In 2022, Facebook will be both a social and a sales channel. The platform enables more than simple brand-customer interactions – it’s one of the best channels to reach your target audience and drive online sales.
And while Facebook advertising has faced diminishing returns, skyrocketing costs, and audience targeting issues because of ever-changing privacy policies and Laws, it remains an important channel to consider. After all, Facebook is still the most prominent social platform (with nearly 2.5 billion active users) and offers advertisers some of the best targeting options.
While it’s great to use your online store as the command center of your business, you still need third-party platforms as sales channels to meet buyers where they are. Facebook ads are an extremely effective medium to do just that.
Advantages of advertising on Facebook
While it can be argued that Facebook ads are less effective today than they used to be, it’s still the social network with the most active users – not to mention that it also covers Instagram. That’s why it’s essential to target Facebook advertising strategies to ensure you don’t waste your budget on ads that don’t contribute to your bottom line.
Advertising on Facebook offers some key advantages:
- Advanced choices to target your ads to specific audiences
- Seamless eCommerce integration
- Insightful data analysis
- One of the largest social networks
- Access to Facebook’s entire ad library
- Options for every budget
You can make use of Facebook ads for both customer acquisition and retention. It’s a great way to increase brand awareness, reach out to new potential customers, and maintain connections with people who already know your brand. Facebook offers three main goals you can choose from for each ad:
Awareness: Use this objective if you are new to business or advertising on Facebook and want to attract new customers. You can also use this objective to launch a new product line or promote an event.
Consideration: It is the next step in our Facebook ads journey after your audience has developed some awareness of what you offer, you should target them with ads that provide more data. These ads should drive engagement or help you collect leads.
Conversion: The last step in the journey is to get users to convert. Maybe that means they buy a product, or you want them to visit your website, get directions to your store, or fill out a form telling you their information.
There’s no guideline or tell-tale sign for when you should consider Facebook ads. The platform offers opportunities for almost any business and any budget.
How to install the Facebook pixel
Before we get into Facebook advertising strategies for your eCommerce business, you should set up the Facebook Pixel. The pixel is a fragment of HTML code that you insert into your website’s back. Once installed, it collects data about your website visitors and their activities, making it easier for you to execute effectively targeted Facebook advertising strategies down the road, mainly if you collect your clients’ email addresses.
Here’s how it functions: once the code is set up and a user clicks on one of your ads and visits your website, the pixel tracks their behavior. You can see how much time they invest in your site, what links they click on, what pages they visit, what products they buy, and more.
While these insights are undoubtedly valuable, the actual value of the Facebook Pixel is in its ability to create audiences or customer segments. You can adjust ad design and bids for more effective ads by targeting your Facebook ads to specific audiences.
5 Facebook ad strategies you should try in 2022
1. Customize your ads by targeting specific audiences
Facebook has one of the most robust ad targeting options, allowing you to be very specific with your audience, promotions, and ad design. That is especially helpful if you don’t have a lot of existing customer data to use. Facebook’s Core Audience feature lets you narrow down your target market precisely based on five criteria:
Demographics: Location. You can target specific countries, states, provinces, cities, towns, zip codes, etc. You can also specify a radius around a central point, such as users within 10 miles of zip code 12345.
Demographic options include age, gender, education, occupation, language, political affiliation, income, relationship status, and more.
Interests: These include hobbies and other things your target audience likes to do.
Behavior: In this section, Facebook considers users’ digital behaviors, including device usage, network speed, and buying patterns.
Connections: This targeting parameter lets you determine whether you want to target people connected to your Facebook page who already know your brand to some degree or whether you want to exclude them and focus on increasing brand awareness and customer acquisition.
Facebook’s Audience Insights tool can give you ideas for building your core audience
Audience Insights tells you the location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections of your current followers – you can then apply these parameters to your core audiences as you see fit.
Below are some ideas on how to use the core audience targeting options in your Facebook ad strategy
Target groups by life events
There are many options for targeting life events, such as engagement, marriage, baby, new job, graduation, a recent move, retirement, anniversary, loss of a loved one, and more. Consider the context in which your products will be used, and think of life events that might accompany such uses. For example, the ad below for Lights of Scandinavia could be repurposed to appeal to new homeowners with a message about lighting their new space.
