Facebook advertising is a powerful tool for marketers. The social network is constantly releasing new and exciting features, enabling brands to drive traffic, awareness, new leads, and ultimately sales. On the downside, Marketers have to adapt their strategies to each upgrade and development – a challenge, to say the least!
Here are 4 ways to use Facebook, combined with data within your marketing automation system, to skillfully drive ROI.
1. Segment your ads with Custom Audiences
With Facebook Custom Audiences, you can deliver targeted ads to people already in your system. All you need are their opt-in email addresses or phone numbers (you can also use their Facebook user ID or app user ID – if you carry these, you’re really on top of the game!).
The ability to segment Custom Audiences is especially invaluable for marketers. For example, once you’ve uploaded a customer list (or any opt-in list), you can further slice and dice it with Facebook’s rich targeting options, such as by demographics, interests, and broad categories. Pro tip: You can even exclude people from that list by uploading another Custom Audience under the “Excluded Audiences” section within Facebook’s Power Editor (see below).
This capability lets marketers tailor different ad messages to customized audience segments based on data that they already have in their automation platforms. It also makes it much easier to distinguish which ad messages are most effective with certain groups of people. We’ve seen many different ways advertisers have used Custom Audiences successfully to reactivate past purchasers (retail), spur app installs (gaming), as well as turn customers into fans (financial services).
2. Find new addressable prospects with Lookalike Audiences
Although the Lookalike Audiences capability branches off of Custom Audiences, it serves a different purpose. With Lookalike Audiences, a marketer can reach new prospects who are very similar to the people within a Custom Audiences list. Simply upload a customer list from your database into Facebook – Facebook then analyzes it and returns a similar but new addressable audience.
If your customer lists are already well-segmented, use them to run hyper-targeted Lookalike campaigns. For example, if there’s a segment in your database that responds well to a certain offer, create a custom Lookalike Audience based on it, and see how this new audience responds to that offer. And if you understand your audience, strengthen the targeting of your Lookalikes with Facebook’s standard targeting options: this combination may even outperform the original Custom Audiences campaign.
Smart marketers love Lookalike Audiences – it’s a great way to source new and qualified prospects, the primary goal of every marketer.
3. Turn social shares into leads
This one’s a bit more obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this piece of advice gets ignored or forgotten. Always embed trackable sharing buttons into every content asset, email, and landing page you create. This helps you maximize your social reach and measure top-performing content. Just as important, you can track how many new leads are entering your funnel via Facebook and how well those leads convert compared to those sourced from other channels.
4. Generate new leads with Offer ads
Facebook offers aren’t just for discounts. They’re a great way to share e-books, slide decks, and other great content, and most importantly, to generate new leads. You can set up an offer to direct people to a gated landing page where (you guessed it) users fill out a short form to claim the asset. You get a new lead, they get some great content – everybody wins.
Based on Facebook’s latest Ads & Sponsored Stories Guide, the hardest part of setting up an Offer Ad is the message, which needs to be 90 characters or less. But once you do craft a clear, compelling offer, the rest is easy. There’s no need to upload different-sized images for all the placements available: Facebook will automatically resize your high-resolution images to make them fit on the desktop, mobile, and the right column. See? Piece of cake.
We hope you’ve stashed away some insights from this post to use in your future campaigns. If your database is already well-organized, you can immediately take advantage of the capabilities mentioned above, such as the creation of segmented Custom Audiences as well as Lookalike Audiences. Make it a priority to insert trackable sharing buttons in your collateral as well, and play around with some Offer ads. With marketing automation, you can track all the leads that come through these channels and nurture them through your purchase funnel.
Oh, and let me know what your results look like! I'd love to hear about your successes (and challenges) in combining Facebook with marketing automation. Share in the comments below!
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