Ultimate Guide to Improving Facebook Ad Performance

If you want to improve the performance of your Facebook ads, you’ve come to the right place!

Improving your Facebook ad performance means higher CTRs, conversions and reach for your buck, keeping your ROIs on point.

So where is the best place to start?

This week we will give you our top tips for improving the performance of your Facebook campaigns. We’ve divided them into newbie tips and advanced hacks to ensure we can help you boost your Facebook results, no matter how experienced you are.

If you want to jump ahead to Facebook performance tips for more advanced marketers, click here.

Otherwise, sit back, grab that coffee and get ready for the ultimate guide to Facebook ad performance.

6 Steps to Better Facebook Performance for Newbies

Step 1: Make Sure You’re Using the Right Facebook Ads for eCommerce

Are you using the right Facebook ads? One of the most significant performance problems newbie eCommerce Facebook marketers face can be attributed to spending money on the wrong kinds of ads. When it comes to eCommerce, there are 9 types of Facebook ads you should be experimenting with. These are:

• Facebook Dynamic Ads
• Carousel Ads
• Facebook Collection Ads
• Video Ads
• Offer Ads
• Domain Ads
• Messenger Ads
• Instant Experience Ads
• Lead Ads

To read more about why these Facebook ads can bring in big eCommerce sales, head over to our Guide to eCommerce Facebook Ads.

Step 2: Make Sure You’re Targeting the Right Audience Demographics

Once you are testing the right ads, it’s time to check your targeting. Facebook audience demographics can play a big role in improving Facebook ad performance. If you’re targeting women’s yoga pants to men, your CTRs will clearly be abysmal.

The idea here would be to target smaller segments to ensure your ads are highly targeted and thus enjoying better ad performance. This includes targeting based on demographics such as specific locations, ages, genders, behaviors and placement.

Step 3: Improve CTRs with Exclusions

Another key, but often overlooked, targeting component to improve Facebook performance is audience exclusions. These allow you to set parameters of audiences you don’t want to reach with your campaigns.

For example, you can improve CTRs of your awareness campaigns by setting a rule to exclude people who have already been in contact with your brand.

Pro Tip: Have you excluded previous converters? Improve performance by ensuring you aren’t targeting previous shoppers, which can tank your CTRs. Instead, move them up the funnel to your remarketing campaigns targeting previous shoppers that also then exclude those who converted from the ad.

Step 4: Look for Ways to Incorporate Video Ads into Campaigns

If you’re not investing in video content for Facebook campaigns, then yes – you’re missing out. Integrating video into your Facebook marketing can have dramatic effects on your performance. In a Hubspot case study, they proved that video generated 20% more clicks than the image used for the same ad and targeting. In another study, our merchant was able to reach 13 million Facebook views with a simple smartphone video.

Due to a lot of misconceptions about expense and ROIs, video content is often the last ad type that newbie eCommerce marketers use. But if you want to turn your Facebook marketing up a notch, it’s time to take the leap. Here are some guides to get you started:

• How to Create the Perfect Facebook Video Ad
• Global List of Video Production Services, Marketplaces and Platforms for eCommerce
• 7 Small Businesses Killing It with Video Content
• 14 Places to Find Royalty-Free Background Music for Marketing Videos

Step 5: Are Your CTAs and Offers Enticing?

Does your CTA or offer appeal to the audience segment you’re targeting and does it match your ad objective? Every ad needs a solid objective, a CTA and awesome copy to back it up. Let’s say your ad objective is sales, but your ad is designed (imagery and CTAs) for brand awareness; your ROIs are going to suffer. Here are some CTA tips to get you started:

• Highlight the benefits, not just the product
• Keep to the point
• Include an action word
• Use negative words

This is something that some of our top 7- and 8-figure merchants know how to do. GearBunch, an online legging store that does over $5 million in revenue a year, gets 80% of their new customers from Facebook ads. Sure, targeting plays a huge role, but so does your copy.

Step 6: Do an Ad Element Audit

It’s not just your objectives and CTAs you want to test! To increase Facebook performance, you want to test each element of an ad to find your converting superstar. This includes variations on body text, images/video, headlines, link text, buttons, targeting, CTAs and more.

