[Webinar] How to Reach the Right People with Facebook Ads

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Launching a Facebook campaign takes a lot of work, but, you’ll save a lot of time when you know who you’re trying to reach. This involves a little bit of upfront work by creating a buyer persona, but it’s well worth the effort.

Knowing your target audience, allows you to navigate Facebook’s targeting options with ease. We also created a checklist to help walk you through setting up a campaign. 
 

In this webinar, we cover the following:
  • How Facebook ads work
  • How to create a buyer persona and use that information effectively
  • How to create different audiences in Facebook, so that your ads show to the right people.

Questions and Answers

There were a lot of great questions during the webinar. To hear what people asked, and our responses, skip ahead to 19:40 in the video above.

Webinar Checklist

Video Transcription

Ravin: Hey everyone, and welcome to the Facebook webinar. I’m Ravin.

Tori: Hi, I’m Tori. As you join, please type in the questions box where you’re joining from. And you’ll also see a PDF in the panel that you can download. A simple checklist to walk through with the call. Alright, we have someone here from Kansas City. Awesome. Hello. Oh, Mississippi, cool. Toronto. Hi, Toronto, South Carolina, Connecticut. Hello, Connecticut. How cold is it? They’re awesome. New York City, Atlanta. Okay, cool people from all over.

Ravin: Okay, I think we have enough people who’ve joined now. And we’re going to get things underway. So the goal of today’s webinar is not to, you know, go into too much detail or present a super long webinar, we really want to provide value. But what we want you to take away from today is we’re going to go over and cover some of the benefits of why Facebook might be useful to you. And if it could be a good fit for you. What we don’t want to do is get too much into the weeds in this webinar.

We want to make sure that if you do decide to move forward with Facebook advertising, that you understand how to make it more effective. And also that you do end up making a more informed decision.

Now, if that’s not for you, feel free to drop off today. Because we don’t want to waste your time.

Tori: Yeah, but this will be for the group of people here that wants to know how you can take advantage of the Facebook advertising platform. And you know, you all are probably trying to figure out how to get exposure to your target audience. And you’ve probably wondered which platform is right for you how you can reach the people that you’re targeting. And that’s what we’re going to dive in today. So today, we’re going to talk about the Facebook advertising platform. And now before we get started, we do want to know where everyone stands with Facebook advertising. So you should see a poll pop up here on your screen here. And we’re just going to, we just want to walk through and figure out where how you guys have used Facebook advertising. So on your screen, please let us know if you’ve never heard of it, if you know what it is but you’ve never really used it, if you’ve tried running your own campaign, but you’re just here to learn more, or if you’ve already, you know, had a successful campaign or you’re currently running a successful campaign, please let us know.

Ravin: Yeah, I’ve been fortunate enough to speak with a few of you in the phone. And I often hear it is a struggle knowing which platforms work the best. Maybe you’ve tried a few different things here and there. So here today, we just want to make sure that we keep things simple and high level but give you enough information to help identify whether Facebook is a platform that could potentially help you.
 
Tori: Right. Awesome. Looks like we have a lot of people here who know about Facebook advertising, but you haven’t really used it. So that’s great this presentation so they will give you a good overview of how you can tackle that and get started with your target audience and then leveraging the Facebook audience platform.

Ravin: So to begin, let’s take a quick look and get a basic understanding of how Facebook advertising works.

Alright, so let’s look at what an actual Facebook ad looks like. You know, I’m sure you found yourself scrolling through Facebook before you know, between photos of your friends and on vacation and you know, status updates for your family members. You may have noticed posts from companies and in these posts, you might see the text that says sponsored in it. So these are actually Facebook advertisements I’ve highlighted sponsored in a pink rectangle on this slide.

Now, these are examples of ads that actually showed up on my own personal newsfeed. So why are these ads showing up on my newsfeed? Well, the reason is that

 I am a part of an audience for the advertisers. So whoever’s running the ads for these companies have set up within Facebook itself set in parameters, and they’ve identified me as potentially wanting to be, you know, a part of, or buying products from these companies, or subscribing to particular services or further during my education at a particular University.

