Facebook Marketing: A Practical Guide

facebook marketing

Anyone who conducts a site understands that setting a solid internet presence is critical — particularly for business owners. How that you present yourself online may have a massive effect on the visitors and conversions that your website receives; whereas, even a feeble presence may have a harmful impact.

In regards to constructing your online business, Facebook advertising may be among the most invaluable tools available. This social networking platform provides you a degree of accessibility to prospective clients, which is difficult to find elsewhere. What is more, it gives a vast array of advertising alternatives which you are able to make the most of.

In this informative article, we will go over different approaches by which you can advertise your company through Facebook to provide help you begin. Let’s get into it!

Facebook Marketing – Everybody says you ought to do it, but understanding you ought to be promoting your small business online and really doing it efficiently are two quite different matters.

Preparing a business site, running advertisements, placing together Posting programs, making great articles…where would you begin?

The fantastic news is, even in this article, we are likely to take the puzzle From Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising is a large topic, so that this will not be a fast read, but we will cover all you want to learn to advertise your enterprise on Facebook. No fluff, just sensible advice that you may use today. Ready? Let’s dive in!

Why Facebook Marketing?

Facebook marketing 2

Before we dive too deeply into the specifics of Facebook marketing, let’s take a step back and look at why Facebook marketing is a good investment for most businesses.

The answer is fairly simple: reach / target audience / widespread network / tons of business opportunity.

Great digital marketing permits you to get in touch with prospective customers who’d never buy from your organization. As a result of the world wide web, these folks can be anywhere on earth and if they are interested in what you are promoting, you can promote to them on line.

The key, of course, is figuring out just how to reach your target audience. That is really where Facebook really excels. Therefore, If You Would like to get in front of a Massive crowd of prospective Clients, Facebook is fairly difficult to overcome.

But, all that reach includes a drawback: most of these Users may care less about what you are selling. If you are not careful with your FB advertising, you might wind up spending a great deal of time, effort and money promoting your company to the wrong men and women.

Just like any marketing station, the key to Facebook advertising Is figuring out just how to place the ideal advertising and marketing content in the front of the proper Folks at the ideal time…that is exactly what the remainder of this guide is about.

What Makes Facebook Marketing Different

Great marketing is about building connections. It’s true, you could consider your advertising concerning pricing, return-on-ad-spend, participation prices or other metrics that are broad, but for the clients, it is about the connection they have with your own brand.

Can I trust your business? Can I believe in your message or vision? Can I feel as if your company is dedicated to fulfilling my requirements? Can I feel as though Your service or product deserves my cash?

Your potential Clients Are always asking these sorts of queries. Before they will make A buy, they will need to feel as though they could trust your company, your brand and What you are selling.

In other words, they need a relationship of confidence with your small business.

The fantastic news is, Facebook is an internet platform devoted to relationships. Social networking is about sharing, building and preserving relationships with different men and women. This is vital, since the failure or success of your FB advertising will be contingent on your capacity to utilize the societal, relationship-focused character of Facebook to develop positive relationships with your potential clients.

I bring up this idea today since it’ll be essential to what we talk in the remainder of this report. To your FB advertising to be successful, you have to get focused on assisting your intended viewers create a positive connection with your small business.

As with your own relationships, in case your organization comes off as irritating, spammy or rough, individuals will not like you and will not react well to your advertising. But, if you are useful, enjoyable and supply value, you’re win people’s Hearts –and their business enterprise.
Setting Up Your Facebook Business Page

Regardless of how you desire to use Facebook to market your company, you can’t do Facebook marketing without a Facebook Page. This is appealing easy (60 million businesses have already done it, which means Facebook has had a lot of opportunities to ideal their process), so let’s rapidly walk through the setup process.

Creating Your Facebook Page

Facebook Pages are diverse from Facebook Profiles. Yes, a Facebook Page looks a wonderful lot like a Facebook Profile, but it offers a variety of distinct marketing options that you don’t get with a normal profile.