Here is an audit checklist that includes all our newbie tips mentioned in this post, to get you started on creating better-performing ads:  

• Audit and fine-tune your targeting
• Test various videos and images
• Try ad copy and CTA variations

Once you’ve done this, you are ready for more expert Facebook performance tips, hacks and strategies. Let’s jump in!

Facebook Performance Tips for Advanced Marketers

1. Test the “Snap, Benefit, Action” Copy Strategy

Before we get into the technical side, let’s look at your copy. Why? Because it’s the first step to pro Facebook performance to upgrade your ad copy to expert level. The “snap, benefit, action” copy strategy, or SBA for short, is a three-stage copy strategy to help you improve CTRs and drive more targeted traffic to your store. I first heard the term from Facebook influencer Charlie Lawrance, and it’s a great way to remember this tried-and-tested winning ad copy structure for colder, newer audiences. Let’s break it down.

Snap: This refers to the first line of copy in your ad, that’s aim is to grab attention quickly. An example of “snap” copy on a new shopper promotional ad could be: “Get 10% off your first [product] purchase when using NEW10 promo code.”

Benefit: This refers to the next line of copy, where, you guessed it, you highlight what the potential shopper – who you are specifically targeting with that ad – will gain from clicking your ad or buying your product. Benefit text may go a little something like this: “Our yoga leggings are 100% organic cotton and come in custom designs to suit any taste.”

Action: Lastly, “action” is your CTA. What should the person seeing your ad do and why should they do it? “Click ‘Shop Now’ for more savings!”

Here are some examples of SBA in action in various eCommerce Facebook ad types.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule; the trick is to find approaches that work for your specific brand and audience.

2. Use Testimonial and Reminder Copy to Boost Urgency and Trust

Another way to boost the overall performance of your Facebook campaign copy is to take the power of Facebook remarketing and word-of-mouth marketing for awesome results. There are two very effective ways to do this:  

Word-of-Mouth Ad Copy: Taking testimonials from satisfied shoppers and incorporating comments into your ad copy can have great results when you target people already in the second stage of the buying process – they know your store and products and have visited your store. This is effective as it gives extra confidence and trust to your brand, which we all know is key to getting new shoppers to convert. You can read more about how to use word-of-mouth marketing to boost eCommerce sales here.

Urgency Reminder Copy: A simple way to create urgency when remarketing traffic that hasn’t bought yet is with reminder ads. This can be in the form of a deal or promotion they already know about that is expiring, or a product they showed interest in (cart abandonment) that there is only x amount of left.

Additionally, incorporating these types of remarketing strategies into your Facebook Messenger campaigns lets you engage directly with these warmer audiences. New to Facebook Messenger ads? Then head over to our Essential Basics to Selling with Facebook Messenger guide.

3. Take Remarketing to a Whole New Level with a 3-Stage Strategy

Are you segmenting down your remarketing campaigns into buying intent? You should! Why? Because splitting your Facebook remarketing campaigns into three stages can be very effective. It’s not just your awareness and new shopper campaigns that should be divided into cold, warm and hot.

If you want to be effective and push remarketing conversions, then dividing your remarketing audiences into stages is key. I am not talking here about segmentation based on traffic behavior, although that is super important. I am talking about further segmentation that can help you zero in on that previous traffic and turn it into sales.

The idea here is to push traffic down the remarketing funnel, as you would with other strategies. Here’s a breakdown of three levels you could be breaking down your campaigns into.  

Stage 1: Awareness Remarketing Campaigns

These are campaigns that you set up to target that traffic that has visited your store only once or twice and still needs engaging, non-hard sell elements to further get to know your brandand build trust. Or it can be remarketing store visitors from an extended period of time ago that are now ‘cold.’

Stage 2: Warm Remarketing Campaigns

The next level is warm remarketing campaigns. Campaigns that are targeting repeat traffic that has clicked through to your site from the previous stage of the campaign. Here you could use promotions (product-specific), dynamic product ads or testimonials to keep their interest.

