The Perfect Facebook Ads Strategy for High ROI

Facebook Ads is one of the top platforms for scaling your business. Facebook has more than a billion active users and chances are that your target customers are already hanging out on Facebook. Everyone says that Facebook Ads is a great platform, but most of the new business owners who try to advertise on Facebook get their fingers burnt because they do not know how to approach the marketing funnel in the right way.

The biggest mistake that business owners do on Facebook Ads is advertising their products and services. This might come as a shock to you because if you are not advertising your products or services, then what else will you advertise? This article will give you clarity provided you read this until the end.

Unlike Google Ads, your potential customers are not in a stage ready to buy from you. People going to Google and searching for something is like someone walking into a store and asking for something specific. People who have already made up their minds to purchase something will come to a platform and make sure that they find what they need. Google Ads works like yellow pages. You find buyers who search for specific keywords. I will explain how to make Google Ads work in another article, but in this article, let’s focus on Facebook Ads.

Advertising your products and services on Facebook is like going to a club where people are hanging out with their friends and family and interrupting them with something that you have to sell. Most of them won’t respond properly.

If you cannot advertise what you have to sell on Facebook then what can you advertise? You advertise your content.

On Google, you will have people who might be hot buyers looking for something specific. On Facebook, you will have access to a massive pool of audience, but almost 95% of them will be a cold audience for your business. That means, no one will be ready to buy your products or services, however, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be interested in your offers in the future.

On Facebook, you will be able to capture the audience at a very early stage of the funnel. Advertise your content and use the content to convert a cold audience into a warm audience before expecting them to buy anything from you.

I have spent more than $100,000 on Facebook Ads and I have never advertised my digital marketing training course directly. My premium digital marketing course (The Digital Marketing Internship Program) is only advertised to the people within my community and my email list. The audience within my community is already warm because of the free value I have delivered through free content.

On Facebook, I have only advertised my free digital marketing course with 25 videos. On avg, I have paid $0.30 to $0.35 per conversion. This has given me more than 300,000 leads. For a few weeks, there are no promotions on this list. I deliver 25 free videos over a period of 2 months and the audience is converted from a cold audience that doesn’t know me to a warm audience that comes to the consideration stage of buying products from me.

The content is delivered via an email drip campaign and for the first 7 days, there is no promotion. Only value. In the second week, I have a 20% promotion and 80% value. The 10% is usually, student stories and testimonials. Success stories are mostly content with a subtle sales pitch packed inside it which makes the audience consider my premium training program.

As my leads progress through the drip sequence, I also run retargeting ads which show the success stories directly on Facebook Ads. Apart from driving traffic to the stories, the retargeting ads drive additional traffic and also improve my email open rates because of stronger brand recall through the ads.

The usual time for 90% of the leads to either convert, unsubscribe from your list, or become a cold audience forever is 3 months or 90 days. Some people try to overdo this strategy by not promoting anything for 3 months and in such cases, it is difficult to get an ROI out of the leads you have generated by paying for it.

As the leads progress through the email sequence, the aggressiveness of my promotion increases. I send traffic to my sales pages, live webinars, and workshops. I do free webinars for my audience which usually runs for 90 minutes. In that time frame, 60 minutes is pure value and 30 minutes is a sales pitch.

Leads going through the drip sequence go from cold to warm. Leads who attend my free value webinar go from warm to hot prospects within 60 minutes because of the massive value creation that happens. Once the offer is made and the sales start coming in, it starts paying back for all the leads I have generated for the free course.

Patience is the name of the game. Instead of expecting sales immediately, if you take time to build a relationship with your audience and gain their trust by providing value first, they will reciprocate with purchases down the line.

The 5% of the people who buy will pay for all the leads you have generated and hopefully turn a profit for you. But at the same time, the good news is that, since you have built value for the remaining 95% of the audience, they will not unsubscribe from you. They will keep lurking around checking you out, and they will become customers sooner or later. Even if they do not buy your products, they will enjoy the free value that you are providing, and share your content on their social media channels which might bring in new customers at no cost.

So, that’s the secret. Do not advertise your products and services on Facebook. Instead, advertise your content, attract the audience to your community like flowers attract bees with their nectar.

Your email list and an online community (could be Facebook groups) is your platform to convert the cold audience into a hot audience. Just by having a little bit of patience, you are getting leads at a far lesser cost than what your competitors are paying and also building a community around your brand while your competitors are just running behind sales.

Your brand will be built in a much stronger way this way. You will sell effortlessly because your community now trusts you. There is no need for a toxic and pushy sales culture within your organization. If you keep nurturing your audience for a period of 3-5 years, your community will become a constant source of sales and revenue for you.

I hope this article changed the way you look at Facebook Ads. Now go and build your empire!

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju