Author: Guest Post / Source: Duct Tape Marketing < All Articles Regardless of your business model, incorporating Facebook ads into
Regardless of your business model, incorporating Facebook ads into your marketing funnel can be a dependable way to drive customers to your site and, ultimately, boost sales.
The concept is simple enough: You target prospective buyers on Facebook with an ad.
But when it comes to Facebook, the real key is how to create sustainable traffic—in other words, campaigns that will deliver traffic reliably month over month.
With that in mind, let’s consider the various actions that you’d like site visitors to take upon visiting your site.
Hard Conversions vs. Soft Conversions
Naturally, you want to drive site visitors who will buy your product after being served an ad. However, these “hard conversions” are typically the toughest sell—literally—to achieve, at least initially.
But, there’s a lot of ways that a visitor can convert other than just purchasing something. While conversion (i.e., a lead or sale) is the eventual goal, the runners up are “soft conversions”, like the following:
1. Generate New Email Subscribers
You want your visitors to subscribe to a newsletter or fill out a lead form (which means they’ve opted in and given you their email, which will, in turn, give you more opportunities to reach them and get back them to your site). In this scenario, they’re not purchasing but they’re asking for more information about your company, your product, your services. Typically we use a number of different opt-in formats across the site.
2. Build Your Retargeting Pool
A retargeting ‘pool’ is a group of visitors to your site who we can target with various offers & messages. Retargeting is often cheaper than generating first-time visitors from traffic sources like PPC on Google Adwords and Bing, so if we can drive a large number of affordable visits from Facebook ads and then retarget those users again with Facebook ads, we can reach a broader audience of potential buyers with our given campaign budget. The tradeoff, however, is that these users convert less often than visitors from paid search campaigns.
Our goal here is to drive relevant traffic from your target audience and get them to complete one of these soft conversions.
So – what kind of Facebook ads drive your audience to complete one of the goals above?
Here are some examples of Facebook ad formats that are typically used for soft conversions:
- Interesting blog posts that speak to your target buyers
- Long-form content that speaks to a user’s needs
- Downloadable buyer’s guide to your product/service
And here are some examples of Facebook ad formats that are typically used to generate a hard conversion:
- Discounts & coupons
- Upcoming events
- Highlight some recent press you’ve received on your product (an example of this later)
The next question you need to answer is which type of Facebook ad is most appropriate for your goals.
The answer could be both – and that’s the trick to using Facebook ads to generate continual traffic, not just occasional bursts.
Our real goal is to drive lots of visitors to our site who fit into our target audience, turn them into an email subscriber or add them to our retargeting pool, and then attract those visitors back to the site with sales messaging in order to produce an actual lead or sale.
Facebook Ad Examples
Let’s look at some examples of each type of ad.
If you’re looking to drum up general brand awareness and give people something interesting to read, in hopes that you’ll get super low CPCs as a result, you might try an approach like this blog post/interview from Wealthsimple. Take note of the clear and simple call to action at the end of their post:
If you have…
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