Table of Contents

Social media is today one of the biggest tools that marketers have to promote their brands. This is a particularly direct, targeted, and personal means to connect with an audience. It lets you do this in a way that is persuasive, pervasive, and purposeful and it allows you to create a real synergy between your marketing and your website or blog.

And when it comes to social media marketing, nothing beats Facebook. Facebook is not only the biggest social media network by far but it is also the best suited to marketing with the widest selection of highly powerful tools and the most data for you to use to find the right audience.

Whereas other social media sites provide occasional distractions, Facebook has become one of the main reasons that we go online. Its users outnumber the population of any country on Earth and those members are more highly engaged than they are on any other site.

Specifically, there are over 1.71 billion active Facebook users today, which is a 15% increase year over year. That means that Facebook is still growing, despite naysayers. Every single day, those users generate over 4.5 billion likes. And every day, 1.13 billion people log onto the site. On mobile alone, there are 1.57 billion active users. Five new profiles are created every single second and 300 million photos are uploaded daily. The average time a user spends on Facebook per visit is 20 minutes. For Americans, it is twice that.

All this paints a very clear picture of a social media network that has become a huge part of our lives and that is embedded as a cultural phenomenon. At a party, you are just as likely to ask for a stranger’s Facebook name as you are their mobile phone number. Facebook is used to plan weddings, organize stag parties, share holiday photos, and to catch up with old friends. Even employers use Facebook to conduct background checks on future employees.

What does this mean? It means that if you want to find a channel that will allow you to connect with a gigantic and huge audience, then Facebook is the best place to do that. In short: if someone uses the web a lot for shopping, then there’s an extremely high chance that you will be able to find them on Facebook. If they don’t? Well then, they’re not a particularly useful lead, to begin with!

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Introducing Facebook Ads

But what’s really great about Facebook as a marketer, is that it gives you the tools to reach that audience directly. Better yet, it gives you the tools to reach a specific sub-section of that audience and to thereby connect with exactly the right kind of person who will want to buy your product. It then allows you to convert those leads from cold leads, to warm leads, to customers – and to keep them highly engaged with your brand along the way.

Facebook Ads are one of the most effective ways to do this, allowing you to hone in on precisely the type of person that will want to buy your products. What’s more, is that they allow you to do so in a manner that lets you tightly control your spending, ensuring that your advertising falls within budget and that you can scale it as you grow your business.

Then there are all the countless advanced features – like CPA – and the amazing external tools that allow you to get even more from your advertising campaign and to grow your business all the more effectively and quickly.

Of course though, like any tool, Facebook Ads is only as effective as the person using it. The campaign you design is what will ultimately impact your success or failure and this is where this book comes in. Here, you’ll learn all of the technical aspects of Facebook Ads and you’ll see how to get started with your own campaign, your own page, and your own brand.

But more importantly, you’ll see how to make sure that all those things are designed well and that they will give you the best chance of success. You’ll learn the ‘what’ but also the ‘how’ and the ‘why’. You’ll see that the most important place to start when creating your Facebook marketing plan is with the right brand and the right product and perfect synergy between those things.

And ultimately, you’ll learn what this means for you. You’ll learn how to generate fans and followers and turn those into excited customers!

What You Will Learn

Throughout this book, you will learn:

• How to create/choose a product that people want

• How to choose a niche  How to create a ‘buyer persona’

• How to create a great Facebook page with a strong brand

• How to set up Facebook Ads

• How to choose from the different types of Facebook advert

• How to track your progress and use insights  How to use advanced features like targeting

• And CPA

• How to budget for maximum ROI  And much more!

So without further ado, let’s get stuck in!

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Getting Started With Facebook Ads

What’s the first thing you’re going to need to start being successful with Facebook Ads? A Facebook account?

Nope!

What you’ll need to begin with is even more fundamental than that. Specifically, what you’ll need is a brand, a website, and a product to sell. If you’re going to use any type of advertising, then you of course need something worth advertising!

And that thing you’ll be advertising needs to be compelling and exciting enough that you can find a large audience of people who want it.

So let’s take a look at where we’re going to get started: by choosing a niche. If you already have a niche, blog, and product then you may consider skipping this chapter. My advice would be don’t: we’re going to be covering some fairly advanced concepts here and you might decide that you actually want to reconsider your current strategy once you’ve read it through…

Choosing Your Niche

Your niche is of course your subject matter. This is the topic you’re going to be tackling with your blog and therefore, the industry that you’re going to be looking at with your product.

For example, you might decide that your niche is going to be fitness and that your product is going to be a weights bench. The two inform each other because you wouldn’t want to have a website about sewing and selling weight benches from there!

More importantly, this also informs your audience. That is to say that you’ll now be aiming your website, your brand, and your marketing at people who like to work out with weights. That means that you’re going to be targeting more men than women and possibly sporty/athletic types. Alternatively, you might go the opposite way and decide to focus on women, the elderly, or even teenagers.

And doing this would be wise.

Ultimately, the whole point of a ‘niche’ is to find a subject matter and a product that will have a relative niche appeal. In other words: something that isn’t going to be appealing to everyone. The reason that it makes sense to do that, is that this will allow you to focus on a smaller group and thereby spend less on advertising while also having a clearer value proposition.

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We’ll get into this in more detail later on but suffice to say that

Facebook Ads use a PPC format. That stands for ‘Pay Per Click’ and what this essentially tells us, is that we’re paying each time that someone clicks on the ad. The amount we pay is related to the maximum budget that we set when we created the campaign, as well as the number of other people targeting the same spot with the advert. When two advertisers both have ads that can appear in a given place on Facebook, they will enter a bidding war. The advertiser with the highest maximum spend will win and will pay the smallest amount that was needed to beat the competition.

So if two advertisers are trying to advertise on the same spot and advertiser A has a 20cents maximum bid and advertiser B has a 50cents maximum bid, advertiser B will win and will pay 21cents for each click.