Stage 3: Hot Remarketing Campaigns

Hot remarketing campaigns will target those potential shoppers who have recently visited your store multiple times and were engaged with the first two stages. From urgency campaigns to cart abandonment remarketing dynamic product ads, the possibilities for making hot traffic convert is high.

And remember, Facebook remarketing plays a huge role in a successful cross-channel PPC strategy. You can learn more about how to integrate Facebook and Google like a pro from this handy guide.

4. Take Advantage of Placement Asset Customization Tool to Stay Relevant

If you want to tweak ad creatives within your campaign to improve CTRs and sales opportunities depending on the channel, then Facebook’s Placement Asset tool is super helpful. Be aware that this tool isn’t available in every country yet, but it’s worth looking out for even if it isn’t.

This tool allows you to use different assets such as video or image for the same ad, depending on the placement of the ad. Let’s say you want to run an ad – for a specific promotion – that is placed on Instagram and Facebook. You could use different visuals for each placement platform for the same ad. 

By being able to alter or edit cropping, aspect ratio, video length and headline or text length, you can ensure that your ads are therefore optimized for each placement (which is likely to result in a higher chance of engagement) without needing to create a whole new ad for each.

Currently, you can use this feature for Facebook and Instagram feeds, Instagram Stories and Audience Network native and/or video placement.

5. Use Lifetime Value Lookalikes to Reach Highly Targeted Potential Shoppers

Lifetime Value Lookalikes are a must-use strategy for eCommerce entrepreneurs looking to become Facebook marketing pros. These allow you to create a custom audience of new potential shoppers based on the characteristics, interests and demographics of your store’s current big or frequent spenders. In short, it allows you to find more potential shoppers who match audiences with a good lifetime value.

You can find a step-by-step guide to setting up this kind of performance-driven custom audience here.

Pro Tip: Looking for more Lookalike Audiences to improve Facebook campaign performance? Why not try event-based Lookalikes or Facebook Value Optimization.

6. Switch to Lowest-Cost Cap Bidding to Peak Performance

Facebook ad sets are set by default at the lowest cost, ensuring Facebook knows you want to get the lowest cost possible per result. However, if you change this default to lowest-cost bidding, you are able to ensure your maximum budget isn’t exceeded and your profits aren’t compromised while increasing ad distribution. The key to using this hack successfully, though, is knowing your target cost per optimization.

For example:

Let’s say you are running a Facebook remarketing campaign for a t-shirt (that costs $20) from your online clothing store. Additionally, you are using a conversion objective and have a target cost per conversion of $2. You would then set a bid cap of $10 – four times the value of your target acquisition cost, and a daily budget five times that of your bid cap – $50 per day with the aim to get 50 conversions in a week.  

7. Recycle Your Best Performers

If you have campaigns that you retired or abandoned in the past, it may be time for them to make a comeback. If at one stage they were winners, that is. Perhaps you have a promotion ad that worked fantastically; you could rerun the promotion or edit it slightly to match a new sale you’re running and unpause the campaign.

Pro Tip: Want to know how to scale a well-performing Facebook ad the right way? This video from Ben Malol takes you through his expert strategy. 

8. Using Facebook’s Split Testing Tool to Find Unicorn Campaigns

We know that the key to successful PPC campaigns lies in testing and optimizing. With the help of Facebook’s split testing tool, you can automatically split test every new campaign to ensure your audience targeting, placement, delivery and creatives are optimized to their full potential. This is super handy as it will ensure that you’re getting the best ROIs possible.

The split testing tool is available for traffic, lead generation, conversion, video views, catalog sales, reach, engagements, messages and brand awareness campaign objectives. With this tool, you are able to create multiple ad sets that you can test against each other to find the top performer.

How does Facebook’s split testing feature work?

It divides your audience into random groups with equal auction opportunities and tests different ads with one variable changed at a time. The ad set with the best cost per result wins. After which you will get a notification with the data, which you can then use to help formulate Facebook ad strategies moving forward.

9. Take Advantage of Facebook’s Test and Learn Tool

Another super handy tool for easily ensuring peak Facebook performance is their Test and Learn tool. Unlike the split testing tool, which enables you to split test variables when creating a campaign, the Test and Learn tool will help you evaluate which of your campaigns are bringing you the most sales for your budget.