For example, here’s what Our’s Facebook Page looks like:

Because you can see previously, you “enjoy” a company instead of “friending” it along with also a Facebook Page can get testimonials, list a speech, comprise chat alternatives and even offer you call-to-action buttons such as “Call Now” or even”Visit Website”.

In the event you’re considering attempting to promote your company out of a Facebook Profile, be cautioned, Facebook has a inclination to block or delete accounts which utilize Profiles such a manner. Additionally, a Facebook Page offers you access to advertising choices like Facebook Ads which you can not run using a Profile, therefore it is worth your time to make a Facebook Page to your company.

To create your Facebook Page, click here.

At this point, you have the option to choose what type of Page you want to create:

 

The kind of page you choose will change what subjects you are going to have access to in your webpage, therefore it is ideal to select a page kind that closely matches what you wish to achieve on Facebook.

By way of instance, if you are a local charity which regularly hosts public events to raise capital, you are likely better off choosing”Cause or Community” compared to “Local Business or Place”, despite the fact that you technically straddle either alternatives.

You’ve got to get a own Facebook accounts to control your Facebook Page, which means you’re going to want to sign to your own personal account once you select your small business name (select your name carefully, as altering it following your Page is live could be a real hassle ).

As soon as you’re logged in and have chosen your enterprise name, then hit “Get Started” to make your Page! You are going to be redirected to a glistening new Page, which you will want to personalize in a couple of ways before you begin using it.

Profile Picture

This is social media, so your profile picture matters for the audience as well as for your business audience. It’s what will identify your business across Facebook while someone lands on it, whether you’re commenting on a post or showing up in search results.

If you’re a larger business with an official logo, this is a great place to use it.

Alternatively, if you’re a freelancer or have a personality-based business (artist, band, public figure, MLM, etc), you may require to use a more personalized photo for your profile picture. Just make sure that it is at least 180 x 180 pixels.

Cover Photo

Including a cover photograph is also a fantastic idea, because nothing shouts”I do not understand what I am performing on Facebook” just like a sterile cover photograph. Your cover photograph is the large horizontal picture near the very top of the Facebook Page.

Contrary to your own profile image, it is somewhat creative and flexible along with your cover photograph. By way of instance, in Disruptive, we have done distinct holiday-themed cover photographs during different days of year.

As an alternative, you might even apply your cover photograph to market forthcoming events or exclusive revenue which you may be running.

Officially, Facebook cover photos are 851 pixels by 315 pixels, but (like your profile picture) you always have the option to upload a picture that doesn’t fit those dimensions and use Facebook’s cropping function to size your picture appropriately.

Description

One other important part of a Facebook Page is the own description. Pictures are excellent, but a few things really are best mentioned, you knowwords.

If you are at the welcome menu, then all you need to do in order to incorporate your description will be click”Insert a brief Query” (convenient, eh?) . Facebook has a character limit of 155 personalities, but a fantastic description ought to be short and sweet, so that you won’t need to worry about hitting the limitation.

In the event you would like to edit your description in the future, you may always click “About” from the menu beneath your profile image. This will Provide you the Choice to edit Various details about your company:

 

Generally, an expert description using a dash of character works best. Bear in mind, you’re attempting to construct a connection, which means you would like to come off as memorable and interesting. But, you are still running a company, and therefore you have to appear professional, also.

Create a Username

Ultimately, before you can begin advertising your company on Facebook, you’ll want to create a username. Here is the exceptional identifier Facebook can use to your own habit Facebook URL.

As stated before, altering your FB URL farther down the road could be rather hard, so ensure that you decide on a name that you feel comfortable with for the near future.

Regrettably, together with 60 million additional companies on Facebook, there is a fantastic possibility that the username you desire to use could be obtained already. Within this circumstance, you will have 50 characters to discover a way to produce your username special without producing a name that is difficult to recall or connect with your organization.

Other Facebook Page Elements to Consider

Now, your Facebook Page is complete and you’re able to begin running advertisements or sharing with your Page. But there are a couple other fields you might choose to finish, particularly in the event that you intend on making significant usage of your own Facebook Page on your internet advertising efforts.

