By Maverick Steffen | Daily Marketing Advice

The goal of the Facebook advertising system is to get you new  customers.

You must understand there is a difference between posting on social media and creating a Facebook advertising campaign.

Boosting one or a hundred updates to your business Facebook page will have very little impact on your sales.

However, running an advertising campaign on your Facebook page should drive study returns for your business in perpetuity

A Facebook advertising campaign is built in the back end of your Facebook business page in the Ads Manager.

Setting up a successful advertising campaign should take at least a few hours.

Managing and improving Facebook advertising campaigns is a task that never ends.

Today I'm going to give you the basic fundamentals of creating a Facebook advertising campaign that gets you new customers.'

Business Manager

Once you have your Facebook business page launched you should Google "Facebook Business Manager" and begin setting it up.

Facebook will walk you through this entire process and you will do things such as adding a payment method and verifying your information.

The first thing you need to set up is your Facebook pixel.

This pixel needs to go on your website and any third-party landing pages you are using, and it will collect information on everybody visiting your pages.

Facebook will give you the exact instructions you need to add it.

Facebook will help you verify the pixel is installed on your website correctly.

Our company has an employee Work Portal which is a separate website, password protected, where our team members login to get work done.

We also have another website that houses Client Portals so clients can log in and see their metrics and control their marketing and advertising.

So we put our pixel on these websites as well so we can hide ads from our employees, and improve ad targeting with data collected from the Client Portal. 

The bottom line is any website you own that has any link to your business should have your pixel installed on it because you never know when you're going to need that data.

Custom Audiences 

We're now going to set up the way in which Facebook know who to target with your ads.

First and foremost you should have a good list of customers you have recently served.

Facebook says this list should be around at least one thousand to two thousand names to be effective for our purposes, but I have found even a couple hundred is adequate to get started.

You want this list of customers to be as recent as possible. In other words, you know within the last 6 months they were shopping for roofing contractors in their local area and that's how you came into contact with them to begin with.

Go into the custom audience section and add a customer list.

 

Be sure to follow the specific formatting Facebook wants you to use so it can read all of the  information in the list

once you do that you were going to create a lookalike audience of this list

a lookalike audience is when Facebook uses its technology to identify the following

- the actual profiles associated with the information on the list you have submitted

- the top 1% similarities between everybody on the list for example shopping for local roofers within a certain area, demographics, age, sex, Hobbies, if they pay their taxes, Etc

you have to remember that Facebook has their pixel on every website on the internet

so whether you are looking for pet sitters or buying a new phone, buying lingerie for your partner or researching your ex, Facebook knows it and can't I all these things in together into issued stata base they use in order to advertise

that's terrifying, but at the same time gratifying because you can leverage this total breach of modern prophecy and the interest of making more money

and that's a hamburger worth eating

now we're going to create a few more audiences.

The goal here is to steadily improve the targeting of your advertising over time

so what if I told you you can tell Facebook to Target people more like the ones that visit your home page, visit your Forum page, and visit your payment confirmation page?

That's exactly what we're going to do now

so go back into custom audiences and you're going to actually put in the URL of the pages you want Facebook to track the visitors of

I can't say that enough, formatting is critical here and make sure your url name is very similar to the one in the image

no you were going to create one page per audience

so overtime is more people hit each of these Pages, you will be able to adjust the targeting the top 1% of similarities to all people that visit these pages

so obviously in the beginning when you don't have volume to these Pages because you just added the pixel and so Facebook can't see who's on your page yesterday, you are going to start with targeting the lookalike audience of your customer list

then eventually when you have enough volume to your form page you were going to Target a look-alike of the people who visited your Forum page

the absolute gold standard is when you are targeting the top 1% similarities of all the people who visited your payment confirmation page

this means Facebook is actively targeting the people most likely to buy what you sell.

So obviously, with every hundred, thousand, and ten thousand Impressions you get your targeting is improving exponentially with your marketing and return on investment

after you have set up these links and created the custom audiences, we will now create custom conversions

again this is another way to Facebook to improve your targeting overtime and it's basically the same exact process

so you are going to set up Pages much like the ones you set up and custom audiences

I also recommend naming them in the same way we named ours.:

People can either get too complex or too simple with names but I found it we found the best formula the page name and what it is tracking, conversions versus audiences, excetera

once you have set up your custom conversions you are now

Now you are ready to create your ad

there have been libraries published about how to create a successful ad but I'm going to give you a cheat sheet so you don't have to put too much thought into it

do you remember being in grammar school and you couldn't think of an answer to a question on the test so you might have a little Gander at the sheet on the desk of the person next to you?