The more popular a niche, the more you’ll pay to have your advert there.

And the more popular a niche, the more competing products you’ll have to contend with. No doubt your audience has seen thousands of weights benches in their time and know precisely where to buy them. But have they seen one that is aimed specifically at women with a more feminine design? Have they seen one that is aimed specifically at older people with stiffer joints?

By going niche, you can solve a more specific problem and be the best choice for a particular person. This is better than trying to be the generic choice for everyone.

Pick a popular niche and then hone in on the specific demographic within that niche – the niche within the niche.

Of course, you also need to think about what topics you know well, what topics you’re willing to write lots about, and what topics you’re passionate about. Trust me: if you try and sell a product you have no passion for, you’ll be making things much harder for yourself.

Finding a Product To Sell

Once you have chosen your niche, you can now start looking for products to sell. Is this a requirement? Well, if you want to profit, then yes!

There’s nothing wrong with building a blog or a brand with no products to sell. If you do this, then you’ll be establishing yourself as an influencer, building trust, and creating a massive audience that you will subsequently be able to sell to. In fact, you’ll build more trust because your visitors will see that you’re not just trying to get them to buy things from you! You can even use some adverts on your site to generate a little income without needing a product of your own necessarily.

But once you start paying for Facebook Ads, then you really do need to think about having a product you can sell. Now, you’re paying for each visitor you get to the site and that is going to quickly add up once you get 1,000 clicks. The only way for Facebook Ads to be viable is if you’re earning more than you’re paying and that means that the average spend for each customer needs to be more than they’re paying to come to your site. That way, you can invest more and more into the advertising and see

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your site grows bigger and bigger. Ads just don’t cut it because you’ll earn less per click than you would have to pay per click!

So where do you get products from? There are a few options. One is to sell your own product from your site. This is the best option and especially if you have the patience and know-how to create a physical product like a gadget, a tool, or an item of clothing. You can do this by creating the design and then finding a manufacturer to partner with. You’ll need to order a minimum amount of stock upfront but one way to get around this is by using a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter to get the funds you need. Alternatively, you can take out a business loan.

Another option is to create a digital product. This will be something like an ebook, an online course, or something else that requires you to send a file digitally rather than manufacture anything. Digital products have lots of benefits – including the fact that they don’t require any upfront expense and also have no overheads. You can sell as many as you like and make 100% profit on each sale. The downside is that digital products don’t have as much broad appeal as something like an item of clothing. eBooks are hard to explain to your gran and you can’t make the argument that anyone ‘needs’ an ebook.

There are ‘in-between’ options too. For example, you can sell a book using POD publishing. This stands for ‘Print On Demand’ and essentially means that the book is printed only when someone orders it. That means there’s no need for you to buy anything up-front; the books are printed only when they’re needed and thus there’s no risk and no upfront investment.

Another great option is to use dropshipping. Dropshipping means that you are selling something that a company owns and simply forwarding the orders on to the wholesaler. They then handle fulfillment but they do so in a silent manner so that the customers feel as though they’re buying directly from you. Better yet, some dropshippers will even offer a truly white-label service and actually allow you to put your logo on the products. For instance, they would let you sell their supplements range while using your own logo on the label. They might even allow you to choose ingredients for your own formula.

Otherwise, you can go the more traditional route and try reselling. This means buying a product in bulk from a wholesaler and then finding customers to sell it on to at a profit.

Finally, you might consider becoming an affiliate. Affiliate marketers promote products made by creators in exchange for commission on each sale. Sometimes this might mean that you’re selling digital products with commission up to 75%! In other cases, you might sell physical products for considerably less. Amazon Associates for example offers its partners around 4-8% on sales. But this does come with the distinct advantage of selling through a very big and very well-known brand that people trust and likely already have an account with even.

You need this product, the right niche and a website to sell it from.

Whatever way you eventually decide to go about finding your product, make sure that it is also something you really believe in and something that people will want to buy. Research your market and your audience and look at what’s currently selling well in other stores and through other channels.

Creating Your Brand and Facebook Page

As you can see then, the best strategy is not to try and appeal to everyone but to try and hone in on a very specific type of buyer.

We’ll discuss this more in the next chapter.

But for now, you need to consider one more aspect before you can go about beginning your advertising: that’s your Facebook Page. And in order to create a great Facebook Page, you’re going to need to think carefully about your brand.

Brand is incredibly important in every aspect of internet marketing and especially when it comes to social media marketing. That’s because your brand is going to be what helps you to communicate what your business is all about, to build trust and to make people want to follow you.

Remember: we’re targeting a specific audience. We want the right kind of person to know instantly that ours is a brand they should be interested in, that our products are things they might want to buy. And we do that with a strong brand.

This needs a strong logo. Your logo needs to communicate what your brand is all about in a way that is subtle and simplistic.

That means you need to come up with your ‘why’ (check out Simon Sinek’s excellent video on The Golden Circle) and i t means you need to think about what your company’s mission statement is and what you want to accomplish.

Let’s say you’re selling that weights bench to women. What is your mission statement? What is the ethos that you want all your products to conform to?

Perhaps it is power and beauty? In which case, you need a logo that evokes a sense of power and beauty. And if you get this right, then your blog post or advert, combined with your logo, should instantly appeal in a very visceral way to certain members of your audience.

Or if you’re making products that are all about green living and natural foods, then perhaps your logo might be something involving the color green, perhaps a tree, maybe a sunrise.

Meanwhile, your name should also use words that hint at what you’re all about.

Spend some time creating a logo that really looks good. This is going to go on your website but it’s also going to be used on your Facebook Page as a way to welcome people to your site. It needs to look professional if you’re going to have any chance of building trust with your audience and if you’re going to make people want to buy from you and assume that your products will be equally high quality.

Make your logo as a vector (not raster) file using software like Adobe Illustrator. Make sure that you hire a designer if you don’t have those skills yourself and avoid clichés that might make your logo appear derivative.

