How We Became Successful with Facebook Ads

Step 1– I watched Ryan Diess’s video on how they were targeting traffic with Facebook Ads

Step 2– Put a campaign together, created an Ad, set a landing page loaded the budget

Step 3– Added more Budget

Step 4– Got a Like

Step 5– I got more serious about it and set up 10 campaigns, tested the Ad’s, Landing Pages and set goals and yes, added more budget

Conclusion- Facebook really works, but you need to have a great strategy going in, plan it and plan on optimizing it. Just because it costs .24 per 1,000 views doesn’t mean that your add will be noticed 1,000 times. There is a lot happening on a Facebook newsfeed and the visitor is there to read the feed, not view the Ad’s.

Something else to consider when starting a Facebook campaign, your advertising is disruptive. Facebook Ad’s can be more compared to Google Display or Banner Ad’s rather than Google Text or Search Ad’s. When people go to Google and do a search, they are seeking the information your Ad should be providing them. With Facebook, they are there for a totally different reason. When you get someone’s attention and they do click your Ad, you are disrupting what they are doing and making them go in a different direction.

What we have discovered is that your Ad really needs to stand out, cater to the demographic and geographic location of the viewer and if your trying to drive traffic into a physical location it really needs to be a great offer to get someone to get up from their computer, get in the car and drive to the location.

Here are some examples of offers that we tried that produced little to no results for a Hot Wing restaurant in a Chicago suburb:

  1. Free 24 oz drink with the purchase of any combo
  2. By a combo get 3 free boneless wings
  3. 10% off purchase of $10 or more

Let’s analyze the offers and see what was wrong, #1- A free drink was just not valuable enough to get someone to come in right now. #2- If your really hungry, you may consider it #3- So I get a $1 off, ok, I will just wait until I ride by the location and pay the extra $1

After begging and pleading with the owner of the business, he finally let us spend some money on the offers:

  1. Free Wings- Loyalty program- 5 Visits and your sixth combo is free
  2. Enter for a chance to Win $100 Gift Card- Must submit the voucher at the location (30 Day Deadline)
  3. New Customers Only- First Combo is on us- Limited to the 1st 50

Now when the viewer clicked the Ad, they went to a Tab on the customer’s Facebook Fan Page and read a more detailed description of the offer, to receive the offer they had to click the Like button, then we asked where should we send the coupon, e-mail or mobile and they submitted that information to us.

The overall Ad spend was around $350, it resulted in over 6,000 likes in 30 days and 98% of those were retained. When we launched the New Customer freebie, we had to turn the campaign off for a day due to the line of customers and guess what, the customers that came in from this, brought other people with them.

While we were launching this campaign, the owner and manager of the location were doing a great job (and continue to do so) of updating the timeline, catering to the new customers to get them back in the door, and taking pictures of his fans and telling everyone what they like such as the Boneless Wings, Hot and Spicy or ragin-cajin.

Now, take the great offer idea, focus on a 25 or 50 mile radius, target new business and see what a campaign like this would do for:

  • Dentist
  • Medical Practices
  • Veterinarians
  • Financial Advisors
  • eCommerce Stores
  • Contractors
  • Auto Shops
  • Car Dealers
  • Real Estate Agents
  • Restaurants

Need Ideas? Want to know what tools we used for the Coupon Vouchers, Like/Reveal tab or the Auto-response system for the e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers they gave us? Just leave me a comment below…

 

One thought on “How We Became Successful with Facebook Ads

  1. These are great steps to follow. They can be used when creating a channel with Facebook, Google+, YouTube, your own blogs, etc. As a business consultant I constantly advise clients to wisely spend on advertising. Obviously the real skill here is how to articulate the ads and how to test for success. Paying for that expertise is worth every penny…. that is what I mean when I advise to “wisely spend on advertising”. Anyway, great article.

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