Add Other Users

Among the advantages a Facebook Page has more than a Facebook Profile will be your capacity to permit a number of individuals to help handle your own Page. To do so, you are going to want to control your Page Roles.

Click the”Settings” link in the top alongside your Page and click “Page Roles” from the left pub. From that point, you are going to be able to discover individuals by email or name address (with the “Assign a New Page Role” search bar) and provide them a function on your webpage.

Notifications

While this doesn’t straight-away affect your ability to market your business on Facebook, you can click on the “Notifications” option in the “Settings” left-hand Menu Bar to determine how frequently you want Facebook to notify you about activity on your Page.

Call-to-Action

Remember earlier when we talked about the ability to add a call-to-action (CTA) as one of the perks of creating a Facebook Page? To pick your button, click on “+ Add a Button” under your cover image.

 

From there, you’ll have several CTA button options to choose from:

 

Using these options, you can enable people a straight way to contact you, book a service, visit your website or even make a purchase. For many of these options, you’ll require to enter a URL, phone number or email, so make sure you recognize exactly where you want Facebook to send people who click on your button.

Marketing on Facebook

Historically, there are two powerful techniques to utilize your own Facebook Page to advertise your company: 1) construct a subsequent organically by submitting engaging articles or two ) pay to run advertisements on Facebook.

But as Facebook just gets paid once you conduct ads and many business Page content is not all that engaging, Facebook is now more tough to advertise your organization on their stage utilizing organic content.

Irrespective of whether you call that movement a money-grab or maximizing their consumer experience, the simple fact of the matter is these days, if you would like to promote on Facebook, you’re likely going to need to pay-to-play.

Organic Reach: Is It Really Dead?

Before we leap into how to prepare and operate powerful Facebook Advertising, let us take a moment to talk about exactly what happened on Facebook organic achieve. After all, entrepreneurs have been advocating that each company setup a Facebook Page and attempt to construct a following through organic material for the previous ten years.

What changed?

Regrettably, over the past couple of decades, Facebook has made it more difficult and more difficult to capitalize on the very first alternative. In 2014, Facebook declared that”Pages that article promotional innovative should anticipate their natural supply to fall considerably as time passes.”

In 2016, Facebook added components to their own News Feed algorithm to stop clickbait articles from displaying up for users. Then, a month, Facebook declared they could be reconfiguring their approach to categorize”articles from family and friends over public articles”.

The end result? According to Facebook:

As we create these upgrades, Pages can see their achieve, movie view period and referral traffic reduction. The effect will change from Page to Page, driven by variables such as the kind of articles they create and the way folks interact with this. Pages making articles that individuals generally do not respond to comment on may observe the largest declines in supply. Pages whose articles direct talks between friends will probably see much less of an impact.

Consequently, should you happen to be handling a hugely popular page such as”FailArmy” that currently sparks tons of engagement and comments, this upgrade probably will not harm you.

If, on the flip side, you are like many companies and you have a little following or do not get a lot of comments in your articles, it is time to pay your final respects: the Facebook natural achieve (organic reach) is dead.

Should You Keep Posting on Facebook?

As you may not become much organic achieve out of the Facebook articles, it is not a fantastic idea to give up in your Facebook Page completely. When organic posting was a valid approach to promote your company on Facebook, among the greatest perks of having a Facebook Page was going to provide prospective customers a means to get acquainted with your organization.

Recall how important relationships are at Facebook advertising?

Your Facebook Page is the way folks construct a connection with your small business. Because of this, that which you print in your Facebook Page is seriously important–even when the only men and women who view it are the individuals that are seeing your webpage since they would like to find out exactly what your company is about.

Combining this idea with the simple fact that your Facebook organic achieve will likely be rather low, so your Facebook articles ought to be equipped with prospective customers in your mind. This does not signify your Facebook articles should be advertisements. In reality, you should normally avoid too promotional articles on Facebook.

Rather, create articles that help individuals get to know the folks behind the scenes in your business. Prove what makes your business”actual” and relatable (testimonials are another fantastic way to construct trust with potential clients ). In that way if people check your Facebook Page, they will truly feel a connection for you, your service or product and your business vision and become more inclined to purchase.