Once you have a log you’re pleased with, this can inform your color scheme and that will blead into your web design.

All these elements should now translate across your social media. You need to make sure that every social media account has the same brand name, the same logo, the same color palette and the same type of content. This brand consistency will help your audience to better understand what you’re all about and whether they should be interested in what you have to offer. It will also enhance your professionalism and ensure that you have a clear and polished image that people will respond to.

To make your Facebook page, just log in and look for the ‘Pages’ heading on the left-hand menu of the home feed. Here will be the option to ‘Create Page’. You can also find this by clicking on the small downward arrow in the top right of any page.

Click this and you’ll be walked through the simple steps to create your Facebook page. Choose the heading that best describes you:

• Local business or place

• Company organization or institution

• Brand or product

• Artist, band or public figure

• Entertainment

• Cause or community

Then choose the category and your company name and start creating your page. You’ll need to fill out some information and other elements, just as you would do when creating a page. Having identified your mission statement and chosen a good niche to enter into though, this should be simple and straightforward.

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Create a Buyer Persona

The next thing we’re going to do is to come up with our ‘buyer persona’. This is a good idea for any kind of business but for Facebook Ads it is particularly essential.

If you’re going to have a successful PPC campaign, then one of the single most important things to have in mind is your target demographic. In other words, you need to be sure that you’re showing your adverts to the right people in order to ensure that those viewers are going to convert and become buyers. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your money. We’ve already discussed this to some extent while creating our brand and choosing our product but now we need to go a little deeper.

By properly profiling who your buyer is, you can that way create a better advertising campaign that will result in more sales. This means not only thinking about their age, sex and location but also what their likes and dislikes are, who they hang out with, where they go and more.

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So how do you do that?

The Basic Demographics

To start with, you need to consider the most basic factors that make up demographics. That means categorizing your potential buyers in terms of their age, their sex and their location. Before we get deeper, it is necessary to think about the more surfacelevel stuff.

Who buys the products that you sell? Are they young or old? Do they have a big income or a small one?

To a large extent, this will be obvious – for instance if you’re selling wedding dresses, then you can safely assume that your target demographic is female and unmarried. This is where Facebook Ads really comes into its own: because it allows us to target those things specifically. Using Facebook Ads, a wedding dress shop can show ads to engaged women that live locally!

In other cases though, the demographic might be both or it might not easily fall into one category. Or it may be that the audience just isn’t so obvious.

So what can you do in this case to make sure that you’re targeting the right person?

One way to do this is with a little market research. You can look at the metrics of who has bought from you so far for example, or you can simply survey your visitors. Who is it that buys from you? What products do they prefer? You may just be surprised by the answers sometimes! Likewise, you might be able to find

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information about other products or brands that are similar to yours.

You can also ascertain a fair amount by looking at your own web stats. If you have Google Analytics set up, or you have web stats on WordPress, then you can see what people are searching but also the location they’re coming from and even how long each person stays on your site. Which of your visitors are looking for your products? What are they searching for? And who is the most engaged? You can even use Google Analytics to set up goals – thereby looking at which visitors end up on your ‘thank you for ordering’ page.

Using this information, you can then set out with the very clear goal of: finding more people like that!

The Persona

But this does not yet give you your full buyer ‘persona’. That’s because a persona is actually more than just a collection of statistics; a persona is an entire fictional biography based on what a person likes, what their hobbies are and more. You need to try and get inside the mind of that person in order to better understand what they might want to spend their money on, where they will be at any given time and what they will be likely to search for. This is how you really sell.

To do this, it can help to have an idea of the ‘why’ behind what you do. Make sure your brand has a mission statement and think about what it is you want to achieve as a company. When you do this, you’ll then be able to find people who believe what you believe and who are likeminded. These are going to be your long-

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term customers with longer ‘lifetime customer value’. These people will really believe in what you’re selling and they’ll be more likely to put in multiple orders. That means they’re the ones you want to advertise to in order to get the very best ROI in the longterm – one click might this way lead to multiple sales over time!

Now some of this is likely to involve a little extrapolation and guess work but it’s worth thinking about.

For example, if you are a wedding dress shop and you’re targeting women in a certain area who are engaged, you’ll probably have some success…

But you’ll have even more success if they happen to love the particular style of dresses that you stock. First you need to think about their income then. What is the average income of your buyer? Are these budget dresses, or are they premium, luxury dresses?

Next, think about the style. Are these ‘shabby chic’? Are they classic? Are they punk? If the people who buy your dresses love shabby chic, then what else might they enjoy? Perhaps they love Pinterest, boutique shops and indie rock?

Using Facebook, you can target your audience by their interests, their income, their age and even their job position. Using this additional information, you could make some educated guesses about who will like your dresses and get only those people to see your ads. Maybe people who like your dresses also like Coldplay?

Sure, by targeting people who like Coldplay, you have now drastically reduced your potential audience and a much smaller number of people will see your ads.

But recognize that your objective is not to get people to see your ads. Your objective is to get the right people to see your ads. Having the wrong person click on your ad is actually a bad thing because it means you wasted money on a click. It’s better to get very specific and target the right person with a bigger budget – that way you can barely fail!

How To Create Your First Ad

We’ve looked at an awful lot of theory at this point and there’s a good chance that you’ll just be raring to get started and to build your advert. Very well, let’s go!

First, take a look under the ‘Pages’ heading again. Here, you’ll find the option to ‘Create Advert’. Click it!

You’ll then need to select a

Facebook Page you would like to use to advertise.

Next, you’ll be given the option to choose your goals (which is now called an ‘Objective’).

