In this episode I’d like to talk about ROI and Facebook ads.
ROI, which stands for return on investment, is a tricky one and one that everyone seems to talk about. Everyone wants to get a return, aka sales and money for their investments and rightly so.
What does often baffle me though is that many people only look at ROI when an exchange of money is involved and not necessarily when they exchange time.
I know it’s harder to quantify ROI when you look at a time investment, but it’s so important to look at the whole picture.
For example, do you know what the ROI is on your time investment in social media? And I mean organic social media, like posting on your Instagram feed or creating reels. How much is your time investment really paying you back?
Something to look into right?
But today I want to talk about ROI from Facebook & Instagram advertising and specifically how you can best maximise your ROI with Facebook ads.
What I’m going to talk about might actually surprise you, so tune in.
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Facebook Ads Success Bundle
Inside this FREE bundle I’ll show you exactly what you need to create and setup before you can start your ads.
Transcript
Welcome back to the new school of marketing podcast. I’m so grateful to you for tuning in. Before we dive in I would love to pay respect and acknowledgement to the palawa people of lutruwita who are the traditional owners of the land on which my business operates and pay my respect to their elders, past, present and emerging.
We’ve had some amazing sunny winter days here in Tassie and we’ve also just wrapped up the winter school holidays. Even though I’ve lived in Australia for 18 years, it’s still strange when we’re in the middle of winter and the other side of the world has their summer holidays. My family, who still live in the Netherlands, all send me photos of their summer holidays while we’re wearing thermals and have the fire burning. Only one more month until we welcome spring and there’s definitely some of it in the air already, the wattle trees are about to burst into their beautiful bright yellow explosion.
Anyway, in this episode I’d like to talk about ROI and Facebook ads.
ROI, which stands for return on investment, is a tricky one and one that everyone seems to talk about. Everyone wants to get a return, aka sales and money for their investments and rightly so.
What does often baffle me though is that many people only look at ROI when an exchange of money is involved and not necessarily when they exchange time.
I know it’s harder to quantify ROI when you look at a time investment, but it’s so important to look at the whole picture.
For example, do you know what the ROI is on your time investment in social media? And I mean organic social media, like posting on your Instagram feed or creating reels. How much is your time investment really paying you back?
Something to look into right?
But today I want to talk about ROI from Facebook & Instagram advertising and specifically how you can best maximise your ROI with Facebook ads.
What I’m going to talk about might actually surprise you, so keep listening.
If you’ve heard any of my previous podcasts before you’ll know that I often tell you what Facebook ads really do for your business. They amplify what’s already happening. So if your current client attraction methods are working, Facebook ads can amplify this. If your current method for converting leads into buyers is working, Facebook ads can help you amplify that. On the other hand, if your methods and funnels are not working and you’re not getting enough leads or buyers, Facebook ads can’t fix this.
Unless your issue is that you don’t have enough traffic, then Facebook ads can help, but I mostly see that people are trying to send more traffic to a broken funnel which results in money wasted.
So if they can amplify what’s already happening, wouldn’t it make sense to deploy some Facebook ads for the parts of your business that are performing well?
This is also why I asked if you know how much of your organic social media content actually gives you a return on your time. It would be really helpful if you could track your statistics all the way through to sales, or at least to getting people onto your email marketing list so that you can build a closer relationship with them and at some stage hopefully convert to buyers.
So, for example, if one of your reels is bringing in lots of new people to your mailing list organically, it would make sense to make it go even further by putting some Facebook ad spend behind it.
So, one way to maximise ROI with Facebook ads is by leveraging your current client attraction methods such as organic social media and turn them into ads to increase its reach.
Another aspect of maximising ROI with Facebook ads is to look at your funnels and identify potential gaps or places where you’re leaving money on the table.
What I mean by that is this:
Sometimes we spend all of our focus on the top of the funnel, which is getting seen by people and getting them to be part of our audience. Top of funnel advertising generally means that you’re spending time and money on attracting new leads to your business, but what about the middle and bottom of the funnel?
Are you spending enough time nurturing your subscribers and asking them to work with you or buy from you?
While I think the top of the funnel is incredibly important, I sometimes feel like people are forgetting about the people they’ve already attracted. If you’re spending the majority of your time and money attracting new leads but you’re not seeing the conversions from them, it means that you need to spend more time on your middle and bottom of the funnel.
You can, and should, do this organically through email marketing and social media, but you can also maximise your ROI by creating Facebook ads for your middle and bottom of the funnel.
What does this look like?
For example, your middle of funnel ads can be like posts that add value to your audience or pieces that remind them about one of your offers. For example, if you are running a challenge or a webinar you may have spent quite some time getting people to sign up for it. You’ll be sending reminder emails to them to take part, but you can also add in an extra layer by running Facebook ads to remind them and tell them a little bit more about what’s coming up.