Instead, when you’ve got good video content which does a fantastic job of introducing visitors to your new, that may be another fantastic way to take advantage of your own Page content.

By way of Example, Here is a movie Disruptive runs in our Page which has created a Great Deal of positive comments:

In the end, because your Facebook Page is more of a landing page in relation to a place to drive articles, it might be a fantastic concept to pin especially superior content near the surface of your page. This way, your very best content is going to be the very first thing people see when they see the Page.

To pin a post, hassle-free click on the down arrow at the upper right of your post and select “Pin to Top of Page”. The post will stay at the top of your page until you pin a new post.

 

With the latest developments in Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, so your natural reach may not be excellent, but it does not mean that your Facebook Page can not be a terrific way to construct relationships with potential clients. The key is figuring out which particular kinds of articles do the very best job of convincing people who you are a firm they can trust.

Facebook Advertising

The fantastic news is, even while Facebook may be breaking down on organic marketing and advertising content from the News Feed, then it’s still possible to get the ability of Facebook advertising…if you are ready to pay.

Evidently, paying to conduct sponsored articles on Facebook is a good deal more costly than just submitting content on your page, however Facebook Ads supply you with access to a far bigger audience. Should you do it correctly, Facebook Ads may yield incredible results for your business enterprise.

Running Paid Ads on Facebook

Facebook has an intriguing advertising version. Beneath Facebook’s promotion model, you specify a target market which you wish to view your advertisements then specify a budget for how much you’re ready to spend during a particular time interval to get individuals to do some thing (see your movie, click on your advertisement, become an outcome, make a buy, etc).

Unlike paid search advertisements, in which you just pay when someone clicks on your advertising, Facebook utilizes something nearer to some pay-for-impression version. Facebook’s calculations do their very best for as many folks to choose your desired actions (aka, convert) as potential along with your finances, but when your ads do not do a fantastic job of getting visitors to behave, you are going to wind up paying more for every activity.

In other words, Facebook will take your money and put your ads in front of your target audience, but it’s up to you to convince them to convert.

With all that in mind, let’s talk about how to set up a marketing campaign using Facebook Ads.

Setting Up a Facebook Ads Campaign

Facebook Ads uses a 3-tier system for organizing your marketing efforts. Your specific ads are contained within ad sets, which are contained within campaigns.

The first time you create a campaign in Facebook Ads, you’ll have the option to choose between two ad management platforms: Ad Manager and the Power Editor. In general, I recommend Ad Manager for beginners, but if you are running dozens or hundreds of ads, you may want the added tools of the Power Editor.

To create your first campaign, click on the downward arrow in the upper right hand corner of Facebook and click on “Create Ads”:

 

You’ll be taken to the Ads Manager, where you’ll be prompted to choose a campaign objective:

 

Choose your objective, name your campaign and click “Set Up Ad Account” (or “Continue” if this isn’t the first time you’ve created ads on this account).

Next, you’ll be given a variation of targeting options you can use to define your target audience:

Location

If your company is nearby, only ships into specific locations or only wishes to market to a particular place, this is a superb setting to utilize. Essentially, this choice lets you use a variety of heights of place targeting (town, country, zip code, state, etc) to target anybody within a predetermined radius of the place.

By way of instance, if you would like to aim a shopping centre, you are able to enter the address or name and decide on a radius around where you are.

 

You might even target individuals who just reside in that particular place, which is excellent if you are somebody like a dental practitioner (versus individuals that are just seeing that particular place ). Or you may target”everybody in this place,” that comprises both residents and people passing.

Demographics

Based on who your company generally functions, this setting may be a fantastic approach to ensure your advertisements are being shown to individuals of their ideal educational degree, political affiliation, connection status or many different other categories.

 

The usefulness of demographic targeting will depend heavily on how well you know the demographics of the audience you want to target. For example, relationship status changes are a great targeting setting for a wedding venue…but not so helpful for a restaurant.

Interests

Facebook determines a person’s “interests” by looking at the listed interests in a user’s profile and the pages they have liked.