You have a huge number of goals, which are as follows:

• Awareness

o Boost your posts o Promote your page o Reach people near your business o Increase brand awareness

• Consideration o Send people to your website o Get installs of your app o Raise attendance at your event o Get video views o Collect leads for your business

• Conversion

o Increase conversions on a website o Increase engagement in an app o Get people to claim your offer o Promote a product catalogue o Get people to visit your shops

Let’s start with the most simple and basic type of advert: sending people to your website. This way, when someone clicks on your ad, they will get sent directly to your site where you can try and sell them your product. This is a simple option and it’s a very easy one that will allow you to do all kinds of things. Likewise, you’ll pair it with a ‘sales page’, which is a single page on a website dedicated to making one product sound amazing and getting visitors to click ‘buy’. Otherwise, you might pair it with a squeeze page to encourage people to sign up to a mailing list, or an ecommerce store. You can even use an affiliate link and send visitors directly to an affiliate product!

Either way, you will then need to create your ad, which will allow you to choose who you want to target, the language, the placement and how much you’re willing to spend.

Remember, when you choose your budget you will set a budget and this is going to dictate how much you bid on each advert as well as when your ads stop showing.

So if you set your budget to $20 daily, then you’ll not spend more than $20 a day on average. However, if you are in a very competitive niche, then you might need to spend more just to get your ad seen a couple of times. Otherwise, if you’re in a very quiet niche, then you could get hundreds of views for this amount.

You’ll also be able to decide if you want to pay per click (PPC) or per impression (PPM). PPM actually means you are paying per 1,000 impressions and while this means you will pay more to get seen more, it also allows you to be a little more aggressive with trying to actually acquire clicks.

Placements refers to where your ad will be shown. You can decide whether you want your adverts to appear on specific devices (not mobile, for example) and whether you want them to show on Instagram as well.

Choosing automatic placements will ensure your ads are shown in the best place without you needing to worry about it and this is what Facebook recommends for most users. Finally, you can also decide whether you want your advert to show immediately, or to show during set dates.

We’re going to get into more detail regarding the targeting in the next chapter, so don’t worry about that right now.

Once you click ‘Continue’, you’ll then be taken to the next page where you can choose the type of advert you want to create:

• Carousel

• Single Image

• Single Video

• Slideshow

Below, you can then choose an image/video for your advert and choose the page you just created to link it to. This is important because you can actually attract more Facebook likes through your advert too: even if people don’t click on the ad, they might still like your page meaning that you can reach them more easily in future!

Now you can enter your website URL. Because we chose to make a website advert, this will populate the headline and the text automatically for us with our meta title and description.

You’re going to want to change that though – and getting your title and description just right are actually two of the most important things for your campaign by far. We’ll come to this in a second.

Lastly, you can choose a bit more about your placement – such as whether you want your links to appear on the right, on the mobile feed etc.

Facebook Power Manager

If you’re struggling to choose these factors because there is just so much you want to advertise, then you might want to consider using Facebook’s ‘Power Editor’. This is an alternative to the Facebook Ad Manager that we’ve been using up to this point, which is designed to allow you to edit multiple different ads at once. You’ll find it at www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor .

This will let you take precise control over your campaigns and to create multiple ads all at once. This is ideal for big ecommerce stores for instance, as it will allow you to build multiple ads to sell each item that you stock. However, if you’re just starting out then it is recommended that you create ads individually to begin with.

Note that there is a benefit to creating lots of versions of the same ad too. If you do this, then you can quickly get some feedback regarding what’s working and what isn’t. This way, you can invest more money in the types of ads and the demographics that are getting results and avoid wasting money in the areas that aren’t paying for themselves.

How to Write Amazing Copy for Your Ad

The copy you write for your ad is incredible important. This means both the headline – which needs to grab attention and get clicks from the right people – and the body text.

We’ve already touched briefly on the heading. The idea behind this is to grab attention but at the same time, it’s also to make sure people know whether the ad is for them or not. We’ve briefly touched on this already but remember: the aim is not to get the maximum number of clicks. The aim is to get only the right kinds of people to click!

So that means you need to use a heading that will attract attention only if someone is interested in the product. You also need to do this while working within some quite strict character limits. Facebook ads have a headline limit of 25 characters, while the text has a limit of 90 characters. This is all going to be a little tricky when trying to make your product sound highly compelling but with a little creative thought, you should be able to come up with something.

Here are some tips that will help…

Honesty is the best policy. When it comes to getting clicks only from people who are likely to buy from you, the most important thing is to make sure you are upfront and straightforward in describing the product. Selling an ebook for $30? Then say that it is $30 right in your advert! This way, only someone who might be interested in buying something that expensive will click on the ad. You just filtered out a lot of clicks that might not have resulted in purchases! This extends to every other aspect of your copy – be completely straightforward about what it is, so that only interested parties need apply!

Another tip is to try to remove objections and barriers to sale. This is pretty tricky when you only have 90 words to work with but it can be done. Essentially, barriers to sale are things that prevent people from wanting to click ‘buy’, even though they might theoretically be interested in what it is you’re selling. It follows that similar objections might prevent them from clicking on an advert.

For example, if you’re offering to sell something online, people might feel they’re in too much of a hurry to want to order. They don’t want to have to put their details in and they don’t want to have to spend a long time reading text.

Thus, a simple line added to your link saying ‘Easy Purchase With One Click!’ can make a huge difference.

Likewise, it might be that they’re worried about buying from a brand they’ve not heard of before. What if the product doesn’t work?

To get around this, simply include a line like ‘100% money back guarantee’. This gives them the extra assurance of knowing they can get a full refund if anything goes wrong.

Another tip is to think about what is known as the ‘value proposition’. In other words, think about what it is that your customers want to get out of the product you’re offering. The value proposition describes the way that a product changes someone’s life. It’s how it’s more than the sum of its parts and it’s the reason why you do what you do (we’re coming back to that again!).

The old adage is that you ‘don’t sell hat, you sell warm heads’. Likewise, you don’t sell books about making money online. Rather, you sell the confidence, freedom and lack of stress that comes from wealth. You sell the ability to wear nice suits and stand in high rise buildings looking out over the world and reflecting on your business empire.