And that might be because of my demographics. So my age, because I’m a male, because of the actual geographic location I’m in. It could also be that have actually visited these websites before but never really taken any action. So these companies are retargeting me on Facebook.

So let’s take a look at what happens when I actually click an ad. Now, there are a number of things that can happen on Facebook, when you click an ad, sometimes you may be taken to the company page, the Facebook page of that particular company. In some cases, you may be sent directly to a website.

Now, in this example, I clicked on skillshare.com or, the ad that they were showing to me. And it actually took me to a page on their website that was offering me a 30-day free trial. So you can see that first I was identified to be a part of a particular audience, then I was shown an ad. And finally, when I clicked on the ad, I was presented with an offer. So Tori is going to jump a little bit more into those three particular things, the audience, the ad, and the offer.

But you know, for example, if you’re an accountant was looking for more clients, you might show an ad on Facebook, which takes people to a page on your website. And on that page, you could have something useful, like a downloadable checklist for small business accounting. And if people give their name and contact information to get that checklist, you’ll be able to follow up with them and capture lead, essentially,

Tori: Right. Yeah, so as Ravin mentioned, at a high level three things that make an effective campaign one your audience, it is very, very important. And we’re going to walk through this a little bit more in depth. But it’s very important that you know, your audience. And that’s actually the goal of today’s webinar is to talk about how you leverage knowing who your audience is, in order to make an effective campaign. Once you know who your audience is, and you’re targeting that in your campaign, you’re able to then focus on the messaging for the ad, the look and feel in order to actually entice people and draw attention. And lastly, as Ravin mentioned, he wants to make sure that you have a strong offer a strong call to action.

So within today, what we’re going to talk about is knowing your audience, so that way, you’re able to leverage your messaging and three, eight that story and walk your potential clients and customers through a path of taking them from your ad to getting them to your website, to actually getting them down your path and down their journey of being a client with you. Okay, now, before we can do that, we want to focus on how you how important it is to actually connect with your audience.

Now, you might have found yourself in a situation before where maybe you’ve tried writing an ad, you try writing email campaigns, and if you find it a little difficult, and it’s mainly because the challenge here is that we’re often not speaking to a particular person, we know that we want to target an audience that we don’t know who that is. And so what we want to focus on is that you have to, before we dig into the technical size of Facebook, before we talk about the actual platform, take it back to the basics and identify who it is that you’re going to target. Okay, so when you know the specific target, it becomes easier for you to create your campaign. Okay, so the way that we do this, the way that we recommend you all doing it is by creating buyer personas.

Now buyer personas are simply just a fictional character that you create that represents your target audience. Okay, now you guys have probably heard of this is the keyword that you probably hear a lot is one of those target buzzwords. But it’s really important. So what I’m going to walk you through is an example of a buyer persona for a financial advisor company, right? So today, this is what if we were to create a target persona for financial advisor, a financial advisor looking for clients, we would look at someone that could potentially be named is that going to be lane so what the way that you come up with this is to break it down, you will start with giving that person a name and his shot.

Now, this basically just allows you to humanize who your audiences so you’re taking it from this big this mass field of knowing that you are trying to reach this large audience and you’re just taking it a step-down and you make you’re making it very granular. Okay, now, in this case, we’ve chosen her name to be a lane the executive. This is how she will look, the way that we’ve gotten to this photo is by ignore her demographics, okay, so she’s obviously a woman, she’s in her 40s. And we know that we want to target people based on their education. If they have a family, a financial advisor will be looking for someone who is making a certain annual income, the location is also important, depending on where you were to surface, but getting very granular about who it is and painting that broad picture is going to help you. And then, of course, you need to know what it is that someone like Elaine would be interested in. Okay. So it’s important to know their goals, what they’re interested in, because you can then use this type of stuff in the Facebook ad platform when you’re setting up a campaign now, for example, we need to know is Elaine trying to save time? Is she interested in just getting savings you see interested in saving go for retirement for her college funds for her children?