For your bottom of funnel it would mean running retargeting ads to let people know to work with you and make that purchase. Statistics show that people only purchase after multiple touchpoints, so showing up in their Facebook or Instagram feed with an ad means that you’re adding an extra touchpoint.
But can’t I just post on my Facebook & Instagram feed organically?
Sure, and you should, but it may not be seen by everyone whereas you have a bit more control over who your ads are shown to as you can upload a list of people who signed up for your challenge or webinar.
Ok, so we’ve looked at maximising ROI with Facebook ads by amplifying parts of your organic efforts, especially the parts that are already working.
We’ve also looked at maximising ROI through identifying gaps in your funnel and setting up retargeting ads to your middle and bottom of the funnel.
The next tips are about making optimisations to get the best out of your ad spend.
Firstly, before you run your ads, you need to be 100% clear on what you’re trying to achieve with your campaigns. So, setting a clear objective for your campaign. Are you running this particular campaign to increase engagement, attract more leads or drive sales?
The next step is to know who you’re trying to reach. Who is your ideal audience?
I know I talk about this just about every episode but the number one thing in marketing is to know your audience. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, then how are you going to talk to them?
There are quite a few targeting options inside of Facebook ads manager but your ads aren’t going to make it if you don’t know who you’re talking to. This applies to both setting up your ads and choosing suitable targeting options as well as your messaging and speaking to your audience in a way that resonates with them most.
Another part is testing your creative.
Nobody knows what’s going to perform best with your ads. Even I, someone who has been running ads for clients for 9 years, don’t know what’s going to work. That’s why we often create multiple versions of creative to test. We’ll try images, videos, reels, carousels and test what’s working.
I do the same with copy and headlines. We test a few variations to see what people are clicking on and taking action on, plus we look at the cost for each of these actions. Keep in mind that it’s not always about going for the cheapest option, but for the one that converts at the other end of it.
The next part is the part that in a way doesn’t have anything to do with ads, at least not with ads manager.
You need to optimise your landing pages and sales pages to make sure that anyone who lands on them is going to take the action that you want them to take. Of course not everyone will, but you want to aim for a high percentage of them to take action. For some industries 30% is high, for others 50% is high. I’m a high achiever myself so I will keep tweaking pages and testing them to see if I can improve them.
To get the most out of your ads you need to monitor them closely. Don’t switch anything off too early, but keep an eye on your click through rates, conversion rates and cost per click and conversion. Your ads data is telling you a story, so read between the lines and make decisions based on this data. For example, if you have a very low link click through rate, and by low I mean under 1%, you need to update your ads creative or adjust your audience because it means that your ad isn’t enticing people to click.
If lots of people are clicking on your conversion ad but not many are taking the action of signing up to your email list, you need to address your landing page.
Learn how to read the data inside ads manager and learn how to use custom conversions and custom events as they will give you more accurate readings. Facebook can track your conversions and there are ways to get even more accurate data by using custom conversions and custom events. I don’t want to go into these too much right now as it’s quite technical and it’s easier to explain by showing it in a video. Inside one of my courses, ADvisory, this is explained in a very detailed way if you wanted to learn more about it.
Also learn how to get even better at audience targeting by using lookalike audiences in addition to your cold audiences. There are lots of targeting options inside of ads manager, but targeting needs to be done right for your ads to actually bring in results. Knowing your ideal audience is so, so important. It will help you select better audiences inside of ads manager, plus once you start attracting the right audiences you can then utilise this data to create lookalike audiences. In case you don’t know what lookalike audiences are, they are audiences that are created based on your existing audiences. For example, if you have an email list of subscribers, you can upload this to Facebook ads manager and set it up so that Facebook can find more people that look like your existing audiences. Using this feature is really cool as it helps you get in front of the right people faster, which helps you grow your business and income faster.
So all up, there are many ways to maximise your ROI with Facebook ads.
Inside this episode I’ve spoken about using Facebook ads to amplify what’s already working in your business, I’ve mentioned using ads for your middle and bottom of your funnel as well as really nurturing your audience with ads, and I’ve mentioned more detailed methods like looking at your campaign objective, your audience, creating lookalike audiences and learning to read your data.
Facebook and Instagram ads can really take your business to the next level IF you know what you’re doing and your business is ready for it.
I just released a completely updated version of my Facebook Ads Success Bundle which talks you through what you need to have ready and set up, so grab a copy from my website. I’ll also link it in the show notes.
Outro
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the New School of Marketing podcast, I hope this episode was helpful and I can’t wait to share more marketing tips with you next week.
If you’re ready to take your business to the next level with Facebook and Instagram advertising, make sure you visit www.newschoolofmarketing.com to download practical free resources, plus subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Until next time, take care and market your business every day.