You don’t sell fitness equipment, you sell toned abs, sexy bodies and confidence.

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Facebook Image Guidelines

When setting up your ads, you’ll have the option to choose your images. Depending on the type of ad you’ve chosen, you’ll need to choose images with different dimensions. This section will act as a quick resource to help you find that information.

First of all, for your profile photo and cover image, you’ll need 180x180 pixels and 828x315 respectively. For App

Installs/Engagement ads, your image should be 1,200x628. For photo adverts, the images will be 1,200x900 and for videos, you’ll have to choose a thumbnail image that’s 1,200x675. Carousel images will be 600x600 and website links will be 1,200x628.

Events images are 1,200x444, lead generation ads are 1,200x628. Offer claims are 1,200x628 as well, while page likes are 1,200x444 again.

There are some considerations to take into account here though too. For one, the display dimensions aren’t going to be the same

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as the actual dimensions – and this will vary from device to device. In other words, an image may appear bigger on mobile than it does on PC. What’s more, is that you can practically rest assured it won’t look the same size as it did when you took it!

For the most part, this is not a big deal. But try to make sure that you look at the image at that size just to check it looks good. If you have small details in the image, then you don’t want them to get lost when it is shrunken down!

To find more information on this, check this link: http://www.jonloomer.com/2016/09/15/facebook-image dimensions-2016/.

Note as well that Facebook is lenient and you don’t need your images to be the exact same dimensions as those specified here. That said though, if you want to minimize any warping or stretching, then it is a good idea to aim for images that are as close as possible. At the very least, try to get the aspect ratio right.

High definition images that look crisp are always going to attract more views and clicks than those that look grainy and blurry. Grainy images make your company look dated, which in turn makes you look less trustworthy and reduces the likelihood people will want to buy from you.

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Facebook Audience Targeting

We’ve mentioned a bit about Facebook Targeting already but now it’s time to look at this section a little closer.

When creating your ad in the Facebook Ad Manager, there is a section called ‘detailed targeting’. This is where you get to choose exactly who you want to share your ads with and this will allow you to choose from a rather massive list of factors. These include:

• Demographics o Education

o Ethnic Affinity o Financial

o Generation

o Home

o Life events o Parents

o Politics

o Relationships

o Work

• Interests o There is a huge list here…

• Behaviors o Automotive o Behaviors o Behaviors targeting o Charitable donations o Consumer classification o Digital activities

o Expats o Financial o Mobile device user o Network connection o Purchase behavior o Residential profiles o Seasonal and events o Travel

• More Categories o Facebook Categories

§ Affinity for high value goods – India

§ Fast food

§ Nail care

Some of these points are self-explanatory and it’s clearly obvious why they would be relevant to your advertising efforts. Other items on this list might be a little more opaque and confusing – or

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you might have to think a little harder to understand how they’re relevant.

But the key is to be smart and to think about who is really likely to want your product – and sometimes, surprising things can help you here.

For example, if you are selling a weights bench, then you might choose to show it to bodybuilders who are homeowners (Behaviors > Residential profiles). Why? Because they’re much more likely to have the space to keep something so big, versus someone who is renting a small apartment!

Using This Tool

Note that there are a couple of subtleties to be aware of when using this section. When you list the things you are looking for in your users, note that these things are not necessary requirements. If you put everything into the top box, then your ads will show to people who tick all those boxes.

But if you click ‘Filter’ and ‘Narrow’ just below, then you get two more boxes. One says ‘and MUST ALSO match at least ONE of the following’. This is how you would make sure that your audience were bodybuilding homeowners for example, rather than bodybuilders and homeowners!

Likewise, you can use the filter section to exclude people from your ads. This is the section that says ‘EXCLUDE people who match at least ONE of the following’.

So this way, you could exclude women for instance, in order to target your product only at men. If you have product that is very budget minded, then you could look at ‘Behaviors > Buyer profiles > High spenders’ and use this to exclude people who like their premium products!

Using all these tricks, you can get inside the head of your buyer and then make sure that they specifically see your ad.

Facebook Local Awareness

Just to keep you on your toes, you don’t actually set the location of your adverts in the same place. Instead, you’re going to go through the ‘Local Awareness’ section.

First, create an ad campaign as you normally would but then look for the option in the left hand menu that is called ‘Local Awareness’. Click this and you’ll be shown a map and a search bar. You can now search for your local area using the town, city, state or ZIP code. You’ll then be given the option to choose a radius.

If you’re a furniture shop and you do home deliveries, then you might be happy to have a very large radius. If you’re a hair dresser on the other hand, then your radius will likely be much smaller, seeing as most people aren’t willing to travel much outside their local area to get a haircut!

The narrower your field, the fewer wasted clicks you’re going to get.

You can then scroll further to set the other filters as you normally would… it’s that simple! Note that just because you deliver internationally, that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want to choose your local area too. This way, you can try and corner the market in your hometown before expanding – it’s a good strategy

to get a foothold in the market when you’re starting out with perhaps a smaller budget.

Note too that when you create your Facebook Page, you’ll have the option to choose a coverage area. Make sure this is inkeeping with the area that your business serves and the ad campaigns you go on to create!

Custom Audiences

We mentioned at the start of this book that Facebook Ads included a lot of very smart and useful tools and features. Well, there are few better examples of this than custom audiences.

Essentially, custom audiences allow you to choose even more precisely who you want to target. How can you target someone more precisely than choosing their age, location, job and hobbies?

By literally writing down a list of the people you want to market to and sending it to Facebook!

This is just one example but actually there are a number of types of ‘custom audience’. Find them below… Customer List

This is the standard type of custom audience. All you’re doing here, is to literally give Facebook a list of contacts and then have

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those people be the only ones who see your ads. This is a fantastic way to turn a mailing list you may have been collecting from your website into a list you can then message from Facebook. Facebook will actually try to match phone numbers, emails or names with people in its database and that will then allow you to target them with your ads.