 

Here again, the usefulness of “Interests” will vary depending on what your business is trying to sell.

Behaviors

Behaviors allows you to target people based on job role, purchasing behavior or other specific actions that a user takes on Facebook.

 

As you might imagine, while these targeting options are interesting, certain companies will get a lot more value out of these targeting options than others. Fortunately, though, audience targeting isn’t your only targeting option for Facebook Ads.

In addition to the general targeting options listed above, there are a couple of other ways to target your ads that you should be aware of.

Retargeting

Another effective way to build an audience on Facebook is through retargeting. Facebook retargeting works much the same as every other type of retargeting, with one special advantage: you can use Facebook retargeting to create lookalike audiences.

We won’t get into the specifics of how to set up and use Facebook retargeting in this article, but it’s a great option to be aware of. For more information on how to set up and use Facebook retargeting, read numerous articles available online.

Lookalike Audiences

Hopefully, in the process of marketing your business, you’ve collected a large list of emails. The good news is, you can upload that list of emails to Facebook and Facebook will find any profile associated with an email on that list. All of those profiles will go into a new custom audience that you can then target on Facebook.

So, if someone visited your website, filled out a form and then never responded to your outreach attempts, you can use this feature to get back in front of them on Facebook.

However, it doesn’t stop there.

Facebook also has a feature called “lookalike audiences” that identifies Facebook users who are very similar to the users in your email list and creates an audience around those users that you can market to. This algorithm is remarkably effective, which means you can essentially use lookalike audiences to market to thousands or even millions of people who are highly similar to the people who have already expressed an interest in your firm.

As an added bonus, you can use lookalike audiences with your retargeting audiences, too, so you can focus your marketing efforts on the people who are most likely to respond to your ads. To learn more about how to use lookalike audiences, check out examples online.

As you adjust your targeting, you’ll notice that the display gauge in the upper right-hand corner of the page updates with estimates of your audience size and estimated daily results.

 

These numbers take your objective, targeting and budget into account to give you an estimate of what you can expect from your advertising.

As you can probably imagine, what you’re selling and the ads you create can have a huge impact on how effective your ads actually are, but its a good idea to keep an eye on this information to get a feel for whether or not your targeting and budget are reasonable.

Finally, you have the option to define your budget and what metric Facebook will be optimizing your ad placements for. We’ll get into detail about how to pick your budget in a minute, but for now, let’s quickly talk about what your options are in this section.

 

The biggest decision here is whether you choose to run ads with a lifetime budget or a daily budget. With a daily budget, your ads will run all day, every day, but you can run the campaign for as long as you like and Facebook will turn off your ads when you hit your budget.

With a lifetime budget, your ads will run for a set period and you won’t spend more than your budget. However, Facebook may spend more on certain days and less on others. Also, the lifetime budget option gives you access to day-parting, which allows you to control what days and times your ads are shown.

 

The rest of these settings are fairly specific to your campaign and business goals, so we won’t worry about them for now. On to ad creation!

Creating an Ad

At this point, whether you realized it or not, you’ve created a campaign and an ad set. Now it’s time for the fun part, actually creating your ads! First, you’ll need to pick an ad format:

 

These ad types are fairly self-explanatory and most people opt for a carousel, single image or single video ad type. For certain businesses, canvas ads can be an interesting option as well.

At this point, you’ll need to upload a 1,200 pixel by 628 pixel featured image (or images/video, depending on the format you chose), write your headlines and body copy, pick an appropriate call-to-action and add any links you want people to click on.

 

In previous years, Facebook would not allow ads with images that were only 20% text. Today, Facebook is more relaxed about this rule, but it still gives priority to images with less text.

Fortunately, Facebook does offer a tool you can use to get a feel for how closely your image follows their guidelines, which you can check out here.

As you can probably imagine, these guidelines put a lot of pressure on you to write compelling ad copy for your Facebook ads. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you put your Facebook ads together.

Stay on Target

What’s the first thing you do when you create a Facebook Ad? You choose an objective, which aligns with the goal you want to accomplish. As you create your ads, you should constantly be asking yourself, “How will this help me achieve my goal?”