All these things are things that you need to know what are the goals because then you’re able to create your messaging creator campaign around all of that, and you put your company as the guide for Elaine. Now, on top of norm, her goals, there’s always going to be common objections, right. So for example, a lane may not be looking for something like a commission payment structure. Okay. So once you know that your target audience and maybe you gather this and sales calls, from emails or messages that you receive, you kind of know what your target audience is looking for, what they don’t like, what they don’t like hearing what kind of stops them from continuing down your path. And you use that and you say, okay, but we know that our target audience doesn’t, they’re not interested in commission payment structures. So then you’re going to be offering the fee-based type of structure and your offers and your messaging. Ok.

Now, another thing that’s good to know about your target audience is where they get their information from, you know, you want to get as granular, granular as you can with who the person is. So for example, someone like Elaine would listen to CNN Money, we know that she likes to read information from people like Dave Ramsey, because that is the type of stuff that she’s looking at, to get her information and all. And finally, where is she hanging out online? What type of social media The good thing about this is that we know that Elaine is not only professionally on Linkedin, and she’s also checking in on Facebook, connecting with her family, to keeping in touch with her friends. And that is very important for us to know. Because now we’re able to go and targeting lane while she’s on Facebook. Okay, so I’m being able to figure out who your target audience is. And getting that granular allows you to then take that and use all of your insights when you’re building out your audiences on the Facebook platform, which Ravin is going to get into.

Ravin: Yeah, absolutely. So now we’re going to jump into Well, how does that buyer persona or how does you know the person who I think is the right type of client or buyer for my particular business? How do they fit into the options available on Facebook, the advertising platform itself? Now to start with Facebook has an audience manager tool. So this is where you’ll create and manage target audiences that you want to show ads to. And this is a place where most people often get overwhelmed. But if you already know the type of customer you’re going after, then it actually makes it a lot easier. And you’re not going to feel as if welcomed by all the different options and all the different, you know, analytics jargon up there. So there are basically three types of audiences on Facebook, you have saved audience, a custom audience and a lookalike audience now saved audience basically lets you target people based on the demographics, the interest, and their location. So you can refine your target audience by choosing you to know, their age range, that gender, what language they speak their education, these are all options available on Facebook.

Now from the buyer persona example, we showed you an executive Elaine, we already know a few things, we can narrow it down, we know that she’s female, 40s to 50s, and she lives in Chicago. So that already, you know, sets you on the right path. And makes creating an audience and Facebook that much easier.

All right, let’s look at some of the interests. So on Facebook advertising, you can choose certain interests that people like or particular, you know, Facebook pages, they like groups there, subscribe to Facebook has a way of collecting all this information. Now, look at the interest of your target persona. If you know that particular bias that your company’s going after, perhaps you might even look at your competitors. Maybe they like a website that belongs to your competitor or services and products that your competitors offer. You can target people based on those interests as well.

So what you can start to do in simply type in an interest. And in this case, we use the example of CNN Money. And we narrowed it down to that. Now, if you just typed in personal finance, you might have a lot more options. But in this case, we figured out that our executive land sheet, that’s where she gets her information from. So the key key key is want to choose, you know, 1000 different things, but focused on a handful of things, make sure you’re using the interest that you’ve already identified with your actual customers. And then bring that to Facebook. Now, custom audiences, custom audiences, basically let you target people that have been passed website visitors, people that have engaged with your content. And actually, because they’ve actually shown interest in your brand already, they’ve already visited your website, this can actually be your most valuable audience, they’re already interested in what you have to offer,

