Have you ever heard the following?

“Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.”

That saying is as true for your business advertising as it is for relationships, healthy living, and planning for retirement.

If you don’t set a clear objective at the beginning of your journey how do you plan to measure whether the results are successful or not?

When you are using Facebook to do your marketing the same concept of having clear objectives applies. You have to tell Facebook what you want to accomplish in order to track progress, invest ad dollars wisely, and scale up the successful campaigns.

Do you want even more people to know who you are?

Do you want Leads?

Website visits?

Physical store visits?

You can have any of these if you communicate with Facebook correctly. If you make Facebook your partner.

Facebook as your Partner

Facebook can be your best partner.

They want you to succeed because that helps you grow your business, which means you’ll mostly keeping investing ad dollars with them. Remember a huge reason Facebook is free to use, if not the reason, is because of advertisers like you and me.

Keep this in mind though, you are in control. 

You are responsible for how well your ad campaigns do. This is one reason selecting the right objective is so important. Facebook doesn’t fail you, you fail to tell Facebook what you want to accomplish.

If you give Facebook incorrect objectives and data, you might not get your desired results.

Always Be Testing (ABT)

Always Be Testing (ABT) is one of the keys to a successful campaign. If you have this mentality, it can help you discern which campaigns will give you more return on investment (ROI).

In some cases, you might get surprised that what works today, might not work so well tomorrow.

If you discover that something in your campaign isn’t working then stop using it. Switch your method or strategy and continue testing. This is how you continuously optimize.

While you’re testing you might get surprised and discover new things. Keep your mind open to the opportunities that are in front of you.

Create Campaign from Scratch

When you first start building your ad you might be one of the few people that have access to either an Auction or a Reach and Frequency campaign. So, let’s quickly define those.

Reach and Frequency Campaigns are like the traditional way of advertising on radio and television. For example, the radio or t.v. station tell you that  $25,000 will get you 6 months of advertising and you’ll be seen or heard by 275,000 people. I’m not a radio or t.v. advertiser so if those completely made up numbers are way off, please forgive me. The point is that you are paying a fixed price to predictably reach your brand’s audience.

However, with a Reach and Frequency campaign, you cannot track the audience the way you can with an auction campaign. You lose out the ability to retarget people with messages that could direct people to visit your website, physical store or message them.

On the other hand, Auction Campaigns are bidding to reach the audience at the lowest possible price. I believe THIS IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE ONE because it allows us to reach more people at the least possible amount. This is the campaign type that I use and the one I recommend you use too. 

Awareness vs Consideration vs Conversion

I want to share something with you that blew me away when I first realized it.

When you look at the three campaign objective columns: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion you’re looking at something amazing. 

THIS IS A MARKETING FUNNEL!

Why?

Because, when you follow the steps in the awareness, the consideration, and the conversion campaigns it takes a person on the journey from not being a customer to being a customer.

Awareness is an objective that helps generates interest. Here you can create a branding effect, letting people know who you are and what are you selling.

Consideration is the objective to use when you are trying to make people think about your business more often. Maybe to inspire them to look for more information about you. In this campaign, you can really start building new audiences of people that you can retarget with more content.

Conversion objectives that encourage people to use your product or service.

For me, my most successful branding campaign methods are video views and messaging.

Follow the Steps

Whether you are a seasoned marketer or just getting your feet wet and advertising your business online you can see above all you have to do is follow the steps laid out for you.

If you are already well known for your business then feel free to jump right into the consideration campaigns. If you’re already very well-known and you have tons of customers already feel free to leverage those customers with a lookalike audience and drive them into conversion campaigns.

But, if you’re like many of us, you need more and more people to be aware of you first. So, start with the awareness campaigns. Then push those people into the consideration campaigns and finally drive them into the conversions campaigns.

Follow steps over and over and over and I believe you’ll be happy you did. I know I am.