This is a perfect way to get even more value out of your mailing list. You know these are very warm leads, so perhaps all they need is that extra push on their Facebook page to buy your product!

Website Custom Audience

Here you place a ‘Facebook Pixel Tracking Code’ and use this for

Facebook remarketing. There’s a whole chapter on this below, so let’s gloss over it for now…

App Activity Custom Audiences

This is a custom audience based on how people use your desktop or mobile app. This is similar to remarketing, except you’re doing it through an application. This is a great choice if you are using an app as part of your marketing campaign – for instance if you have created an app to let patrons order food from your venue.

Look Alike Audiences

This is a particularly smart feature that Facebook offers marketers to find new potential customers. Here, once you have entered your mailing list or another custom list, you can then ask Facebook to look for more potential fans that have similar traits. For example then, if your list is filled with people of a certain age and with certain interests, Facebook will find more users that

match those demographics and then create an even bigger list for you. This is a great way to find more people just like the audience you’ve created so hard to create and it can save you a lot of time and money spent trying to perfect your targeting manually.

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Setting Bids and Budgeting

Now you’ve created your ad text, your image and your targeting, you need to think about the amount you’re going to spend on it. This is another big decision that will have all the impact on just how successful your ads are.

To start with, you will want to choose the specific bids that you set on your ads by going to your Ads Manager and then looking at the table at the bottom of the page where you can see all the ads you created. Select ‘All Ad Sets’ if any are missing. Now hover your mouse over the ads you want to edit and then click ‘Edit Ad Set’. Here, you’ll have the option to change your bids and your budget to more closely fit your budget.

But how much should you be willing to pay for your ads?

Choosing the Right Budget

Your aim is to generate profit. Whatever else you do when creating your ads, it should always serve this end goal and that means you need to think carefully about how you’re going to budget. Yes, spending more on Facebook Ads will ensure that more of your ads get seen and theoretically, you can invest a lot of money into your ads in order increase the number of hits on your site and therefore the number of sales. The more you spend on ads, the more people come to your site and the more money you make…

Except in reality, it’s often more complicated than that. For starters, you will likely have a limited budget. Secondly, it will usually take a small amount of time before you eventually stumble on the best type of ad, with the best targeting and the best script. In other words, you risk wasting a lot of money by blowing your whole budget right away on an ad campaign that doesn’t work.

This is why a smarter strategy is to work out how much budget you have to experiment with and then to gradually increase your spend as you become more and more confident in the strategy you’re using.

Of course you’ll need a bigger budget if you’re targeting a bigger niche too and for that reason, it can make sense to start out with a smaller niche where you can practice and then to move into bigger areas as you start to amass budget to spend and more experience on how to make the most of your adverts.

As mentioned, a good way to start setting your CPP is by looking at your CLV (customer lifetime value) and then working out how much each click is worth to you.

To work this out, first calculate how much profit you make on each sale. Once you’ve accounted for CoGS (Cost of Goods Sold – the overheads), how much of the revenue you make is actual profit? Now look at your conversion rates. When you get 10,000 clicks on your website, how many of those convert into paying customers?

If it’s 1%, then that means you’re now getting 100 sales for every 10,000 clicks from your ad. If you’re selling a $30 ebook, then you’re going to be earning $3,000 dollars for those 10,000 clicks – not bad!

If you’re paying $1 per click though, then suddenly that $3,000 doesn’t look so good anymore! Now you’re paying $10,000 to earn just $3,000… you see the problem?

If you lower your bid/daily budget, then you might find that your ad doesn’t show as often and you’re unable to generate many clicks at all. Another strategy then might be to sell a more niche product, where you only have to pay 10 cents to get the same amount of visibility because you’re not bidding against other big advertisers. Now you’re paying $1,000 for $3,000 worth of sales!

Another option is to increase the value of your product. Of course this will mean you’re going to sell fewer items but somewhere you should be able to find the ideal ‘middle ground’ where you’re shifting a good amount of products with a good profit margin each.

You might also take a look at the sales page itself – could you improve your conversion rates on the site? Could you get it up to a much better 10%?

The other thing to consider though is that aforementioned ‘life time value’. This becomes particularly important when you’re using ads to build a mailing list. Now you’re not earning anything per visitor but hopefully, you’ll building a list of highly targeted leads who you can sell to in future. You then need to calculate how many times each subscriber buys from you on average. If 5% of your subscribers have bought 10 things from you, then this makes them much more valuable than a single sale!

As you can see, the amount of money you spend on your ads is going to be closely linked to the value of your product, the niche you’re in and your overall strategy. It takes time to find the perfect balance though and to get all the different factors working for you and that’s why you need to keep some budget spare to ensure you have time to learn from your mistakes and to improve your setup. Once you get it right, you should then reinvest profit in order to keep scaling up your operation.

Note as well that this requires you to constantly watch your Facebook Ad metrics. Your Ad Manager will let you see how each ad is performing in terms of CTR (click through rate – how many people actually click on it), average CPC and CPM, impressions and more. This is important to keep checking because the more data you collect, the more easily you can improve your campaigns.

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CPA and the Different Types of Ad Campaign

What is CPA?

We’ve looked at how to go about selecting the perfect CPC for any given advert and choosing the right budget and the right bid. But there are ways you can avoid this altogether…

Another option is CPA. This only works for certain types of Facebook Ad (such as Facebook Likes, see below) but it essentially allows you to completely remove any risk of your ‘not working’.

CPA stands for ‘Cost Per Action’. This means that you aren’t paying each time your ad is clicked or seen but instead, you only pay when someone takes a specific action, which you will have chosen at the start.

Remember when we built our first ad and we mentioned that we were choosing an objective – and in our case that objective was to get people to click our link and go to our website? This was an example of CPC advertising because we paid for each click.

But there were other objectives here too, including the ability to

‘get installs of your app’ or to ‘get people to claim your promotion’.

These are actions. In one case, the action taken is people downloading your app. In the other, the action is people claiming the promotion. It’s also possible to approach page likes this way.