An ad meant to drive sales will have very different copy and imagery than an ad intended to get users engaging on a mobile app.

This ad uses “Learn More” to win over tentative users, instead of a more immediate “Sign-Up” CTA that might lose them.

With this in mind, you’ll also want to choose your CTA early on, even though it’s one of the last steps in the ad creation process. Knowing whether you want users to “learn more,” “contact us,” or “shop now” can have a big effect on how you design your ad.

Think About Your Audience

Understanding your audience is just as important as knowing what you want them to do. How will they use your product? What pain points do they have that you need to solve? Even within your overall audience, different niches will have different priorities, problems, and objections.

This ad solves the pain point of “healthy eating is hard” – not that it’s “expensive,” which would be the pain point for a different audience.

Picking the right images and ad copy is all about knowing who your audience is and what they want. If you don’t know who you are targeting, you’ll never be able to convince them to convert.

Create a Hook

Your hook is the angle that you’re going to use to reel potential customers in. This is what will grab their attention. Emotional hooks are always a good option, but logical and educational hooks also work well.

In many cases, the hook will translate directly into the headline. The hook should tell users “why” they should care, click, watch, or convert.

Sometimes, the “why” comes before the “what,” offering up the pain point or the problem before the actual solution. This is a great way to approach your advertising, because it puts the problem fresh in the customer’s mind, giving you the perfect opportunity to present a solution they’ll be excited to hear.

Anticipate Their Objections

We mentioned objections briefly in the “understand your audience” section, but it’s essential to consider it again when you’re actively writing the ad copy: you must anticipate your audience’s objections so you can fight them.

Objections will be what prevents a user from converting, or even clicking. They assume that your meal delivery service will be too expensive, or that your beach shoes will be cheap material and fall apart the second they hit the hot sand.

Apple’s simple copy reminds users that “All the computer stuff you love” is still available on the iPad Pro. This is offsetting an objection of limited capabilities.

In addition, you should make sure that your ads don’t provoke any objections, and—if possible—puts them to rest. In some cases, even adding just one word to the copy can help prevent objections from ruining your ad’s potential. Saying “affordable meal delivery service” and “durable beach shoes” can offset objections from the get-go.

Keep it Simple, Stupid

For many business owners and marketers, our first instinct is to be like the entrepreneurs on Shark Tank who keep saying “oh and one more thing!” even after the Sharks have already made offers or bowed out. We know how amazing our products are, and we want the whole world to know every single reason why.

Realistically, you can only fit one or maybe two feature/benefits into a single Facebook or Instagram Ad. This means that we need to choose the one or two benefits that will speak to a specific audience’s pain points and interests the strongest.

Your sentences should also be short and sweet. Users typically skim through ad copy, so you want your point to get across cleanly and immediately.

One way to trim down your ad copy is to write a sentence and then chop away at least a third of the words. Keep the phrasing as compact and to-the-point as possible and your Facebook Ad copy will be significantly stronger.

While you’re fine-tuning the copy itself (which typically means cutting words), go through and eliminate any corny language that makes you sell like a bad car salesman or like an email containing a computer-crashing virus.

This includes how you choose to punctuate and capitalize the copy—no one wants to see all caps informing you that “ONLY THREE DAYS LEFT ON THE BEST SALE WE’VE EVER HAD DON’T MISS IT YOU’LL REGRET IT.”

There’s no reason for this ad to have the link to the site in the ad itself. It should just be in the CTAit clutters the copy and looks like spam. It also lacks transparency by saying “see how much you can save!” instead of telling users outright.

Some emojis can be okay, but adding lots of arrows pointing to where you want users to click is a no-go. You’ll also want to eliminate phrases like “Stock going fast, you’ll miss out if you don’t order now!” This works fine in an email, but it’s wasting up limited space in an ad, and just comes across like a bad line.

Short and sweet. It’s clearly a promotion, but it doesn’t feel like someone is trying to force you to buy something.

As we discussed earlier, Facebook marketing is all about relationships, so try to sound like a real human person instead of a broken record trying to trick the user into buying something.