There are a few different ways you can go about creating a custom audience. And I’ll describe a few of these ways here. So you can create a custom audience by customer file by website traffic, and via engagement and Facebook customer file. Simply put, just means if you have the email address, or you have their phone number, you can upload it to Facebook and Facebook will match it with a Facebook profile by website traffic means that you can target people who have engaged with your website. So in this case, maybe someone clicked on an ad and then went to your website. But they didn’t submit the contact information form or they didn’t complete a purchase. But since they’ve shown interest, it’s always a good idea to retarget them, even if they didn’t have time to, or they just weren’t ready to make a purchasing decision. At the time I’m true of any of you have had the experience of shopping on Amazon and leaving your shopping carts abandoned, or you haven’t yet completed a purchase? Well, Amazon showing ads to you about that particular product, again, might get you to come back to the website and complete that purchase. So that’s an example of targeting people who’ve already been to your website.

Now by engagement simply means that you can target people who have engaged with your Facebook content. So maybe they visited your Facebook page, they’ve liked some of your posts, they’ve already interacted with some of your events, or they’ve even been your business profile on Instagram. That’s a way that you can target people by engagement. Now, the final audience I’m going to talk about is called a lookalike audience. All that simply means is that you can target people who already quote-unquote, look like your customers. And what does that mean, let’s say you’ve already got a custom audience set up in Facebook, and it’s doing really well, you’re getting lots of leads, you’re getting a lot of traction from that audience that you’re using for your current advertising campaign. But let’s say you actually want to expand to another city, you want to offer your services to a lot your radius, or maybe you’re setting up an office location in a different city.

Custom sorry, lookalike audiences, simply mean you can take an audience that you already have with the parameters with you know, demographics set with the different interests and replicated in a different location. So if something’s performing really well, why not test it in a different location. And that’s what the lookalike audience allows you to do. Now, at pronto, we do offer a Facebook management service, and our team runs through similar steps when they do set up your campaign of trying to identify who it is that you’re going after. So if that is something you’re interested in, there’s also a link at the bottom of the handout sheet which links to our Facebook advertising service on our on our website. 

Tori: Great. You know, as we said, we want to keep it very brief, very straight to the point. And I’m giving you the information about how to leverage Facebook audiences in the ad platform. And now if you have any questions, we are going to open it up. And if there are any questions that we cannot get to today, we will be sure to include maybe a few questions on the follow-up.

Ravin: Yes. And someone’s asking about do you serve your customer base? I’m not sure if you’re referring to your own company and asking if Yeah, you should survey your customer base. Um,

Tori: Yeah. So that goes back to the persona. So the way that you would figure out who your target audiences and creating your persona is, you know, this can be using your CRM, some type of customer database that you have, I’m doing market research, honestly, if you have a sales team that is out in the field or taking sales calls, they’re going out and they’re they’re meeting people, they’re going to events, it is good to connect with your sales team and figure out what is it that they’re hearing in the market? You know, who are they talking to? What does that person look like? What does that person’s name like? How old is that person? Where are they interested in? You know, are they emailing you from Yahoo, where are they emailing you from Gmail, because, believe it or not, there are little things that, we can pick up my interactions that we’re having.

Ravin: And yeah, I mean, going back to Tori’s point, if you aren’t already doing that it’s really important perhaps, to start Yeah, and yeah, it perhaps you don’t have a sales team is going out there and doing these things may be for, you know, the next year coming ahead and should be a worthwhile exercise to go ahead and plan to go to some events. But not only that, if you already have, you know, a list of customers, let’s say you’ve worked with, and maybe you have a database, whether that’s a CRM, you can actually go in there, look at perhaps the top 10 clients you’ve acquired over the last year, what do they have in common with a particular niche industry with a, you know, what was the sales cycle like? So just identifying, you know, what, what’s your ideal type of client you want to work with? If you have enough of them, try and find out what’s the common factor between them and narrow it down?