Measuring brand and conversion lifts, Facebook’s Test and Learn tool will help you determine which campaigns have the lowest cost conversion, the impact of all your Facebook ads, the impact of each campaign on your store brand, and campaign budget evaluation – showing you opportunities to improve budgeting to improve performance.

Conclusion

There you have it, hacks and tips to help you with improving Facebook ad performance and building a solid eCommerce Facebook marketing strategy. To help sum up everything we have covered in this guide, here is a checklist of things to help you improve Facebook ad campaign performance:

• Ensure you’re using the right ad types for eCommerce
• Check that you have set the right objective
• Ask yourself whether you’re targeting the right audience
• Are your budget parameters serving you?
• Review your placements and remove those bringing down your result averages
• How relevant is your ad creative and text to your objective and audience?
• Do you have a snap, benefit and CTA?

And finally, it is worth mentioning that if you’re getting the reach and clicks but not the conversions, there is a big chance the landing page you are sending them to either isn’t optimized or displays messaging irrelevant to the ad. If you want to check (for free) how well your store is doing on this front in relation to 7- and 8-figure stores in your niche, click here.

For more expert tips, head over to our 9 Must-Use Expert Facebook Strategies post and if you have any campaign questions, feel free to post them in the comments below. Our Facebook gurus are standing by!

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Data Analytics vs Business Analytics vs Web Analytics vs Big Data vs BI: What are the Differences?

In the world of business software, it can feel like there are way too many buzzwords and industry terms to keep up with. As the software industry continues to grow and advance, more new concepts and trends are added, and the problem compounding all of this is that many of them sound incredibly similar. For example: web analytics vs business analytics. What’s the difference? I’ll answer that question in addition to many more about the different types of analytics and how they compare to each other (such as examining data analytics vs business analytics).

Types of Analytics

Case in point: think about how many types of analytics are out there. There’s data analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics, descriptive analytics, prescriptive analytics, web analytics and business analytics, just to name a few. We’ll touch briefly on the definitions of all these types of analytics and some basic differences between them, then dive deeper into the main focus of this article, web analytics and business analytics. We’ve already covered predictive, descriptive and prescriptive analytics before, so let’s focus on the other kinds: data analytics, web analytics, business intelligence tools, big data analytics and business analytics.

Web Analytics

Web or website data analysis is defined as the collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of web data used to understand and optimize web pages. It includes everything from web traffic metrics to market research to assess the website’s effectiveness. Web analytics software helps users collect data, process it into organized information, develop KPIs, formulate an online strategy and perform experiments to test UI changes.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence, or BI, is the overarching name for the group of technologies and methods used by organizations for the analysis of business-related data. This data provides historical, present and predictive overviews of a business’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Some typical functions include reporting, dashboards, analytical processing, data mining, event processing, process mining, business performance management, text mining, benchmarking, as well as both prescriptive and predictive analytics. The goal of BI software is for non-data scientists to be able to utilize data visualizations to draw conclusions from data sets. Then they can use these conclusions to glean insights and implement new business strategies.

Web Analytics vs Business Intelligence: Business intelligence is the parent category for all types of data analytics used in a business setting, whereas web analytics focuses on website data.

Big Data

Big data is just what it sounds like: data that is large in volume, complexity or structure. Data analysts of the past had to tackle big data in small pieces at a time, but with software, we can structure and analyze this kind of data easily and efficiently. BI and BA systems often come equipped to handle big data, but this is not always the case — that’s why it’s important to determine your data needs before choosing a solution.

Web Analytics vs Big Data: Web analytics is a tool that can process big data, which is a descriptor of the type of data.

Data Analytics

Similar to business analytics, data analytics is the process of analyzing data to draw conclusions. Business analytics can be understood as data analytics applied specifically to help businesses make data-informed decisions.

Web Analytics vs Data Analytics: Web analytics is data analytics that is restricted to your website.

