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How to Launch and Scale Your Business With Facebook Ads

Mojca Žove (Mars)

Founder, Super Spicy Media

Founder of Super Spicy Media. Facebook Ads Expert. Alpha Female. Geek. Coffee lover. Full-time dinosaur.

Mojca Žove (Mars)

You'll learn:

  • why most Facebook ad campaigns don't do anything but burn time and money
  • how to get Facebook to find new customers just like your existing customers (and steal your competitor's customers)
  • how to get someone from "I've never heard of this company" to "I'm ready to buy" with an automated sales funnel

It's a MicroConf tradition to begin your talk with family photos. Unlike the traditional Silicon Valley narrative of "you have to crush code and grind through your twenties to ever be successful," Microconf encourages a more life-heavy balance. Mojca decided to fill her life with fast cars instead of children, and her and her husband have a fur baby named Jackie.

About Mojca

Mojca works with 7-figure companies to help them build, launch, and run Facebook ad campaigns.

Mojca got started by launching a productized service ("Super Spicy Sessions") doing teardowns of social media profiles for her clients. When she launched, everyone in the Facebook advertising industry focused on Business to Consumer (B2C) ads because common sense said that Business to Business (B2B) Facebook ads were a bad idea.

Mojca invested 10% of her clients' fee for Super Spicy Sessions in Facebook ads and saw success, so she wondered why more companies weren't advertising on Facebook.

Facebook Ads Introduction

When asked why they don't advertise on Facebook, most companies respond:

  • Facebook ads are too complicated ("I don't know where to start!")
  • Facebook ads are too time-consuming ("It takes hours to launch one campaign!")
  • Facebook ads are too expensive ("I spent $1k and nothing happened!")

These are bad excuses with simple solutions. Focus instead on the potential benefits of Facebook ads: a few years ago - before google, twitter, and Facebook - it was really hard to get a potential customer to see your ad. Today, you can get your message in front of exactly who you want for $10!

To grow your business, take advantage of this technology.

Facebook Pixel installation guide

Start Tracking Now

Even if you don't plan to advertise on Facebook soon, spend two minutes installing the Facebook Pixel - a code that lets you track your audience's behavior. You'll need it installed before you run your first campaign, and you'll have a much easier start if you've let Facebook collect traffic data for a while first.

Why Most Facebook Ad Campaigns Fail

Facebook campaigns usually fail by:

  1. Selling to cold audiences: you wouldn't knock on a stranger's door and ask them to buy your $50 e-book - they wouldn't trust you! Selling to cold audiences is a bad idea because you haven't built any trust or authority.
  2. Trying to close the deal too quickly: someone that has visited your homepage isn't a customer prospect. You need to build up more trust before trying to make the sale.
  3. Optimizing for the wrong metrics: instead of optimizing for clicks, optimize for the core metric you want to improve. Sales or app downloads are better metrics than clicks.

Facebook Advertising Funnel

Facebook Ad Funnel

A typical Facebook Ad funnel, like any sales funnel, typically has three layers:

  1. Attract visitors
  2. Generate leads
  3. Close sales

Each of these layers represents a separate campaign.

For each campaign, ask yourself these four questions to craft the perfect message:

  1. Goal: what are you trying to achieve?
  2. Asset: what are you promoting?
  3. Audience: who do you want to reach?
  4. Approach: how are you going to achieve your goal?

Let's walk through each of those four questions for each of the three layers of the Facebook Ad sales funnel.

"How to get paid 100% Upfront" is a powerful headline because it sparks the audience's interest. The copy came directly from his audience.

1. Attract Visitors

1.1. Goal

When reaching out to a cold audience, make the first connection through value. Give your audience something they want and you'll start building trust with them. Establish yourself as a professional with authority on a topic.

This is also where you can start tracking your audience with the Facebook Pixel on your site so you can re-target them later.

1.2. Asset

Give your audiences something valuable right away. Your promoted asset should be something they can implement themselves and start seeing results.

Blog posts and videos are great forms of assets to promote. A 5-minute video recorded on your phone is fine as long as you're talking about something valuable to your audience.

If you don't know what to promote, look at which of your blog posts have gotten the most traffic and start promoting them.

1.3. Cold Audience

At the first stage of your Facebook Ad funnel, you're targeting a cold audience and want to try to reach as many people as possible.

There are two approaches you can take:

  • Interest Targeting: target people based on what they like. For example, profiles that have liked one of your competitor's pages, or a page of a business in a similar space.
  • Lookalike Audiences: upload your existing customer email list and Facebook can find more people that are similar to your existing audience based on geography, age, gender, interests, and all other data Facebook keeps on profiles.

Note from Christian: advertisers are the true customer of Facebook. It's a fantastic service for it's intended customer.

1.4. Approach

Brand your promoted posts with your design (logo and colors) so people remember you.

Use a powerful headline that sparks people's interest. "How to get paid 100% Upfront" is a powerful headline that came directly from Jonathan Stark's audience.

A great lead generation ad. Specific language, branded design, clear call to action - join egghead!

2. Generate Leads

2.1. Goal

Once you've captured someone's attention, your goal is to get them to make their first transaction with you by giving you their email address. This builds more trust and further establishes you as an authority.

This transaction separates people who might be interested but are just lurking from qualified leads that want more.

2.2 Asset

Make sure your asset is actually valuable to your audience. It can take the form of:

  • An ebook
  • A Cheat Sheet
  • A Checklist
  • An Email course
  • A Free Trial

This asset should be another tool your audience can immediately use to get a quick win.

2.3. Retargeted Audience

At this level of your funnel, target people that have expressed an interest in you. Look for:

  • Blog post readers
  • Top web page visitors
  • Contact page visitors (they were actively looking for a way to contact you!)

2.4. Approach

What pain are you solving for your audience? What will their outcome be from this asset? What's their next actionable step to get that outcome?

Make sure your asset is clearly answering these questions and makes it clear what action you want your audience to take.

A great lead-generation ad for a time tracking app for construction companies. This ad reiterates its audience's pain - "no more repetitive tasks and hand-written time cards" - and has a clear call to action - "sign up."

A closing ad from Egghead selling their pro membership. This ad speaks directly to its audience of developers, addresses specific pain they have ("Do you remember those boring 8-hour courses you had to sit through?"), communicates value (focused professional knowledge video lessons), and has a clear call to action ("become a pro member").

3. Close Sales

3.1. Goal

Once you've gotten an audience past the first two levels of your sales funnel, it's easy to make the final sale. Your goal here is to close sales.

3.2. Asset

Restaurants start you with a tiny appetizer then work up to the main course. It's hard to sell your premium expensive product (like your $5k consulting) right away. It's much easier to start with a small offering (a "tripwire product") and scale up later.

3.3. