Some companies have tons of marketing resources to tap into.
A highly profitable beauty brand can create new content and campaigns on demand.
But what do you do if you don’t have a massive budget? If you’re a small business or agency, you don’t need a huge selection of expensive bells and whistles to stand out on the web.
If you already have a website and online assets available, then you can make the most of what you’ve got without having to construct any new fancy experiences from scratch. Using Facebook and Google Analytics, you can figure out what’s working best for your business and amplify any existing success through your ad campaigns.
Finding the Best Landing Pages for Your Campaign
Virtually every company in the modern world has a website.
On that site, your visitors will likely have the option to connect with you in some way about your services and products. From there, you’ll be able to build the foundations to start advertising.
The great thing about Facebook ads, is that you’re not restricted by specific keywords or phrases. However, you will need to access your website data to make sure you’re leveraging the right assets.
Start by implementing Google Analytics with your website (if you haven’t already). You can use the technology to establish goals tying back to your business objectives. When you can analyse goals in your Google Analytics, the process of creating a Facebook campaign becomes easier.
Analyze your strongest website pages by selecting the reverse goal path strategy under the conversions section in Google Analytics. Doing this gives you an insight into which URL slugs on your site generate the highest volume of results.
Planning Your Campaign
After you identify the page that yields the most goal results, you can either clone that page and try using the new version for pulling in new traffic, or you can experiment with UTM parameters. The second option is generally the easiest.
Cloning your page means that you need to remove it from the rest of your site navigation, which can be a complicated process. Once you have your Google Analytics tracking sorted, you can ensure you have a Facebook Pixel implemented on your website.
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code placed in the header tag of your website. This is crucial for tracking users for building remarketing audiences and custom conversions. If you don’t have the Facebook pixel on your site, you can generate one by going to your ads manager and clicking the drop-down menu.
Copy/paste the destination or thank-you page for the offer as a custom conversion and make sure it’s properly named. This is the page your users will visit after they submit their information. Your ad pixel will tell ads manager that a conversion has occurred. If prospects don’t go to another page, but an “event” takes place, you’ll need to create a standard event campaign instead.
Creating Your Facebook Ad Campaign
Once you have your custom conversion ready, it’s time to create the ad campaign you want to use with your offer. Click on the create campaign option to begin, and make sure that your strategy is optimized to find the users most likely to drive the results you need.
Select the Conversions option under the campaign objective and decide which conversion event you want to optimize for. You can do this because you chose conversion as a campaign objective. Basically, this lets Facebook know you want to optimize your campaign for conversions.
When creating the target audience for your campaigns, you’ll have various options at your disposal. Facebook uses a proprietary algorithm to learn what kind of people convert when interacting with your ads. Options for your target audience might include:
- Website remarketing: If you have a healthy flow of website traffic, it will help you to create a remarketing audience for your campaign. Assuming the pixel is running on your site, you can create an audience that will allow you to market to people familiar with you. To create the audience, click on the custom audience option, then select all website traffic. You can also set a specific time for your audience.
- Custom lists: Another option for Facebook ads is to upload an CSV file of contacts. This can be a very effective option if you have a database of customers or prospects that you’d like to market to directly. Just as before, click on the create a new audience option, then customer file. Once the audience uploads and matches, you can select it within the ad set, just as you would a remarketing audience.
- Lookalike audiences: Facebook allows users to leverage custom lists, remarketing, and custom conversion audiences with lookalikes. This is a great way to expand your ad reach to users who are similar to their respective source audience. You can select Lookalike audience from the create audience tab.
- Manual targeting: If you don’t have much in the way of custom lists and web traffic, and you want to scale reliably and effectively, mastering the art of creating target audiences is crucial to getting to that next level. Creating manual target audiences requires a lot of detail when looking at behavioral, interest, and demographic data.
Designing Facebook Ad Creative
The final step in creating your Facebook ad campaign is designing your Facebook ads. The first step is making 2 or 3 variations of the same ad within a set. This supports Facebook’s algorithm in determining which version of your ad should be the most effective for your target audience.
Head into the power editor and take the URL you got when you used the your UTM parameter. You can paste this within the website URL section. Pasting an URL should automatically generate a preview for your ad. If the site you’re linking to has an image on the page, the ad will pull that image for you. On the other hand, you may need to upload a picture of your own.
Remember, the best size for all ad placements when it comes to images is 1200 x 628 pixels. This will fit the desktop version of an ad well, but it scales down effectively to suit other mobile devices too. If you want to upload an image from scratch, just click on select image.
Both the image and any copy you’re adding to your Facebook ads needs to be professional, compelling, and relevant to the offer. Remember that Facebook does limit the reach of your ad if your image contains too much text. This means it’s important to use an ad with as little text as possible.
The good news is that you don’t need a professional design platform like Adobe Cloud to get started. You can access websites like Canva for free templates that specifically work with Facebook ad campaigns. Remember, keep the image simple and focused, and ensure that it delivers the right information to your audience. You need a reason for them to click.
Regularly Analyze and Optimize
Finally, if you’re just getting started with your Facebook ad campaigns, using the existing marketing collateral you already have should help you to minimize your spend, and improve your company’s reach. You’d be surprised how much you can accomplish with only the assets that you have today.
Crucially, however, having a simple offer and website doesn’t guarantee success. The basics of landing page optimization, compelling ad copy, and unique selling propositions still apply. If you’re a new business, you can take your successes and failures from Facebook, and use them to optimize and adjust the way you showcase your offer.
Don’t limit yourself to only re-using the resources you already have on your website and throughout your digital landscape – however. It’s important to make sure that you’re considering the opportunities that may be available to you when you start from scratch too.
Designing new ad campaigns that focus on upcoming products, sales, and other efforts will boost your chances of successfully connecting with your target audience.
Be sure you have analytics and metric measuring opportunities available too. This will give you a deeper insight into what’s going on with your efforts. Every time you run a new campaign, the results you receive will give you an insight into what’s truly possible for your brand, and what your audience expects from you.
Creating Affordable Ad Campaigns
You’ve got to invest in your company if you want it to be a lucrative success in today’s competitive landscape. However, that doesn’t have to mean spending a fortune. Using the assets you already have; you can create low-budget ad campaigns that really speak to your customers and drive more success for your website.
At the very least, using your existing assets means that you’ll be able to stretch your brand image into new environments, and reduce your risks of minimal ROI on a new investment. The more you learn from these tester campaigns, the easier it will be to make a profit in the future. Don’t forget, you can always reach out to the Graygency for targeted support too.