Business Analytics

As a subcategory of BI, BA is the study of data using operations and statistical analysis, predictive models and optimization techniques. This used to be the purview of highly-trained data scientists combing through huge amounts of unstructured data by hand and manually drawing conclusions from patterns they found. While that is certainly still a way to parse data, the technological age has brought advancements in software that allow average employees to perform the same kinds of analysis.

Data Analytics vs Business Analytics: Business analytics utilizes data analytics in a business setting to help managers make data-driven decisions.

Difference Between Web Analytics vs Business Analytics

Now let’s take a deeper dive into business analytics vs web analytics:

Goals

Both web analytics and business analytics help businesses improve their data-driven decision-making processes. But the biggest difference between the two lies in what types of decisions are made based on that analysis. Web analytics — which analyzes website metrics — aims to improve your online presence. Mainly, this means increasing overall web traffic, including the number of visitors, visits and page views.

One way users can do this is via search engine optimization (SEO). Web analytics like Google Search Console can identify the keywords drawing visitors to your site in order to make your content more relevant and appealing to your audience. You can also sign up for automated alerts when there is an issue — a crawling error, for instance.

Web analytics also helps optimize your website’s performance. Because what’s the point of having a highly-trafficked website if it doesn’t help your bottom line? To maximize your website’s effectiveness, you have to increase your customer base by onboarding new leads. For example, making sure that your calls to action (CTAs) are effective is one key strategy. Web analysis can deliver data, such as conversion rates, that you can use to improve your CTAs, so you’re generating as many leads as possible.

While web analytics works to improve your website, business analytics help improve your whole business. The uses of business analytics are almost limitless as long as it has definable metrics. Using big data analysis capabilities, website analytics software helps you dive into the data related to your customers, business processes, employees and more.

Like business intelligence, business analytics predicts outcomes and forecasts performance by studying past results. It creates reports and predictive models from proprietary data to reveal valuable trends and insights.

Data

As you probably know, data is the most important component of analytics. Without it, you can’t perform any analysis. Which leads to another of the biggest differences between web analytics and business analytics: the type of data analyzed.

Web analysis, as we mentioned earlier, analyzes data from your website, including data related to your users, your site visitors, site visits, page views and other web metrics. This means that the data it analyzes is very focused and narrow, related exclusively to your website. After developing KPIs such as the number of monthly site visitors or CTA conversion rates, you can use web analytics to discover whether or not you achieved those KPIs. That being said, web analytics platforms can definitely be integrated into larger BI systems to give you the specificity of web analysis in conjunction with the power of larger BI platforms.

Business analytics, on the other hand, analyzes all of the data that you tell it to. Any kind of data, from how many hours each employee works to your monthly product sales to inventory information, falls under business analytics. This means you can boost more than just your marketing efforts: business analytics helps turn your entire company into an efficient, data-driven business.

Business analytics also involves more robust, in-depth analysis. Using techniques like statistical analysis and quantitative analysis provide insights into why you experienced a particular result. For example, it could find a correlation between excessive time off being taken by warehouse employees and a higher amount of late shipments. Or let’s take a more complex example: you might see that less vacation time taken off actually correlates with worse sales outcomes. This could mean that your employees need more time to recharge in order to be their most productive selves.

You can then use the information gathered and analyzed by business analytics to implement changes and conduct A/B tests if necessary. This involves testing two different versions of the same thing: two versions of your website’s landing page, different taglines for pages, etc. A/B testing allows you to isolate variables and test out courses of action without going all-in on those changes, mitigating potential failures.

Finally, using predictive modeling, you can forecast future results that you can use while planning for the future. Say your testing found that sales reps who are allowed more vacation time actually perform better: you can use algorithms to predict how this better performance will relate to the lost revenue for more vacation time to predict if it is something your organization can afford in the long-term.

Software

Last but not least, we come to the final difference between web analytics and business analytics: the type of software used. Web analytics involves simpler analysis than business analytics. Therefore, the software you use for it doesn’t need to be particularly robust. Typically, the main features of web analytics tools include data collection and reporting.

Google Analytics, the most popular web analysis tool, doesn’t create sophisticated predictive models (at least not yet) — but you usually don’t need it to. You just need to be able to see the data on your web traffic, page views, page referrals, etc. and view the trends in a report.