What this essentially means, is that you only pay when someone completes the action you want them to take. Earlier, we discussed that getting leads to sign up to a mailing list can actually be a smarter strategy if it means you’ll get an even higher CLV. So if you run the math and find the averages and you calculate that each subscriber is worth $3 to you over the course of a year, you can safely set your CPA so that you’re only paying $2 per subscriber and you’re now making and average of $1 profit. If you spend $200, that’s $100 profit over time.

Because there’s no chance of this going wrong, there’s no chance that you’re going to lose money. There’s an even more direct benefit to getting people to claim promotions, as this way you’re actually making a profit every time someone clicks. Unfortunately, the app CPA set up only works for free apps – but if you sell from your app then this can potentially offer you great value again.

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More Types of Ads

As you’ll recall, there were also numerous other types of ads – such as the ability to promote a product catalogue (probably using a carrousel ad), or the ability to get video views.

Another interesting option is the video views ad. This will let you embed or upload a video as your ad and that can give you a fantastic opportunity to promote a product in a very dynamic, engaging and emotive manner. This is like being able to sell door to door and you can use all of your charisma, all of your charm and all of your editing and music to really make the product you’re offering sound amazing.

While increasing profits is likely always going to be your end goal, think about what the best short term goal for your business is and once you’ve made that decision, consider what the best type of app is going to be to help you accomplish that.

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Facebook Remarketing

If you’ve used Google AdWords before, then you might be familiar with the notion of remarketing. Fortunately, Facebook also has its own version of this: The Facebook Pixel (also known as the

Customer Audience Pixel). Essentially, this is a cookie that you’ll place on your visitors’ computers when they’re visiting your site. This will then allow you to subsequently identify them on Facebook, thereby seeing whether someone viewing your ad has been to your website before or not.

This is remarketing because it means you’re now marketing adverts toward people who have already seen your website. That in turn makes them warm leads and this is especially powerful because the Facebook Pixel lets you look at all sorts of other metrics too – such as which pages they looked at and how long they were on your page for.

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You can actually target ads directly at users who visited your store and then lingered on one of the items. There’s a very high chance they’re interested in buying that item and so by using this strategy, you can ensure they’ll be likely to click your ad and hopefully make a purchase.

Creating Your Pixel

To create a Facebook pixel, just click ‘tools’ at the top menu and then select Pixels > Facebook Pixel. Choose Create Pixel and you’ll be given your pixel name. Choose a name that will represent your business (you only get one pixel per advertiser account) and then click ‘Create Pixel’. You’ll be given a snippet of code and all you need to do is to embed this on your page. You can also use this pixel to track certain actions by copying code for specific actions and then pasting it onto the pages that will track that action.

You’ll then head back to your Adverts Manager and then choose ‘Audiences’ under tools. We’re going to create an audience, using the pixel. To do this, select Website Traffic as your Custom

Audience. You can now create your advert to show only to people who have been on your pages and spent a certain amount of time there.

The biggest advantage of this is the power of timing. If someone has been looking at your products, then they probably want it. Unfortunately for you, they probably decided that logically, it wasn’t a good idea to spend the money. The thing to note is that we buy products based on emotions and not logic.

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If you were to try and target that same audience again then, at a time when perhaps they were tired and feeling a little more impulsive, you might just find that you have more luck. This is a surprisingly powerful method and certainly something to try as a part of your own strategy.

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Top Tips For Using Facebook Ads Effectively

At this point, you can consider yourself to be more advanced in your Facebook Ads strategies than 90% of the web. You should have a strong understanding of not only Facebook Ads themselves but also the best way to approach any kind of advertising online and how to build this around a business that lends itself to marketing.

But before you’re let loose, take a moment to consider these top tips and to recap on what we’ve learned so far…

Be Up-Front

To get the maximum ROI from your Facebook ads, make sure that you are being up-front and honest about your offer. This way,

only people potentially interested in buying from you or ordering from you will click the ad. Remember, Facebook ads are 'PPC' or 'Pay Per Click' and even if people don't actually click on your ads, you'll still be getting free exposure and thereby increasing your brand visibility.

Target Strictly

Facebook also allows you to target your ads by filtering who sees them based on their age, sex, location and interests. The stricter you are with these requirements, the more you will find your ROI increase further. Think about your 'typical' target audience and make sure they are the ones who see your advertising.

Use Eye Catching Headlines

While you want to avoid getting everyone to click indiscriminately, you do also want to ensure that as many people see your ads as possible. Even when you’re not selling to someone, letting them see your advert will help to build visibility!

So to that end, try using headlines that garner attention – whether that means they make a bold statement, or they just get people a little curious about something.

The same goes for your images. Try to use images that draw the eye. Images of people have been proven by studies to get more attention for instance!

Don’t be Afraid to Generalize

In our politically correct world, we are often taught not to generalize and not to assume things about people based on small amounts of information. When it comes to advertising though, small amounts of information are all we have and so we have to generalize.

Case in point, if you’re selling a book on bodybuilding then you might be aware that there are some female bodybuilders out there. But you know what? There are more male bodybuilders. So unless your book is specifically targeted at the fairer sex, it will make more sense for you to target guys.

Copycat

When using Facebook as a user, try to be a little conscious of the ads that show up and how they impact on you. Are they frustrating or potentially something you might click? Is this something you could do yourself?

While we all want to be unique, often the best strategy when it comes to marketing is just to see what is working and then to emulate it. There’s no reason you can’t do the precise same thing and get the precise same results. Think of it as inspiration!

Experiment

To get the most from Facebook ads, you need to try different combinations of filters, wording, images and more. Don't be afraid to experiment then to find the winning combo.

Use Facebook Generally

Facebook ads should be just one part of your Facebook advertising strategy. Combine this with a generally solid social media campaign and make sure you have a good Facebook page with regular posts.

