As part of our mission to help you focus more on your passion, we at Taxumo will be inviting various experts here on our blog to guide you on how to grow your business effectively.
Below, digital marketing specialist Julian Cañita explains how Facebook advertising can be a great platform to reach your potential market.
I know a lot of people who are really great at closing sales.
Give them inquiries and they can convert a lot of them into clients and customers.
But for some, business still tends to be slow. This is because having a good success rate of closing leads is not much if there are very few inquiries. And this tends to be what a lot of business owners neglect or put on the backseat. They just wait for inquiries to come in as opposed to actively looking to connect with potential prospects themselves.
One way to get your business out there is through advertising. But a lot of small businesses don’t venture into advertising because the misconception is that advertising costs a lot.
The truth is, it doesn’t have to!
One low-cost way of advertising your business and your offer is through Facebook advertising.
In a nutshell, you as the advertiser control a lot of elements of your advertising campaign including how much to spend and to whom to show your ads to.
In this article, I want to share with you how to get a consistent stream of inquiries with a marketing budget as small as Php 1,200 a month.
New to Facebook Advertising? Check this out first: What You Basically Need to Know About Facebook Ads
Facebook Advertising: How to Set Up A Lead Campaign
As with any new ad campaign, the first step is to create a campaign. For this specific campaign, we will be utilizing Lead Ads.
Lead ads are ads wherein when users click on the ad, instead of being brought into an external webpage, a form pops out from within Facebook that the users can fill up and submit.
Setting up a Facebook Lead Ad
The great thing about these lead ads is that it can prepopulate the form fields based on the information provided in the Facebook user’s profile. This means that if you will only be requiring the user’s name and e-mail address which Facebook already has, all the users have to do is to click 3-4 times to send in an inquiry. No typing required!
Choosing Your Facebook Ads Objective
To set this up, make sure to select ‘Lead Generation’ as the campaign objective.
(Note: There are other alternatives to the lead ads which I will mention later on. You don’t have to limit yourself to just this one type of campaign. It’s always best to experiment and go with the best performing campaign.)
Define Your Target Audience
One of the best parts of the Facebook advertising platform is its ability to get really granular when it comes to targeting your audience.
Once you create your campaign, you will now proceed to create your ad set where you will have to define your targeting.
The first thing you should do is to define the demographics of your target audience.
- Are you serving anyone from the Philippines or just Metro Manila? Or maybe it’s just within your city.
- How old are they? Make sure you avoid showing your ads to age groups which do not include your target market.
- Are you targeting just men, just women, or both?
Next is the more interesting part where you define your target market by their interests and behaviors. This involves a bit of research but when you get it right, it is very beneficial to your success.
I wrote about this in a bit more on my blog but here are some questions you can ask to help you look for targeting points:
- Who are the authority figures in your industry?
- What are their jobs?
- What do they read?
- Which websites do they visit?
- What tools do they use?
- What clubs do they belong in?
- Who are your competitors?
- Where are they in their lives right now?
If the answers to these questions are targetable through the ad platform, then put it in the ‘Detailed Targeting’ box.
The ad set is also where you define the budget to be spent. If you’re looking to start at the minimum ad spend, start with a daily budget of Php 40 a day (hence the P1,200 budget for the month assuming it’s a 30-day month).
Create Your Ad
The ad level is where you create the ads themselves. You can create more than one but for now, let’s stick to one first.
We won’t go into the general ad creation process yet since we go over it in the article we linked to earlier.
The important thing your ad for this campaign is to get them to click through to open the form. It is why it is important to explicitly say “click here”.
End your ad by asking the users to click and telling them what they will get after they click. A simple call-to-action sentence could be “click here to submit an inquiry” or “click here to request for our rates”
Create Your Lead Form
In the ad creation process, you will be asked to create the lead form.
The first part is the optional welcome letter which basically acknowledges that the user has clicked on the ad and provides instructions on proceeding. I usually prefer not having a welcome letter to lessen the amount of work the user has to be done, but that’s just me.
The second part is the form itself. Here, you can select from a pre-determined set of form fields. I highly recommend putting in the very bare essentials to make it easy for the user. I usually only ask for the name, email and contact number because by having the contact information, the business can easily follow up all the other information needed to provide a more accurate quote.
You will be asked for a link to your privacy policy and a link to your website. If you do not have these, you can just provide the URL to your Facebook page.
Activate
Once you’ve done all these, you’re all set to go. Just check the preview links to make sure the ads look the way you intend them to. Go ahead and upload or place the order.
You will now have to wait for approval which usually doesn’t take very long.
If it has been a few hours already and your campaign still isn’t running, it might be undergoing further review because your ad may possibly in violation of the Facebook advertising terms of service. If they are, you will be informed if it is disapproved.
Accessing Your Leads
Once your campaigns start running and leads start coming in, you will want to check on them.
To do so, go to your Facebook page and click on ‘Publishing Tools’. In that window, select ‘Forms Library’ and you will find your form on that page. On the right side, you will find a download link. Click on it and you’ll get access to a .csv file with the lead information.
Monitoring and Improving
The Php 40 a day is the minimum required ad spend to run a campaign. But I recommend you not limit yourself to that.
As you go along, it would be a good idea monitor the results you are getting over a significant time period. With a small budget, a week’s worth of data may not be enough for you to make optimization decisions.
As you monitor your results, it would also be good to take measures to improve your campaigns. Here are some ways you can do so:
- Have 2-3 ads per ad set to test and see what ad creative and/or ad copy
- Have multiple ad sets to test different audiences
- Increase the budget for well-performing ad sets
- Check the demographic data of your distribution by checking out the Breakdown tab in ads manager
Other Alternatives
Apart from lead ads, there are other alternatives you may want to test to get direct inquiries:
- Ads direct to a website or landing page where users can submit an inquiry form
- Messenger ads where when the user clicks on an ad, it opens up a messenger window which allows them to start a conversation with your business.
- Page Post Engagement ads where you ask people to comment to express their interest
It’s always worth it to test out different strategies because what works for one business may not always work as well for the other.
Conclusion
Advertising doesn’t have to be expensive, nor should it be thoroughly planned out the way traditional advertising is.
It just boils down to having an offer and getting that offer in front of the right audience. And this is exactly what Facebook advertising allows business owners to do.
By using lead ads and optimizing it to run on auto-pilot, businesses can now focus more on closing each inquiry that comes in and serving that audience.
Are FB advertising expenses Tax Deductible?
Hello Sonny,
Yes, typically, businesses can deduct Facebook advertising expenses if they’re essential for promoting their products or services. Keep good records and follow tax rules.