If you want predictive modeling of your web analytics data, you can use business analytics software. The data analysis performed by business analytics is much more detailed and sophisticated, so it needs to be more robust software than web analytics. Good predictive analytics aren’t easy, you know. This comes with additional costs to purchase and train your users to use the software.

Business analytics software needs to be able to do much more than collect, store and report on data. It needs to be able to create predictive models, while continually updating those models as it collects more and more data. Real-time dashboardsallow users both macroscopic and microscopic overviews of their organization that put them more in control than ever. Plus, it needs to be able to aid in data mining, so you can extract every possible insight from your data.

Recap

Once they’re broken down, the different types of analytics aren’t all that difficult to understand. To recap, data analytics is any kind of data collection with the intention of analyzing it to improve business practices — any size business can use it through a variety of tools. Web analytics involves the collection and analysis of your website data, with the goal of improving its performance. It can be integrated with other tools in this list, but focuses on website data only. Business analytics involves the collection and deep analysis of any type of data that your business collects. Big data is any data set used by any of these processes that is particularly large in volume or scope. Business intelligence, the parent category of the rest of these practices and tools, is the practice of using data to make better-informed business decisions.

While all types of analytics contribute to a better data-driven decision-making process, they each require their own unique type of software. Now get out there and start discussing analytics with confidence!

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How to Leverage Facebook and Instagram to Scale a 7-Figure Business

Combining Facebook and Instagram can be a powerful business scaling tool. Not only does it allow you to identify and target your ideal customers and leverage your content engagement to boost sales, but by combining these platforms into your marketing strategy you can lower cost per conversion rates as well.  
According to Facebook case studies, MVMT Watches saw a 20% lower cost per conversion and UGO Wallet had a 45% better cost per installation, by running ads across Facebook and Instagram.

Another brand, Saturday Morning Pancakes, revealed to Brilliant Business Mom podcast that by using Facebook and Instagram ads, she was able to go from $500-1,000 a month to $1 million in a year. The trick to getting these types of results with these mega platforms is to leverage your ads in different ways, depending on your desired result and what stage of the conversion funnel the potential shopper is at.  

In this post we will show you how to leverage Facebook and Instagram to scale a 7-figure business in 3 steps – from building your accounts to building your campaign funnel strategy.

Building a Scalable Social Strategy Step 1: Prime the Social Pump

Probably the slowest and most frustrating step for eCommerce entrepreneurs is boosting the initial growth of their brand’s social platform. After all, you need a starting number, a winning formula, to scale up from. Building your social platforms and organic reach is the foundation, which you need before you can leverage Facebook and Instagram to scale a 7-figure business.

Having a good flow of follower growth, engagement, and organic reach is vitally important to ensuring you are able to build brand trust through your social accounts, which in turn will help boost brand awareness, and in turn sales. How? It gives your brand ‘social proof’ – an impression of what your brand represents, how people relate to it, what you’re selling and the feedback from your product sales.

Think about it this way. Let’s say you have a great ad running on Facebook, talking about how you’ve been selling great products for 10 years. But before clicking through to your product landing page, the user checks out your Facebook page, only to find you have less than 1,000 followers who only engage with posts to complain. What kind of impression does it give the potential shopper? Not a very good one.

There are two main ways you can hustle in order to scale up your ‘social proof’: using micro-influencers and building human connections.

Using Micro-Influencers

Building your influencer reach by reaching out and engaging with influencers is slow-growing, but it also can do wonders for building your overall social brand awareness. After the initial sweat and tears, as your brand and list of influencers grow, your collaborations will start to happen organically over time, as you build your brand awareness and grow your eCommerce brand.

Now, when it comes to influencer marketing, bigger is not always better. Micro-influencers are those Facebook pages and Instagram accounts that have around 2,000 to 25,000 followers, who are more likely to engage back with their followers and keep it real. Plus, in our experience, the bigger the influencer follower base, the lower engagement percentage is in relation to the number of followers. Add this to the fact that micro-influencers will cost you less and be easier to connect with while being a lot more niche-segmented, you’re sure to get better ROIs in these smaller segments.