Create Specific Landing Pages

As a general rule of thumb, it’s best not to send Facebook Ad traffic to your home page. A good Facebook ad will have a very specific message and that message needs to be closely reflected by the content of the landing page.

Unfortunately, as great as your homepage might be, it has to meet a lot of needs, which makes it hard to focus your business’s home page on delivering one specific message that happens to match the message of your ad.

Instead, it’s best to create a separate landing page for each new campaign. This will make your ads more effective and allow you to make the most out of those Facebook clicks.

As you create your landing pages, it’s a good idea to use what you know about your audience from your Facebook audience targeting. For example, if you’re mostly targeting 60+ year old women, a picture of a mom with kids may not resonate well with your target audience. On the other hand, a picture of a 60+ client might work a good deal better.

To be honest, if you aren’t willing to go to the trouble of creating specific landing pages for your Facebook ads, running Facebook ads may not be for you. It might get you a lot of traffic, but paying to send a lot of traffic to the wrong page is a great way to waste a lot of money.

The quality of your ads can make or break your Facebook marketing. You can be targeting the right audience at the right times and have all the budget in the world, but if your ads don’t sell, it’s all a waste of money.

How Much Do You Need to Spend?

Speaking of wasting money, let’s circle back to your Facebook budget. When you get right down to it, your overall Facebook marketing strategy and your Facebook marketing budget go hand-in-hand.

If you approach it right, you can (and should) plan both at the same time. After all, if you know who you are marketing to and what they are worth, you can use that information to figure out how much you can afford to spend on marketing to bring in a new customer.

There are 4 basic steps to creating an effective Facebook marketing strategy and budget.

1. Define Your Goals

To figure out what you need to spend on Facebook, you first need to clarify what your goals are for Facebook advertising. These can vary quite a bit depending on whether your ultimate goal is to drive clicks, conversions or leads, sales, revenue or a certain return-on-investment (ROI).

When you get right down to it, the ultimate goal of Facebook marketing should be ROI. After all, if your Facebook spend isn’t driving profitable revenue for your business, why are you advertising on Facebook?

Clicks and even conversions are great, but your company doesn’t make money from clicks (in fact, you actually spend money on clicks) or conversions. It makes money from sales.

With that in mind, the first thing you need to determine before you decide what your Facebook marketing budget should be is to decide how much revenue you want to drive using Facebook. Once you know that, you can use that information to determine how much ad spend it will take to reach that revenue goal.

2. Create Your Buyer Personas

Once you know how much money you want to make from Facebook advertising, you need to identify who you are marketing to.

Now, about 72% of marketers are familiar with buyer personas, but only 30% actually create effective buyer personas that aid them in their marketing goals.

That’s a problem, because different buyer personas require different advertising. On Facebook, that means different target audiences, different messaging and different landing pages. Even more importantly, different buyer personas turn into different types of buyers.

So guess what? If you don’t understand your buyer personas, you can’t create an effective Facebook budget!

If you’ve got a sales team, talking to sales can be one of the fastest ways to get a decent buyer persona together. After all, they’re the ones who talk to your customers the most, right?

However, even talking to your sales team and doing a little research isn’t enough to really get at the level of detail you need to put together an effective Facebook budget. To do that, you need to get on the phone and call your actual customers.

Ask how they found you, why they converted and what convinced them to pay you. This information will give you a ton of insight into your marketing and sales funnels that you can use to both improve the performance of your paid search advertising and choose your Facebook marketing budget.

3. Figure Out What Your Buyer Personas are Worth

Typically, people look at buyer personas as a good way to craft an effective marketing strategy. Buyer personas are great for this, but they are also an important part of putting together an effective Facebook marketing budget.

For example, imagine you are advertising for a SaaS business called SaaS-A-Frass that has the following pricing structure:

In this situation, you’re probably targeting 3 different buyer personas:

  • Small business “Steve”
  • Mid-market business “Mandy”
  • Enterprise business “Edward”

Small business “Steve” has much smaller and simpler business needs than Edward or Mandy, so he’ll probably choose the Starter package. Mandy will probably want the Professional package and Edward will likely need the Enterprise package.

