4 Ways To Know If You're Ready

To Run Facebook Ads

Facebook ads work.

But will they work for you?

It's not as easy as putting €20 into an ad and then just sitting back and waiting for all the sales to roll in.

That can happen, but you need to have a few things in place first.

Let's walk through the four things you need to know before you put your money where your content is.

It's true in organic marketing and it's true in paid marketing...

If you don't know who your audience is,

your ad money won't take you very far.

And I'm not just talking about the basic demographics.

Facebook has the ability to target really specific people.

You need to know WHO your ideal client is in terms of their age, gender, location, marital status, education level AND you need to know the psychographics.

Psychographics are where the magic is. 

This is what differentiates two people who look the same on paper, between who will buy from you and who won't.

This is what Facebook calls 'interests'. You can target someone based on their behaviours and interests.

So if you're selling a mindset course, rather than targeting women in Ireland, you are targeting women, aged 35-45 who never married, don't have kids, and are spiritual.

Much higher success rate!

Knowing your WHO is everything.

That's why I spend a lot of time helping my clients uncover their WHO and I always advise them not to pay for advertising until they know the demographics and psychographics of their ideal client.

You want to get to the stage where you are walking down the street and see a stranger and say to yourself 'that's my ideal client'!

Ask yourself, WHAT action do you want people to take when they see your ad?

Are you ready to funnel them to your main offer?

Facebook advertising can do three things;

1. Create brand awareness (Awareness)

2. Send people to your website (Consideration)

3. Convert them to buy (Conversion)

This is how they categories their ads when you are creating them (see below).

This is where your advertising strategy comes in; you can use Facebook ads to bring your ideal clients along their customer journey.

Here's is what a typical customer journey looks like:

They start by not knowing who you are (brand awareness).

Then they know who you are and are curious to learn more (send them to your website).

And finally they have gathered enough information and trust that they want to buy from you (convert them to buy).

You need to design your ads based on what action you want them to take.

It can be a good idea to run ads simultaneously targeting people on these three stages of the customer journey, but as you can guess, these will be three very different ads.

Let's assume you know WHO and WHAT, now you need to know WHERE are you targeting these people.

I don't just mean their geographic location, but where on social media.

This is what Facebook calls 'placement'.

You can allow Facebook to automatically place your ad across Facebook, messenger, Instagram and whats app etc, or you can select the exact places you want your ad to be show to target your client.

This comes back to knowing WHO your ideal client is so you can figure out WHERE they spend their time. Maybe they are not on Instagram. So there is no point you targeting them there. Maybe your ad creative has been specifically designed for Facebook so it won't be legible on Instagram or Instagram Stories anyway.

There are two key things that will influence WHERE you place your ads;

- your creative (the size etc of the ad so that it will appear correctly across all platforms)

- where your ideal client hangs out

You can of course test this out by allowing Facebook to automatically place the ad and then study the results and adjust accordingly.

This one is about you. WHEN are you ready to run ads?

Well, once you can answer the WHO, WHAT AND WHERE of your ads, I would say you are good to go!

But start small, and test.

Facebook ads are all about testing.

You can split test ads in Facebook.

That means you can use a small ad spend to figure out who your best audience is, what type of image/video they resonate with most and what kind of creative copy they respond to.

If you have less than 1000 Facebook Page likes

I would focus on Brand Awareness Ads on a small budget (say €5 a day).

You primary goal here is testing what works, uncovering your perfect audience and inviting them to like your page.

Once you have done that you will have learned a lot and the next step (sending them to your website and converting to sales) will become a lot easier.

Ads work, once you know four things:

WHO you are targeting

WHAT action do you want people to take

WHERE you are reaching the right people

WHEN you are ready, testing will play a big role in this

Do you need one to one help with your social media?

I run a 12 week program where I simplify social media for small business owners

who didn't grow up using it.

If you need one to one help growing your business online

turning Facebook & Instagram into sales tools, this is for you.

Apply for my 16 week program today.