Invest in High Quality

If you're going to pay for a Facebook ad, then you might as well pay for the design and make the most you can from those adverts. You can find a designer to create you a banner ad relatively cheaply and this will make a big difference to your clicks and conversions.

How to Adapt Your Strategy to the Unique Goals of Your Business

To recap on that advice then, you need to:

• Target your audience very precisely

• Use eye-catching headlines

• Test different bids to see what works

That’s all sound advice sure, but unfortunately it just doesn’t apply to everyone. What many people forget when it comes to marketing through Facebook ads, is that the best strategy will vary very much depending on what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. In this post, we’ll look a little bit at why that is and how to make sure you’re using the right methods to best achieve your goals.

For Selling an Affiliate Product

If your aim is to sell an affiliate product or any product for that matter, then the single most important thing is that you very precisely target your audience – even to the point of filtering.

Look at it this way: you are paying each time someone clicks on your advert and as such, you want to try and get as few people as possible to click and not buy. Your ROI is dependent on getting the highest possible percentage of clicks to convert into sales.

So one thing you need to do is to filter out all of the people who might click on your ad and then not actually buy anything. So how might you do this?

One trick will be to make sure you are using the Facebook Ads features to target the users precisely. If you’re selling wedding dresses for example, then you only want to target people who are female and engaged.

The other trick though is to put the price right there in the title. When people see that you’re selling a fitness eBook for $30 then they probably won’t click unless they’re willing to at least entertain the idea of spending that much money on an eBook. You could even weigh the odds further in your favour by having the book on discount and available for less once they load up the page.

For Selling a Big Ticket Item

When selling a big ticket item, it’s actually more important that you think about leads rather than customers. The more expensive the product you’re going to sell, the more you need to build trust and interest first.

Thus, you’re going to need to be willing to sink a little money upfront in order to invest in future sales and that CLV (customer lifetime value). To do this, you may want to avoid focussing purely on the types of advert that send people to a website or offer a special promotion and instead focus on CPA to get Facebook Likes or subscribers. This also has the advantage of being CPA vs CPP, meaning that you can more carefully calculate the CLV and then make sure you are turning a profit.

This is just like getting to know someone before you ask for their number – it tends to go a lot more smoothly!

For Promoting a Website

On the other hand though, if your aim is just to spread brand awareness and to get more fans for your website then you need as many people as possible to click on your ad. The same is true if you have a sales funnel that you’re very confident in.

Now you still want to target your ad but at the same time, you want to do anything you can to get people to click on it – because that is where you’ll start making the impression and converting people to fans.

In this case, you certainly wouldn’t want to mention the price and you may even try being purposefully vague in order to get people to visit.

Then again, if your ad is intended to build Facebook page likes, you’ll probably be using CPA (Cost Per Action). This means you’re only paying when someone actually goes through with the action of liking the page – meaning you can change your strategy entirely once again.

So there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach to Facebook ads. Be sure to think it through and to tweak the variables so that you maximize that ROI and not just clicks!

For Local Businesses

For local businesses, the key metric for targeting is of course going to be the local one. If you have a local store, then there’s no point in advertising to other countries unless you’re able to deliver there!

It will be worth setting up some kind of order form or ecommerce store if you want to make the most from Facebook Ads and the good news is that by using local targeting, you’ll be able to avoid direct competition with the huge players like Amazon.

A lot of the time though, you won’t want to choose CPA for local business. Local businesses are often about building a personal relationship with your audience – whether you’re a hair salon or a restaurant. Either way, you may do better to get Facebook Likes so that you can remind them of your business and promote your special offers. And of course special offer adverts also do very well, especially as these can be CPA too!

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Conclusion and Summary

And with that, we part ways. Hopefully, you will have found this book useful and learned a lot about how to get set up with Facebook Ads and how to use some of the more advanced features to target the precise right audience for your product, your service or your offer.

But moreover, I hope that it has made you think a little about your strategy and perhaps better understand how any marketing campaign works. The first quarter of this book we spent talking about creating a product, choosing the right niche and developing a buyer persona. This is absolutely crucial to success and what makes Facebook Ads so powerful is the fact that they allow you to target these very specific people and specific goals.

When you know exactly what your business is, what you’re trying to achieve and what you want to say, then you’ll have a much

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better idea of who your marketing needs to be aimed at. You’ll know not only their likely age, gender, location and other details like that – but also what other hobbies and interests they’re likely to have. You’ll know what they’re likely to do in their free time and you’ll have a better idea of why they might be interested in your brand to begin with.

Your objective is to try and avoid appealing to everyone or playing it safe. Instead, you need to have a clear idea of who you are and what your brand is about and you need to know exactly how you’re going to communicate that with your audience and exactly how you’re going to make them interested in what you have to offer. When you know this and when you embrace your message, you can find those true fans and market to them directly with a message they’ll respond to.

The rest is just math: working out precisely what the right spend is in order to ensure you’re making more conversions and earning more than you spend. Then you check the stats, you assess the model and you refine it. Over time, you make it more and more efficient until the point where you’re generating truly passive income and your ads are doing the heavy lifting of selling your products for you. All you have to do is keep adding great content to a blog – if that’s part of your strategy.

So here are your action points and the steps you need to take:

• Choose a niche and industry

• Decide the ‘why’ behind your business – what is your mission statement?

• Design a logo and a company name that expresses this ethos

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• Define your customer, think about the buyer persona  Create a Facebook page. Make sure to make your brand’s presence felt throughout it.

• Calculate your current conversion rates, profits and CLV

• Use this information to set a bid for your ads

• Calculate your current budget

• Start running your ads, making sure that you leave some budget free to experiment

• Target your ads directly at your audience, using targeting, custom audiences and the other advanced techniques discussed in this text

• Watch your metrics closely, tweak, refine and iterate

• Once you find that magic formula, keep increasing your spend to scale your business and your profits

It really is that easy – but only if you have a great product, a real vision and a good understanding of your audience.

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