Let’s talk Facebook ads. There… I said it and you might be running for the hills or you might be thinking ‘sure, I’d like to learn more’.

You’ve heard of Facebook ads right? Perhaps you’ve seen them in your news feed (it will say sponsored post), you may have even created an ad account, and maybe you’ve even tried running a Facebook ads campaign. If you’ve never run Facebook ads before, don’t worry too much. Plenty of people haven’t, and I’m not going to hold it against you, it’s totally fine.

I want to encourage you to consider Facebook ads, and learning more about them, because even though you can waste a lot of money with Facebook Ads, you can also MAKE a lot of money using Facebook Ads. The trick is knowing a few things before you dive in. Today I want to give you 5 tips for a successful Facebook advertising campaign.

Be clear on your goal

As with any marketing activity, you need to know why you’re going to run a Facebook advertising campaign. What is it that you want to achieve? My personal favourite is running a campaign to grow your community by growing your list. If this is something you are looking to do, then your goal formulation would be to ‘grow my list’.

Don’t stop there though. Let’s refine your goal a bit further. How much do you want to grow your list and what would the time-frame be for this?

Keeping in mind the type of platform Facebook is, your ads should mainly be used to generate demand, not fulfill it. People are on Facebook to connect with their friends, generally not to find products to buy.

Set a budget (and stick to it)

As I mentioned at the start, you can waste a lot of money on Facebook ads, so I encourage you to set a budget before you start your campaign. There are methods to calculate the budget you need to reach your goal, which I teach in the FB Ads for List Building course. It basically involves some pre-campaign testing to see what your cost per conversion is which will then allow you to calculate your total budget.

Or you can define a total amount that you’d be willing to spend on your ads campaign and put that in as a total budget and work with that. It’s not necessarily the best approach to setting your budget as you may not be getting the best results. I recommend the previous method and sticking to your ads budget until you know what does and doesn’t work.

Create strong content and CTA

Content is what helps you get noticed, content is what helps your tribe make decisions, content is there to invite people in. It’s important to use visual content that is in line with your brand, it speaks to your audience and grabs their attention. Visual content, or images, will be the first thing people notice in their news-feed so you really want your image to capture their attention so that they will actually read the written words.

Once you have their attention, you need to speak directly to them with your written content. Write a headline and body text in a way that makes your audience feel like it’s for them. Make it irresistible for them to say no and scroll on and then make a strong call to action, or CTA, in which you tell them what to do next. Facebook gives you options such as ‘learn more’, ‘download’, ‘buy now’. Choose what is most relevant for your ad type.

Know your metrics

Remember the first point I made? Being clear on your goals? It will help you figure out what you need to measure and filter through what is and what isn’t important to look at in your ads manager. If your goal is to grow your community (i.e. list) you need to know what to measure and focus on that. Facebook gives you lots of statistics, and one that’s important to take note of is the CTR, or click through rate, as well as the cost per conversion.

Test… and improve

Facebook ads is a wonderful marketing tool. It’s the first time ever that businesses are able to have access to so much data about their audience and are able to use that data for laser sharp targeting. Facebook ads give you the option of using demographics like location, age, language and education level to target your audience. It gets even better and more targeted. You can target parents, couples, newly engaged couples, and people who speak French but live in Australia. Pretty cool right?

It’s important to keep an eye on your ads during the campaign so that you can make changes and focus more on the campaigns that work and switch the ones of that don’t work… and all of that while the campaign is running. Can you imagine pulling a magazine ad in the middle of a campaign, after it has gone to print? Impossible!