Target audiences by weather
While not a Facebook-owned targeting option, there are third-party tools that let you automatically customize ad design and enable/disable ads based on local weather conditions. Indow Windows did just that with WeatherAds to promote its window insulation products by targeting zip codes with temperatures below 35 degrees Fahrenheit.
Target audiences by hobby
Audience insights are precious for this Facebook ad targeting strategy. Look at the typical hobbies of your target audience and select those that aren’t directly related to your niche or products. A brand like Orca, which sells rugged outdoor coolers, might predict common hobbies like fishing and hiking among its target audience. Audience insights, however, might also reveal an interest in country music and concerts – in which case you might consider targeting these people with ads suggesting that the coolers are great for barbecuing before concerts and festivals.
2. Nurture repeat clients through Facebook Custom Audiences
Facebook Custom Audiences are teams of Facebook users who know your brand to some degree. That means they have visited your website, engaged with your Facebook page or posts, signed up for your emails, made a purchase, or otherwise engaged with your brand.
Essentially, Facebook eventually takes the customer data you provide and compares that data to Facebook users to match your customers to individual users. Facebook then creates groups from these individuals that you can target with various ad campaigns.
You can create four kinds of Custom Audiences
Website Custom Audiences: Create these audiences from users who have visited your website or a specific page on your website.
App Activity Custom Audiences: These segments consist of people who have interacted with your mobile app or performed a specific action within your mobile app.
Customer List Custom Audience: Import a table with a customer list, and Facebook will match the data with its users to create this audience.
Engagement Custom Audiences: Teams of people who have engaged with your Facebook content or ads in the past, such as watching a video, submitting a lead form, or visiting your Facebook page. That is an excellent source for building Lookalike Audiences.
3. Expand your market with “lookalike” targeting
Over time, you will use your Custom Audiences to create new segments with similar characteristics to the target. These audiences are called “Lookalike Audiences.“
Lookalike Audiences are valuable because they have much in common with your target market. So you already understand what they like and which advertisements work well. You can often utilize the same ads for your Lookalike Audiences that you already run for other targets.
This Facebook advertising strategy is a great way to attract new customers. You already know the preferences of these groups so that you can introduce them to your brand with proven, practical ad creativity.
You can scale how comparable your Lookalike Audience is to your original target audience. If you keep it very similar, you’re targeting a smaller but more specific group. If you allow a wide variance between audiences, you’ll reach a more extensive but broader audience. Facebook allows a maximum of 500 Lookalike Audiences, giving you plenty of room for creativity and experimentation.
4. Retargeting previous visitors to your Facebook or Instagram web pages
Facebook Retargeting ads are revealed to users who have visited your eCommerce website or communicated with your Facebook or Instagram web page in the past. You can target customers based on specific actions they have taken – Likes on Facebook, products added to the cart, or even specific pages visited. This Facebook advertising strategy is a great way to nurture pre-existing relationships.
There are many applications for this Facebook advertising strategy, with retargeting options that include people who:
- Interacted with your brand on Facebook and Instagram
- Have visited your website
- Have used your mobile app
- Have you spent a certain amount of time on your website
- Visited specific pages on your website and viewed a product (known as “viewed content”)
- Added a product to the shopping cart
- Purchase transaction initiated
5. Check your competition in the Facebook Ads Library
Attention is the currency of advertising, and to know what attracts your audience, you need to know what your ads measure up against. In 2018, Facebook aimed to provide more transparency for advertisers and introduced the Facebook Ad Library (now Meta Ad Library). The tool serves as a repository for all of an advertiser’s current and past Facebook ads. Once you’ve developed your Facebook advertising strategies and created campaigns to promote your brand, look at what your competitors are doing.
Any user can search the ads by keyword and filter by location and four ad categories: issues, elections or politics, housing, employment, and credit.
When planning your Facebook ads, it’s helpful to see what ads your direct and indirect competitors are running. Pay particular attention to ad design, including images and copy and ad variations.
Repeat and analyze your Facebook advertising strategy
The most effective Facebook ads are constantly optimized for performance, even though you can set them up naturally.
It’s essential to test your Facebook ads to find out what works and what doesn’t, and then make adjustments based on those findings. For example, you could test Facebook video ads versus photo ads to see if one content type works better than the other. Another optimization strategy for Facebook ads is to consider the cost of your ads. You can adjust bids and audiences to lower the cost per click (CPC).
Want to create an effective Facebook ad fast? Here’s where to start Facebook Ads and also check out our more products at My Sales Script.