Tori: Yeah. But the reality is that if you are not already clear on who you’re targeting, then this is it is really important that you get active, like, you need to get very, very, very drill down on that it is essential that you know, who we’re talking to. Because if you don’t know who you’re talking to, how can you go out and create messaging, what you’re probably finding is that your messaging or campaigns, you’re not getting a lot of leads, you’re not getting a lot of engagement. And you’re wondering what’s happening is because sometimes when we try to talk to too many people, we end up talking to no one. And I’m sure we’ve had that before we run email campaigns that don’t don’t work well, you know, we’ve, we’ve done it too. But the more that we get targeted, and the more data that we’re able to pull, and we’re getting these conversations going, we know who we’re talking to. And we’re able to make our messaging more effective and more engaging based on that, you know, so if you’re talking to someone in their 13, that is looking to save money for a house, it is different from an older person that is looking to retire soon. So going back to the financial advisor, that person would need to know specifically who they’re talking to, because the ad creative, the messaging, everything literally is different. So it is essential that you get really active on your target persona, your audience, and then your messaging. Okay. And actually, just to go back to that we actually have a buyer persona tool that will include in the follow up that you can go in and create is a tool that you can use. And you also see the link on your handout, at the very bottom, there’s a link to using the persona tool, which will allow you to go in and just kind of get it all out in your head, put it all out on paper, and then see that persona on paper. Okay, so you know, we highly advise you to start with that.

Ravin: Okay, we’re getting a few more questions coming in. Let’s have a look. Now someone’s asking, what are the costs? What are the charges for Facebook ads? And now the way Facebook works in terms of how a charge for ads is based on how competitive is it going after that particular audience. So you could imagine in different industries, this would vary a lot like if, if you’re in a super competitive industry, let’s say you’re a lawyer who’s going after personal injury clients or something like that. There are lots of other law firms, law companies, who perhaps trying to target those same specific people. And the more people and the more companies are trying to target a select group of people, obviously, that drives the price and the cost up. So a general rule of thumb is, yeah, the more competitive it is, and obviously, if one if getting one client is worth a lot more, that’s naturally going to lead to people wanting to advertise and get more clients through advertising. But that also generally drives the cost of advertising up, I don’t, I can’t produce a specific number off the top of my head. Again, it varies from industry to industry and from audience to audience.

Tori: And now someone asks, What are the time frame restrictions on how long and add can run and you know, honestly, this is also one of those things where it kind of pins Well, what we suggest is that you let the ad one and you’re always looking at the data, we really depend on the data. Sometimes there are campaigns that we’d like run because is doing really well. And then there are sometimes that you may see one of your messaging or the ad is not getting you know any engagements not getting any actual leads, and then you change it up. But we wouldn’t recommend that you do this every few days, let the ad run.

And then as you’re letting that run, compare it, measure it, test it make changes as you’re going but there’s not really restrictions if an ad is running well then let it run well, if it’s not continue to optimize it is okay to optimize your campaigns as you’re going

Ravin: Yeah, and again, generally with Facebook, you’ll start to see eye fatigue which just means over time you’ll start to see less than less engagement for a particular asset and that knowing that is generally a good time once you have that data you know, like okay after running this ad for two weeks that’s when you’ll see a dramatic drop in clicks on those particular ads we see a dramatic drop in people just engaging with those ads then you know okay so from my target audience running that particular ad went well for two weeks and then we saw a drop in engagement so maybe every two weeks it’ll be worth having a different type of ad being shown to that same audience and then again looking at the data to see what the engagement is like for the next set of ads

Tori: So someone asked, how can they view the status is it can you only be this guy’s while your ad is running know once you’ve run a campaign of that once the ad campaign is finished, you can still look at the stats you can still see the data from your ad campaign

Ravin: Thanks everyone for joining we really appreciate it

Tori: Yeah yeah, thank you for today. Again, please use the handouts please look at the resources and feel free to message us at [email protected] or you can schedule a marketing call to go deeper into how a Facebook campaign with content would work.

Ravin: Yes. So Tori and I are both available for marketing calls, and we will include that in our follow up email how to contact us or All right, thank you. Thank you, everyone.

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