Facebook ad campaigns are like a Rubik’s Cube. Creating a Facebook Campaign That Works involves a series of strategic steps and lots of testing.
It’s quite straightforward to set up a Facebook ad campaign (check out the ever popular Facebook Ads Bootcamp ~ which shows you how to create high-performing Facebook Ads in 5 steps).
But, like many things in life, and digital marketing, the set-up is just the first step. To ensure your campaign is a success – and you’re not throwing money down the drain – you also need a number of other key factors when Creating a Facebook Campaign That Works:
#1 A well thought out marketing system, including a high converting landing page – in other words, where are you sending people to, and is that page converting your traffic into leads?
#2 Close monitoring and testing of your campaign to see what’s working and what’s not. Facebook campaigns require constant monitoring, testing and refining as demonstrated in the following case study.
CASE STUDY
Meet high end property investment/holiday home company Cedar Retreats.
If we’d just stuck an ad up for Cedar Retreats and let it run, it wouldn’t have worked and we would have confirmed the owner’s belief that “social media doesn’t work for high ticket sales”. As it happened we tweaked the campaign five times before “hitting the jackpot” and have surprised and delighted the owners who were “blown away” and were quoted as saying “We are so excited. You’ve opened our eyes to the potential of digital marketing“. Happy days indeed!
So let me share the campaign with you.
Cedar Retreats contacted me after seeing me speak at a Property Information Network (PIN) event in London, and asked if I could help them generate some targeted, high quality leads.
THEIR CHALLENGE?
They had an open day coming up – in 10 days time – and wanted to generate bookings from potential investors.
OUR CHALLENGE?
We recommend running Facebook ads consistently for at least 3 months to get the best results. But something in our conversation compelled me to accept the challenge and Team MMSpark roared into action.
THE STRATEGY
Cedar Retreats is a luxury holiday investment opportunity, offering 7.5% return on investors’ money on a beautiful log cabin retreat in North Yorkshire. If you’re interested, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you (and tell them I sent you!)
We started by creating a very targeted profile of potential investors – by talking through their ideal customer avatar and asking some strategic questions of the existing owners. From this we were able to target our ads to a very specific audience.
THE MARKETING SYSTEM
We ran the ads to a dedicated landing page on the Cedar Retreats website and added a lead capture form so we could capture emails for their mailing list
We also added Facebook tracking code (pixels) to the landing page so we could capture their traffic for remarketing
CAMPAIGNS
We ran 3 campaigns. The first two were lead generation campaigns
#1 to our very targeted audience focussed around the M62 corridor
#2 to our very targeted audience UK wide
THE RESULTS?
What was interesting was that the UK wide ads were getting more traction, and more clicks at a lower cost, than the localised campaign.
Within a few days we had generated over 700 visitors to their landing page. Great you might think? But no. Despite 700 click throughs to the landing page there were no sign-ups for the Open Weekend.
TESTING & REFINING
This is where we started refining and changing the campaign.
First, we looked at the ad targeting. That was working well because we’d attracted 700 potential leads within a few days and the click through rates, cost per click and relevance score were spot on. Check!
THE PROBLEM
Looking at the campaign with fresh eyes I had a hunch as to what the problem was. We were attracting the right sort of potential investors AND they were interested enough to click through to the landing page BUT they couldn’t make the dates of the Open Weekend, which was, by then, less than a week away.
MAKING THE CAMPAIGN WORK
So we began the process of changing our strategy, and went through five landing page tweaks. Here’s how we changed the strategy:
#1 We made the landing page about the investment opportunity, and de-emphasised attendance at the Open House on a set date.
#2 We made the opportunity seem more elite by inviting interested investors to register their interest and arrange a private viewing at their convenience
REMARKETING
Because we’d used the Facebook tracking pixel we were able to run remarketing ads to the 700 people who’d visited the original landing page but hadn’t registered their interest. So we got a second bite of the cherry because these people were familiar with the company (so not cold traffic any more) but hadn’t seen the final version of the landing page.
THE RESULT OF OUR STRATEGY CHANGES?
Within 24-48 hours Cedar Retreats had 5 qualified leads. People who had registered their interest in the investment opportunity, provided their email and phone number and requested a call. RESULT!!
We’ve yet to see if any of these become buyers, but at a value of £130,000 ($200,000) a piece that’s a huge potential Return on Investment. And worth running a consistent ongoing campaign because even 1 sale more than pays for your entire year’s marketing spend!
Imagine if this was your business and you could generate a regular stream of qualified, targeted, high value leads day in, and day out.
SUMMARY
So as you can see there is quite a bit of work involved in setting up and running even a simple campaign, including:
#1 Understanding your ideal client avatar
#2 Copywriting
#3 Graphics
#4 Strategy
#5 Analysis
#6 Easy access to edit your website or landing pages
#7 Technology
If you’d like to schedule a strategy session to discuss Creating a Facebook Campaign That Works or to see if Facebook ads would work for your business, CLICK HERE