If you’re trying influencer marketing, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Instagram Influencer Marketing for Online Store Owners to get a jump start.

Bonus Content: How to Find the Best Influencers for Your eCommerce Brand 

Staying Human

If you’re taking the ‘all I need is to shove Facebook ads down my potential shoppers’ throats without engaging with them’ approach, you’re missing the mark. The thing is, you need real fans who regularly engage with your content, and in turn to scale that up, you should be engaging back. You know, talk back to them like human to human; keep it real. Why? Because this creates your brand’s strong social presence, AKA social proof, which helps to build trust, reach, and brand popularity, all of which ultimately drive sales.

What gives 7-figure businesses a one-up on huge eCommerce brands is their unique opportunity to connect with their shoppers and potential customers, engaging with them to form real human relationships. This not only gives you valuable insights into your shoppers beyond the data that you can use to scale up business through product launches and highly-segmented marketing campaigns, but builds a long-term customer base.

So how can you be more ‘human’? Where relevant, you should be replying to followers’ comments, questions, posts and messages. Facebook and Instagram are ‘social’ media after all: people expect – and value – a brand that socializes with them. And you don’t need your eCommerce brand to do it. Just look at one of our top merchants, owner of the successful Babes and Felines, Ciera Rogers, who was able to leverage her personal Instagram brand to build her $700K business.

The thing is, as we grow our business and sales increase, it’s easy to forget these pump-priming fundamental basics. However, if you lay the foundation from the beginning and then scale up your activity (increasing team members, budgets and scope), you will be ensuring you retain your customers long-term while continuously building relationships with potential shoppers, which makes them more inclined to buy from you.

Bonus Content: 4 Simple Mistakes Even the Biggest Online Stores are Making that Cost Sales 

Using Other Platforms to Drive Social Follower Growth

We know from numerous case studies that online coupons can grow sales. In fact, in one such case study we did, an online store was able to increase their sales by $40k in just ten days. However, by using those coupon pop-ups on your site to additionally grow followers on Instagram and Facebook, you will be doing so at no extra cost. And as your traffic grows, so will your followers, thus enabling your social accounts to scale up along with your business, with minimal effort on your part.

Take one of our top merchants, Angelus, for example; they were able to grow their Facebook and Instagram followers by 6,000 after only one month of adding social share elements to their web pop-up.

Building a Scalable Social Strategy Step 2: Leveraging Facebook & Instagram Ads to Scale

After scaling the social pump, building your branding and social foundations, it’s time to scale your business by leveraging Facebook and Instagram ads. What you want to do is test a variety of campaigns to find the winning formula for your brand, niche and target market before you scale up your efforts.

A perfect Facebook and Instagram scalable marketing strategy includes campaigns aimed at potential customers within each of your conversion funnels: brand awareness and audience building, first time conversions, and last, but by no means least, remarketing conversions. Let’s look at each of these separately.

Brand Awareness & Audience-Building Stage

These campaigns have one objective: staying relevant to your potential shoppers while building brand awareness. If you think you don’t need these ads once your sales increase, unfortunately you’re wrong.

Here’s the thing: Google analytics lie. The only way to really understand how social media brand awareness campaigns influence your organic traffic is by turning off all your Facebook and Instagram ads simultaneously. You’ll be surprised at how many of your ‘Google organic search’ and ‘direct traffic’ sales are actually a direct result of how much money you’re putting into Facebook and Instagram ads. But then, who wants to do that!

It makes perfect sense when you think of shoppers’ behavior: so many of us see sponsored ads on Facebook, without engaging at the time, only to search for the brand through our browser later on. Or that most of us prefer to buy from a brand we think we can trust, and trust is built on awareness.

What does this mean in terms of creating a scalable Facebook and Instagram strategy? It means creating high-performing campaigns that meet their secondary objective (building your audience either through web searches, follower growth or email signups), so that you can push them to the conversion stage. The point is, just because the ad is not generating an immediate sale, that’s not to say it isn’t increasing your chances of a sale further down your funnel.

