Our Facebook Advertising Strategy: Learn How To Promote Your Brand

Facebook has a huge audience, and many of these people can become your returning customers. But to get them, one needs a good Facebook advertising strategy.

As of June 2019, the number of monthly active Facebook users was 2.41 billion. It means that, each month, more than a third of the world’s population logs in! Furthermore, most of Facebook audience comes from developed and developing countries.

In other words, Facebook represents a huge opportunity for any eCommerce business which you must not neglect.

At the same time, although the platform offers a variety of tools for promotion, some entrepreneurs have a hard time finding an efficient Facebook advertising strategy.

Target the right audience

Almost any digital marketing pro tip starts with the target audience, and it does for a good reason!

Can you really convince someone to buy a product without understanding who your buyers are and what they want? Therefore, any advertising campaign starts with defining your potential clients.

One may think that trying to guess who might be interested in your products is too hard, but, in fact, even pure logic can help a lot.

Let’s assume we want to dropship stationery products. Who could be interested in it?

What about children and teenagers? They go to school and have to write all the time, they need tons of notebooks and pencils! Seems right, but on the other hand, most children don’t have credit cards to pay for online shopping. At best, they could ask their parents to buy something for them.

Thus, we can assume that our audience are adults.

What do they do? I guess college students could need stationary products, as well as those working in the office. What about creative people who write poems or draw sketches? I think they might be interested too. And of course, I could sell my products to the schoolkids’ parents I just mentioned above.

As you can see, after just 5 minutes of thinking I have age, occupation and hobby – and I can keep going! Of course, I might be wrong, but who said I should only use my mind to identify my target audience?

You can also use various services and tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Page Insights or the sales statistics on your dropshipping store to better understand who visits it, who buys and who returns. Read this article to learn more about these tools.

Cold, warm and hot audiences

Now that we know what kind of people could buy our products, we need to reach out for them because potential customers do not necessarily want to buy your product… or want to buy your product… In fact, they might even be unaware of your offer!

In digital marketing, they use the so called sales funnel that represents different segments of your target audience:

• Those unaware of your brand
• The ones who know you but don’t want to buy your product
• Those who want to buy it but are having doubts, etc.

These funnels get really complicated sometimes, so let’s make it simple. You could divide all your potential clients into three categories:

• Those unaware of your product
• The ones aware of it and interested in the item
• Those ready to make a purchase

You can refer to them as cold, warm and hot audiences.

It’s important because you can’t use one and the same Facebook advertising strategy to attract each of these categories. Moreover, reaching out to different segments of your sales funnel may require different goals.

Facebook Ads: campaign objectives

Whenever you customize ad campaigns on Facebook, you can choose one of the 11 objectives. Each campaign objective defines how the system targets people.

For example, if you choose the Awareness objective, FB will simply try to show your ad to as many people as possible because it doesn’t imply any kind of interaction with the ad. This one usually works well to increase your brand awareness, i.e. for the cold audience. If you set the objective to Engagement, FB will try to show your ad to those who are more likely to like posts. Use this or similar goals for cold AND warm audiences.

Facebook advertising strategy: using lookalike audience

Sometimes, understanding who your potential customers are is a piece of cake. But sometimes, it’s really difficult. If you’re struggling with defining your target audience, you can use this strategy.

• The first thing you need is to attract the initial (cold) audience by promoting a product. A short video not longer than 10-15 seconds will do great. At this stage, all you want is to find people who showed interest in your business. You need at least 2000 views, but the more the better. Those of them who watched 95% of the video are called custom audience, and you can consider them to be warm.
• After that, you need to use Facebook lookalike audience. This function allows you to boost another post by showing it to users similar to your newly created custom audience, i.e. those who watched 95% of your video post. It could be their age, occupation, hobbies, family status – let Facebook decide what users to choose. At this stage, you want to broaden your custom audience and lead them to your dropshipping store.
• As a result, you will get another audience (warmer) who not only showed interest in your brand, but also visited your product pages. Now you can create another lookalike audience and convince some of them to add something to their shopping cart or give you their emails.

The point is, at each stage, you narrow the circle and, at the same time, broaden it by finding similar audience. In the end, you will have a number of audiences such as those who may show interest, those who may visit your store, those who could subscribe, those who could add a product to the cart, etc.

As you can see, these audiences correspond to the structure of your sales funnel (cold > warmer > even warmer > hot), so you can use them for different advertising strategies on Facebook depending on what you want – to find new clients or to retain the existing customers, etc.

Although one such campaign doesn’t cost much, a number of them may hit your pocket. And it takes a lot of time, too. So, use it only when you’re stuck. Besides, you don’t have to start from the very first step if you already successfully attract the first category of potential customers.

Facebook advertising strategy we use our self-managed dropshipping stores

As you might know, we have our own dropshipping stores, which we use to test strategies and our digital solutions. And these are two simple strategies our team uses to promote these stores of Facebook.

Strategy #1

This one implies two steps:

1. We start with creating a post engagement campaign. We boost a post that leads traffic to one of our stores. It doesn’t matter whether people buy anything. Even if they just look at products and leave, that’s enough at the moment. What matters is that now we have a list of people who got interested in our business.
2. Now all we have to do is retarget these visitors on Facebook or any other social media platform by sending them targeted ads with a certain hook like a discount, a time-limited offer, a bundle, etc.

Strategy #2

1. The first step is a bit different. Instead of starting an engagement campaign, we start a traffic campaign. So, our objective is to lead the audience to our store. It costs more, but the efficiency is considerably higher.
2. And again, here we use retargeting to turn the visitors into customers.

Although these strategies seem simple, they work pretty well, especially when you have a clear target audience. However, you also need to make all the ad types you use convincing, so here are several simple tips to make sure your ad works.

Facebook ads tips

• Make your ads relevant. Yes, it’s all about your target audience again, but seriously! You and I both know how irritating it is to receive an ad promoting something you couldn’t care less about. Yes, I like anime, but I’m absolutely not wearing this maid dress!!!
• Make your ads short. People don’t like reading, much less reading an ad. Still, if for some reason, it catches someone’s eye, please, don’t scare them away by writing a David Copperfield novel.
• Use visuals. Pictures are easier to perceive, while videos are the best. However, don’t use blurry and low-quality photos and try making videos not longer than 60-90 seconds or even shorter.
• Use hooks in ads. Most ads are targeted at people who showed a certain degree of interest in your products. But simply offering a deal is often not enough, so you have to give them a nudge. As mentioned above, it could be a discount or a time-limited offer – anything that makes a person think, ‘If I don’t buy it now, I’ll regret it later!’
• Lastly, use calls to action. Any message (and ad is a message) should end with a clear call to do something like go to your site to see other products, learn more about something, get a coupon code, or make a purchase.
• Experiment! There’s no single all-in-one strategy that’ll work for everything. Different niches may require a bit different approaches, so always test new ideas.

If you’re still not sure which direction to take, consider this amazing Facebook & Instagram ads service. Our highly skilled team will help you prepare a winning advertising campaign thanks to our time-tested experience in the area!

Summary

Defining your target audience is the key to developing an efficient advertising strategy. At the same time, don’t underestimate the importance of high-quality and relevant posts and ads. And always choose the proper objective that corresponds to your sales funnel.