Of course you did, because that would be cheating!

The great thing is doing business and Facebook advertising in 2022 cheating off your competitors is not illegal, unethical or wrong!

What I'm saying quite plainly as you could take a look at your biggest competitors even though on the other side of the country to see what ads they are running, the headlines they are using, they're landing pages, body text I'd images

this is where we have to think thank the Russians for creating advertising campaigns in Facebook years ago

ever since then I believe Facebook allows you to see the ads every Facebook page is running at any particular time

for example type in a large roofing company that you know serves millions of people Nationwide

when you go to the page transparency section and click on their ads, you will be able to see all their advertising campaigns, there is serious of links and function where you can see more detail about the ad, and where people go when they click it

so instead of teaching you how to write an ad today which I spent countless blogs doing in the past, I'm inviting you to take a look at any competitor you wish to see so you can be getting seeing what they do and how they do it

I told you this was fun

now don't forget just because somebody's running an ad doesn't make it successful which is why I invite you to check back on the successful companies to see if their ad is still running

what did I had is running over the course of days weeks months and even years, you can be sure that at is making them a lot of money

however, Ralph's Roofing in Camden New Jersey who doesn't have a license and has a pickup truck with two flat tires may be running ads you don't wish to emulate or copy because he may just be wasting a lot of money on them

soapy critical here and also use as you think are going to work the best

me personally I like to win and so I won't hesitate calling accompany, acting as a customer and saying I really like your one ad I bet that gives you guys a great response

the employee will quite plainly tell me yes we get calls for that ad all the time

don't feel bad about it. Sam Walton used to do the same exact thing when he was building Walmart. He's to crawl around the floor and Kmart's all over the country trying to learn how they displayed merchandise not to mention diving into dumpsters to look into their financial reports

he would sometimes grow their employees on the retail floor as long as possible before the employee would get in trouble and be told to go back to work

so do you want to be like Sam Walton or Ralph's Roofing?

The ad is set up properly, the link goes to a page you have already created a custom audience and a custom conversion for,  so on and so forth.

Then once you publish the side Facebook will take a look at it to make sure you're not violating any of their terms

reading to Facebook's terms it's like reading stereo instructions for the largest, most complex stereo you can never imagine

so instead let me give you a few tips:

don't post an image or write text you wouldn't want your ten-year-old daughter to say

the close-ups of body parts and avoid using the word you too much in the text because for some reason they consider that intrusive

don't use any before or after pictures because again that is one of their strange violations

they are also going to look at the page people see when they click the ad so make sure again you're violating anything there as well

luckily for you your industry it's fairly straightforward and we rarely have a have a difficult time getting ads approved for roofing company

some Industries like insurance and online classes are much more difficult to manage and maintain

that's because it anytime Facebook can shut down your ads and even shut down your entire at account for no good reason at all

I'm saying this because you should expect that to happen. As a matter of fact, it will happen.

You see Facebook has a lot of automated technology and every now and then it will do a sweep of millions of Add accounts to make sure they are run by real people not Bots, and just to make sure you are being a good player

so be prepared to have your license or social security card or passport ready to submit to them

and when you do so, make sure personal profile you have Associated to this ad account matches that identification

never create a fake Facebook account with a fake name to manage ads!

We used to do this for the marketing agency because that made sense instead of entrusting one or two personal profiles to manage and oversee thousands of that. Said we would create avatars our entire team could use as they needed

eventually these real shutdown

when you are trying to pass one of these identification checks make sure that your name birthday and Hometown all corresponds to a license. And use a picture of yourself that looks most like your license if you have a picture of your kid as your profile picture, get rid of it and put a picture of your real face

trust me, you don't want to fail multiple ID checks run by people that could care less about your business and frankly just want to shut down your ads account because they score points with Facebook

instead make it as easy as possible for them to pass you because too many failed ID checks and he won't be eligible for any more and your account will be shut down forever and you'll have to start from scratch with all new data on a brand new pixel

that is the last thing in the world you want after years of your ads creating exponential returns!

If you're interested in more advice be sure to subscribe to my Monday morning marketing memo where I will get into how to create a Facebook ads funnel for your business so that your targeting strangers to your business with one ad campaign, and targeting people thinking about doing business with you with another ad campaign

after all, you wouldn't create the same pitch for a stranger as you would with somebody you been talkin to about your business for the last few weeks

so that's about it good luck and we're here if this is all too much and you like professionals to do it for you.