Assuming that Steve, Mandy and Edward stick around for an average of 14 months, 4 years and 9 years, respectively (average lifetimes for a SaaS client) and buy 5, 20 and 100 licenses (again, respectively), here’s the lifetime value for each of these personas ( [licenses/mo] x [# of licenses] x [typical customer lifespan in months] ):

Lifetime Value

  • Steve: $1,750
  • Mandy: $72,000
  • Edward: $1,590,000

These numbers look really exciting, but not all of that money is profit.

A normal SaaS company pays about 22% for fulfillment, 9% to sales and has a 40% overhead, leaving them with about 29% of the lifetime value of each client to play around with. That means to simply break even, SaaS-A-Frass has to spend less than the following to acquire a customer from Facebook:

Maximum Acquisition Cost

  • Steve: $507.50
  • Mandy: $20,880
  • Edward: $461,100

If SaaS-A-Frass can keep their acquisition cost below this threshold, they’ll make money. If it costs more than this to acquire each of these customers, they’ll lose money.

See why buyer personas are so important to budgeting?

Of course, it’s unlikely that the market is saturated with Edwards, so SaaS-A-Frass will need a mix of these deals to hit their revenue goals. That mix will dictate their Facebook budget.

So, if SaaS-A-Frass is willing to spend $0.18 on marketing to produce $1.00 in lifetime value (for a 11% total profit margin), SaaS-A-Frass’s can afford to pay the following for each buyer persona:

Customer Acquisition Cost

  • Steve: $315
  • Mandy: $3,750
  • Edward: $286,200

If SaaS-A-Frass can’t produce paying customers from a particular buyer persona at a price point below this threshold, they probably shouldn’t be marketing to that buyer persona.

However, if SaaS-A-Frass’s Facebook ads are currently producing buyers from each persona at these CAC (or even a CAC below these thresholds), SaaS-A-Frass can use that information to then calculate their Facebook marketing budget.

4. Set Your Budget

At this point, things are pretty simple. Just take your CAC, average purchase order value and average number of purchase (if you have a subscription model, you can just use the average lifespan of each buyer persona here) and plug them into this calculator!

The default for this calculator shows the monthly budget and ROI for SaaS-A-Frass, assuming that SaaS-A-Frass wants to produce $2,425,500 in new revenue from Facebook advertising each month and they’ve determined that to do that, they need their Facebook marketing to produce 100 sales a month (90 Steves, 9 Mandys and 1 Edward).

Per our example, a new Steve pays $125/mo for an average of 14 months, a new Mandy pays $1,500/mo for an average of 48 months and a new Edward pays $15,000/mo for 108 months.

Plugging all of that into the calculator, SaaS-A-Frass will need to budget $348,300/mo for Facebook marketing to achieve their new lifetime revenue goals.

See? I told you this part is easy! Play around with the calculator and your different buyer persona numbers and see what sort of Facebook budget makes sense for your business. Or, if you’re dealing with a predetermined budget, use this calculator to look at your different buyer personas and see which target audiences you should be focused on.

Now, as you might imagine, this approach isn’t a perfect estimate of what it will take to hit your revenue goals. This calculator is only as accurate as the information you can give it. But, it’s a lot better than picking your monthly at random and hoping that your Facebook budget will produce the results you need.

Conclusion

Although it’s hard to get great organic reach out of Facebook these days, Facebook marketing is still a great way to reach potential customers across the globe. Facebook has an enormous, highly active user base that you can easily market to using Facebook Ads.

In addition, creating a well-designed Facebook Page is a great way to build important trust and relationships with your target audience. The better they get to know you and your business, the more likely they are to respond well to your ads and become paying customers.

By the way, if you would like some help getting into Facebook marketing (or need some help with your current Facebook marketing campaigns), let me know here or in the comments. I’d love to help!

How do you feel about Facebook marketing? What are your thoughts on Facebook’s deprioritizing of organic content from business pages? How do you think that will affect your Facebook marketing? Leave your thoughts in the comments!