Top 9 secrets to success with Facebook Ads
We have been working with Facebook Ads in B2C verticals where our clients include the Automotive, Cosmetics, and Hospitality sectors. Each client has unique business processes inside their building that makes conversion and follow-up of these Facebook ads challenging and existing. As a lead generation platform, Facebook will indeed help bring the customers to your client’s door, but who will answer the door?
That’s why we wanted these best practices in Social Media Marketing and Ads that we have now developed to help all B2C companies. The goal is to help management teams identify the missing resources and processes that will help them succeed with Facebook Marketing.
Here are a few examples of best practices we recommend for Facebook Ads:
Evangelize
Like the early days of internet marketing, most of our target audience needs education about the mechanics of social engagement and Facebook ads. Take the time to answer questions about the different types of ads you are recommending and how that content will be shown to potential buyers. Commit to training ALL the sales and service staff who will be responding to Facebook ads to eliminate the risk of failure due to untrained staff.
Our marketing agreements include training at least 2 Sales Reps on social engagement. We give these reps an in-depth view of how the ads are developed and where the contact information comes from. We also coach these reps about the best engagement models where they can preview the Facebook profiles of the buyers to better understand buyers’ needs. We also cover commitment to price and inventory which has legal implications in most States.
Unique Phone Number
Use a unique phone number that will make it easier to measure the success of your Facebook campaigns. For instance, if you are doing Google AdWords to market your Wedding Service at your hotels, assign a unique number to Facebook ads to distinguish where the leads came from.
Used Video Ads
Facebook Video ads have 30% more consumption than ads with static images. More than 1 Billion video minutes are being consumed on Facebook every day and the trend is growing. Our video ads for the Automotive sector, are producing buyer leads within hours. The challenge with the brands is that they are still producing long videos as if they will be consumed on TV! These ads should be 10-30 seconds long. Facebook has proven that video consumption drops of f=You should monitor your video Insight to see how many of the videos are being watched and then tailor your future campaigns.
Convert on Mobile
With the advent of Facebook Lead Ads, you now have the option to convert your leads on Facebook which eliminates the need for a browser to be launched. Another powerful feature of these Ads is that the user’s contact information is auto-populated and released from their Facebook profile which eliminates the need for any data entry. This makes these ads optimal for conversion where they just have to hit “Submit”.
Unique URL
If converting on Facebook is NOT an option, then take the extra step to create unique URLs for each Facebook campaign. This will make it much simpler for you to determine which campaigns are producing the best results. It’s a sin to use the same URL for your landing page that you use for all your other campaigns.
Don’t over-rely on Auto-Responders
Gone are the days of auto-ponderers. They don’t work with Social Media ads. The expectations of your target audience who post questions to your social media ads are that someone well-informed needs to contact them soon. And that response better contains useful, relevant, and engaging information to compel them to take further action.
Use CRM
With the massive volume of social engagement data that Facebook Ads generate, it’s impossible to manage the follow-up without a CRM. We are generating more than 3 buyers within a few hours of a Used Car ad campaign. Without a CRM follow-up, you will lose these buyers to your competitors.
In summary, don’t market Facebook as the Silver Bullet that will solve ALL of your customer’s lead generation problems. In fact, expect plenty of jockeys who will blame the Facebook horse when they fail to implement these best practices. One automotive client assigned 11 different sales reps to Facebook campaigns in the span of 3 months; only to find out that none of them were willing to follow up with these buyers through their CRM.
Set achievable expectations
Our experience with Facebook ads in some of the verticals like Automotive is that marketers are over-promising and under-delivering. And when the management team is unimpressed with the results, Facebook is the easy target to blame.
Some marketing and advertising companies are branding themselves with bogus grantee offers of car sales if an auto dealer buys their Facebook service!! This is a dog whistle, that you should avoid at all costs. After all, as a marketing company, we do not control our client’s prices. How can we commit to a certain number of sold cars, if your cars are over-priced for the local market?
