Planning your Facebook Ads for the New Year

It’s that time of year. I’m more than ready to wrap this year up but I have two busy weeks ahead before I’ll wind down. 

I’m not sure if you’re like me, but I have already started planning for 2024 and in this episode I want to talk about how Facebook advertising fits in with your bigger marketing picture.

Everyone has their own take on planning, and that’s totally ok. It’s great really.

What I’m going to share with you might work for you or only parts of it may work for you. Take what you need from this episode and make it your own to suit your business.

I’ll be sharing my thoughts and process of how I use and plan Facebook ads into my business.

Tune in 🎧

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Website: www.newschoolofmarketing.com
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Instagram: @bianca_mckenzie

 

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Transcript

Episode 151

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.

 

It’s that time of year. We put our Christmas tree up, yes I know it’s not December yet, and I’m almost done with our Christmas shopping. We did our Santa photos on the weekend and omg they are so cute. 

 

I’m more than ready to wrap this year up but I have two busy weeks ahead before I’ll wind down. 

 

I’m not sure if you’re like me, but I have already started planning for 2024 and in this episode I want to talk about how Facebook advertising fits in with your bigger marketing picture.

 

It’s always important to create a marketing plan and strategy for the year ahead, and it goes hand in hand with what I want to talk about in this episode.

 

So if you’re planning for the year ahead, you’ll probably be thinking about things like:

• When your launches are
• What your content calendar will look like roughly
• What your social media calendar will look like roughly
• Which new products or services you will add to your suite of offers
• How many clients you want to work with and can realistically work with

 

Everyone has their own take on planning, and that’s totally ok. It’s great really.

What I’m going to share with you might work for you or only parts of it may work for you. Take what you need from this episode and make it your own to suit your business.

I’ll be sharing my thoughts and process of how I use and plan Facebook ads into my business.

 

First up, I do my overall plan for the year which highlights what particular activity I’ll be doing in a particular month of the year.

 

It’s important to have some plan in place for your year and then you can use Facebook ads to support this plan.

 

For example, I’m planning to launch my signature Facebook ads program twice next year and will be using Facebook ads to support list growth for my launch.

 

My first launch will be in April, which means that I have planned my pre-launch for February/March.

 

Pre-launching to me means all the activities I need to do before opening the cart. In this case list building is one of them so I plan my Facebook ads for February/March.

 

I break down my ads into categories:
Pre-launch list building
Open cart re-targeting
Cart closing re-targeting

 

There are a few more layers in each of these categories, but for the sake of this episode I’m keeping it simple.

 

Using these categories, I then carefully plan which dates I will be advertising a free opt-in and/or webinar to build my list and then use this data to re-target once my cart is open.

 

Re-targeting is a method of showing your ads to those who are already familiar with you because they’ve clicked on your site where they may or may not have signed up, they might be on your list or have visited one of your pages in the past.

 

So I sit down with my calendar on which I’ve planned all my launches out and determine how I’m going to support my launches with Facebook ads.

 

I then look at my pre-launch period and set dates for running Facebook ads to grow my list. Most of the time this is a minimum 4-6 week period in which first I run ads to a free download or video series for 4-5 weeks and then ads to a live webinar for approximately 10 days. Both methods are geared towards list building.

 

I’m using examples here and don’t want you to feel like you must run a video series or a webinar. You’ll need to find out what kind of lead magnet works for your audience.

 

As I mentioned earlier, I’m planning two launches for my Facebook ads for launches program so I’ll be duplicating what I have done for my first launch to the second launch.

 

I will always review what went well or not so well during my first launch and then adjust my strategy for the second launch, but I want to have something in the calendar at the start of the year.

 

If you have offers that compete against each other you can pair back advertising for one while you focus on the other.

 

Sales for my courses are driven by the number of people who sign up to my list and are then nurtured to purchase so it’s important to focus on growing my list and the fastest way to do this is to run Facebook and Instagram ads.

 

I also pay attention to what other advertisers are doing during the year so that I’m not spending more than I have to because I don’t want to ‘compete’ against businesses with large advertising budgets right now.

 

In the end though, it’s important to keep an eye on all of your numbers. It might seem obvious, but the main goal of using advertising is to make more sales. Whether that’s immediately because that’s how your funnel performs, or whether it’s later because your audience needs a longer period of time before they purchase from you.

 

So keep an eye on your numbers at all times.

 

The method I described works for me but it might not work for you and that’s ok. Take what you need from my methods and focus on your own. I simply wanted to share my method with you and highlight some of the things to look out for (such as peak advertising times for your industry).

 

If you have an e-commerce business, your plans may look a little different.

You’ll most likely focus on seasons and when certain stock comes in, so you need to plan around your stock levels.

 

As an e-commerce business you can pretty much advertise all year round and then put extra focus and budget into peak sales periods such as Black Friday, Christmas, Mother’s day etc.

 

On top of that you can run awareness or consideration campaigns to build a stronger relationship with your audience. This is especially important if your price-point is higher because your customer needs to be able to relate and see themselves in the story. For higher price points you will almost always need to build a relationship first, which you can do with ads, organic social media and email marketing.

 

So start planning your ads for next year just like you would plan your social media calendar, your launches and your other marketing activities. Then put a marketing budget towards your ads and know that you can always change things along the way.

If you have any questions about planning your Facebook ads for 2024, get in touch with me via DM on instagram. I’ll put the link in the show notes.