Facebook Ads: One goal, to get the maximum output <> review ft. CXL Institute

This is Part 10 /12 of learnings that I gained from CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree.

This week I went on to complete facebook ads and Content strategy and SEO for lead generation. Before starting the course I had previously played around with Facebook ads and I did thought about how I was successful in running them, and no wonder how such thoughts change quickly as you go ahead with the course. So let me share you some quick insights and tips that I gained from Facebook Ads.

Facebook Ads | Curt Maly

Most of the marketers and general small to large business owners (including me) run Facebook ad cluelessly. I can totally relate to every mistake that he pointed out in the intro video itself. So here goes my way of thinking before taking the course.

I would make an awesome graphic and write some irrelevant tag line that just sounds cool but adds no value to the product or the graphic and run the ad for like a week across instagram and facebook and call it a day when I get like 10–15 purchases. Everything is wrong here, I am just putting a lot of money on the table for an output that I could possibly get with much less amount.

So the modern customer journey is not just someone sees an ad and they click on the given link and purchase, it doesn’t work that way.

“The Rule of 7 is a marketing principle that states that your prospects need to come across your offer at least seven times before they really notice it and start to take action.” — Old Marketing Adage

Facebook tells us to adopt a funnel strategy with different ads and formats. (But instead what we did was a cluster of different mishaps.) then you target audience using options like custom, look-alike audience, etc (this we always do but kind of force Facebook into getting the wrong ones) and finally they ask us to re-target which most of us miss.

We treat all the audience equally, but there are some segments. Like the most aware, product aware, solution aware, problem aware, and unaware. So under the funnel method, there are three section — top, middle, and bottom. At top comes awareness, in middle its consideration and at bottom its conversion.

So now comes the B.E.L.T method. Each letter indicates a stage.

B — It stands for Belief. It’s goal is to make people aware of the problem that your brand solves. Consider it as a basic introduction to your brand. The first ever impression. They might not be aware of the problem at all, here you need to make them believe that there exist a problem and your brand can easily solve this.

Best Ad types here would be Reach, Brand Awareness, Video Views, and Engagement.

E — It stands for Engage. Here you need to engage people who already know about your brand with edutainment content, or the kind of content that produces more interaction. At this stage, relationship with the customer is nurtured. You can even present your Unique selling point and how you differentiate from others.

L — It stands for lead. Probably the favorite thing marketers look for nowadays. All you need to do is collect their information by value exchange. Provide them with something in return for the information that they are about to enter. Create some content that is product/service oriented.

T — It stands for Transact. Give some strong call to actions and offers that customers cant resist. Here our goal is to make customer purchase the product or service. It is basically a re-targeting campaign with the audience who has interacted with your brand previously.

Now that you know all this, its time to start building the campaigns. Do consider the top, middle and bottom funnel while creating a funnel. One major thing that a lot of marketers miss out on with the ads they create is to check the relevancy. Till now I have been doing what the instructor would call as cold advertising. If you are someone who would have run Facebook ads then you might feel a little bit ashamed of yourself for taking wrong steps in a cluster.

Now what do you measure for purchase intent? Clicks? okay so CTR must increase ROI? right? NO it doesn’t. Clicks does not necessarily increase sales. Now I feel the importance of Landing Page Optimization and UX maybe if all those things are aligned then clicks might translate into purchases but only on paper and in ideal condition but with real life situations it most probably won’t.

So with all the standard concepts, Facebook targeting via pixel is also covered in this course. Along with that, there’s specific lessons on how to run campaigns effectively and strategically. What to do when you are on a tight budget there’s even insane strategies like the $1 per day method, its quite a fun experiment where you run a lot of ad sets and convert people everyday. It is the shorter version of BELT method, where implementing BELT would take weeks and the shorter version can be achieved within a day.

An extensive insight on how Facebook target you was demonstrated. Accordingly, we created a HOT audience. It comprises of the ones who are ready to take action and here we re-target them for the transact purpose. All the things take time. It’s not going to be like you run an advert and the next day people are flooding your sites to sign-up that only happens with big brands but if you see it did took them a lot of time to reach that stage. So you can have a feel of those brands in the transact stage, that is the bottom of the funnel.

Facebook ads course was very intuitive and helped me strategies some marketing angles for different domains. Now my next step would be to be aware of what Facebook is showing me and at what stage I might be with the advertisement, and maybe I can go deep in the advertising campaigns they run and try to figure out if it is working for them or not.

Next I am doing project management and I am extremely excited about the growth master training workshop. So stay tuned for more updates.

Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9