don’t have to exactly take pictures of your business or yourself just to have striking imagery. That image must be relevant to whatever message you are trying to convey and, of course, acquired legally and without stepping on anyone’s copyright. If possible, you must make sure that the image must be meme-able. The more memorable it is, the more likely it is going to be viral. And we all know how much being viral is sought after in the Internet nowadays.

• 4. Mind the Landing Page

  

  You should not forget to add your landing pages in each of your advertising as you would want your audience to follow through your call of action as soon as they hear or listen to it. Landing pages allow you to inform your readers more before you compel them to buy or avail of your services.

  Landing pages also help since advertising in Facebook is no longer going to be cheap. Eventually, you’d have to pay for every click that comes to your page which is why you should give your audience the stimulus they need to start a transaction with you as soon as possible.

• 5. Sales, Not Clicks

  

  Social engagement is important, mind you, but it’s not the ultimate signifier of success in your Facebook marketing campaign. It’s easy, in fact, to think that your business is going to do well now that almost all of the content you publish on Facebook gets liked and shared for more than 5000 times per day.

  What thousands of likes and shares means is that your ad is high-performing content and just that. The question is if people actually did what you said that they should do on their part to enjoy whatever benefits you promised on that ad.

  What this means is that you should never underestimate the ability of your call to action to prompt people to start the sales process with your business. You should also be diligent enough in tracking the sales of your business once every ad is published and look for any noticeable change in it.

  After all, your business thrives on sales and, as such, it is the ultimate signifier of how good your marketing campaigns on Facebook are. You can craft all the compelling messages you want. You can come up with the flashiest, smartest, and funniest ads out there. But if none of these would translate to actual sales, then you are effectively wasting money online.

In Conclusion

What is certain is that Facebook, no matter how many times it will change and no matter how much it will charge you in the future for placing ads there, will remain a viable place to do your marketing in. Of course, there is the fact that it’s rules and algorithms can change once every few years but the sizeable crowd it draws on a daily basis as well as the reach it offers to businesses for marketing purposes is undeniable.

It all boils down to how well you keep your knowledge on what works on Facebook up to date, really. The more you are in the know of what the platform thinks is acceptable for marketing, the better you can craft strategies that will hit all the right people at the right time.

What other challenges do you see in Facebook advertising? Do you know of any other strategies that can maximize your business’s reach there? Let us know in the comments below!

References:

EZRA IN ACTION

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