I hope you find these tips useful and it helps you boost your sales or reduce your advertising spend.It is a difficult time for small business owners right now. If you do find this article useful please help others in your network by sharing it on Linkedin and facebook.
How to see your competitors facebook ads
It may just be out of curiosity or you may be looking for inspiration to improve your Facebook ads, being able to look at your competitors facebook ads can be useful.
To do so go to your competitors facebook page. Scroll down to “Page Transparency” and click on “See All”
Scroll down and click on “Go To Ad Library”
At the top where it says “Filter by” change the first drop down to “All”.
The ads which are running the longest, in general, will be the ones which are working well.
Facebook ads not working for your service business?
Often Facebook isn’t suitable for selling services directly to a cold audience. It’s like asking someone you don’t know to go for dinner with you. It takes time to know someone before you extend a social invitation.
Similarly, if you are running ads for your service business you should consider using Facebook to help warm up your audience rather than trying to sell your service directly.
How can you do this? You can run ads for a free guide, webinar or provide a free assessment. This is known as a lead magnet.
In return for access to your lead magnet people provide you with their email address. You then warm up your audience by providing them with free useful content and client testimonials over a period of time. This approach tends to work better for a lot of services.
If you would like to watch a free video on how email list building can help your business get new customers you can get access to a free video here. Step by step tutorials are also available here.
How to show ads to your competitors’ customers
This is only possible if your competitor has a high level of interest among facebook users.
When you set up your ads on facebook when you come to the detailed targeting section you can enter in your competitors name as an interest.
This means that people who have liked your competitors page or have interacted with websites which reference your competitors name (and have a facebook pixel installed) will be shown your ads.
This strategy only works if you have a vastly superior product or service. It also works if your competitors’ customers are very dissatisfied with the current offering.
What is a facebook pixel and why you need to set it up on your website
A facebook pixel is a piece of code you add to your website which allows you to track users on your website. The main things a facebook pixel can do are:
- Track specific actions of users on your website
- Log users who have been on your website
When you run ads on facebook you first start with your campaign goal. There are a number of goals to choose from. The best goal you can select is conversions. The only way you can use a conversion goal is by having the facebook pixel installed on your website.
Let’s take an example. Say you sell online courses. Using the Facebook pixel you can say I want to track every time a user signs up to my email list. You set up an event called lead.
When you set up your ads and you select the conversion goal, Facebook will show your ads to those mostly likely to sign up to your email list.
What happens when you don’t select conversions? Say for example you select traffic. Then facebook will focus on getting you clicks. It will put your ads in front of the clickiest people on facebook to drive up the number of clicks which is completely useless in terms of building up leads for your email list.
The other useful thing a Facebook pixel can do is create an audience. The Facebook pixel creates a list of users who visited your website. When you run ads on Facebook you can run your ads to those people who have visited your website. You can also run ads to those users who triggered certain events e.g. abandoned their shopping cart.
The final thing you can do with your facebook pixel is a lookalike audience. Using the list of people who have visited your website created by your pixel, you can create a new audience which is similar to that list but much bigger.
You can then run your ads to a much bigger audience than just those who have visited your website.
However, the best option is to create a lookalike audience based on your existing customers (based on their email) rather than people who have just visited your website.
Running ads to a lookalike audience who are just like your customers with the goal of conversations is one of the most effective forms of advertising on Facebook.
Never boost a post
The boost your post button or the “waste your money” button should not be used to promote your business on facebook. From personal experience I’ve had little success with this form of promotion.
The reason is because, as we mentioned earlier, every advertising campaign has an objective. The objective of boosting a post is engagements. This means facebook will put your ads in front of people who have a history of clicking and leaving comments on ads.
Surprisingly, this isn’t going to pay the bills.
You need your ads going in front of people who are going to make a purchase.
Instead, if you have a post which has a lot of likes and comments you can still use it as an ad with the conversions goal once you have the facebook pixel set up on your website.
To create a facebook ad with an existing post create a new campaign and select Conversions as the goal. Complete the ad set steps. When you get to the ad directly under Ad Setup click Create Ad and select “Use Existing Post” and select the post you want to promote.
This is a much better way to promote an existing post than using the boost post button.
Bonus – How to target business owners on facebook
Advertising to business owners is very expensive on Linkedin. But you can advertise to business owners on facebook.
In the detailed targeting section of your add type in “Business page admin”. Make sure on the right of the option it says Behaviour.
Now when you run your ads it will be shown to people who are the administrator of facebook pages the majority of which will be small business owners.
You can also target potential business owners by targeting their interests such as Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank and excluding those who are Facebook page administrators.
If you found this article useful please share on Linkedin and Facebook and help others in your network.
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