Pro Tip:

Don’t forget to add campaign exclusions so that you are only spending awareness campaign budget on brand new potential shoppers – saving you from overspending and ad fatigue. You can find out more about this expert strategy in our 7 Quick Expert Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies Used by the Pros post.

First Conversion Stage

The next must-have campaign in your scalable social PPC arsenal is of course your top funnel conversion stage. Since we started interviewing leading eCommerce entrepreneurs to find out the secrets to their eCommerce success, we have found that all of them run Facebook and Instagram ads. That’s 100% of our 7/8-figure online businesses who budget for the conversion stage with both Facebook and Instagram ads.

Although their Facebook and Instagram ad budgets differ substantially, ranging from $1,000 to $60,000 per month, we have found that they all have one thing in common: each of them has tested a variety of ads until they found the ones with the highest ROIs, which they then scaled up accordingly. We also found that the vast majority of them, even those doing $3.5 million in revenue, don’t use fancy PPC agencies to run their campaigns for them; it’s all trial and error. In other words, they test, test, test!  

Additionally, their strategies all vary depending on what ROIs mean to them, i.e., it isn’t just about an instant cash sale. Let’s say you’re running an ad that doesn’t result in an immediate sale, but drives traffic to your store that results in abandoned carts and you just happen to have an awesome conversion rate on abandoned cart campaigns.

Alternatively, you run remarketing campaigns to cart abandoners specifically (including those abandoners resulting from the conversion campaigns), that have an above-average conversion rate. Then you would consider the aforementioned campaign successful, no? It’s important to find the winning formula for what works for your brand, your budget and your objectives. Once you have done that, you can then scale your Facebook ads correctly to ensure conversion growth.

Here’s a how-to video to get you started:

Bonus Content: 8 Common Facebook Ad Myths, Debunked

Remarketing Conversion Stage  

The reality is that sometimes people need that extra push before they make their first purchase with you, and building a scalable Facebook and Instagram conversion campaign strategy is imperative when growing your online business. To do this, you want to ensure you are creating highly segmented conversion campaigns, meaning you create different ads for different sets of potential shoppers, based on how recently they browsed your store, what pages they browsed and how they engaged with your pages. This is where Facebook’s Dynamic Product ads can be super effective for building your remarketing strategy.

So, what does a perfect remarketing conversion ad strategy for Facebook and Instagram look like? Let’s say a shopper visits your store and puts a product in their cart; two days later, they should see a Dynamic Product ad for that same product, perhaps with an enticing discount. A week after that, if they haven’t bought yet, they may see a more generic remarketing ad in their Facebook or Instagram newsfeed that reminds them of your brand. With exclusions, you can run these ads almost automatically, keeping an eye on your ROIs and tweaking copy, segments and/or discounts as needed.

Building a Scalable Social Strategy Step 3: Accelerate Your Growth With Email

The final step is to accelerate your growth with email marketing. This may seem off-topic, but that couldn’t be further from the truth when you take a step back to look at the bigger picture. As I have said so many times before, Facebook or Instagram ads shouldn’t exist in a vacuum; instead, your marketing channels should work together to scale your 7-figure business.

As we mentioned above, brand awareness is an integral part of leveraging Facebook and Instagram. Whether you’re running email sign-up ads or, more likely, using awareness to drive traffic to your online store where you then email capture, the result is lots of juicy email addresses to market to. Because the more traffic you drive, if you’re using email capture pop-ups, the more email data you’re collecting, and you are therefore able to email market to these potential shoppers who know your brand through your Facebook and Instagram ads.   

That’s why it is important not to look at email as a separate entity, but instead to think of it as adding fuel to the fire of social conversions and ensuring you can fully take advantage of all the time and money you’re putting into your campaigns. By creating highly segmented email marketing campaigns, you can boost sales while staying front and center in the minds of all those potential shoppers.

Bonus Content: Top 4 Things That are Killing Your Email Marketing and How to Fix It 

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There you have it – how to leverage Facebook and Instagram to scale a 7-figure business, from growing your organic reach to using remarketing campaigns to automatically boost sales. Have questions? Post them in the comments below – I’d love to hear from you!

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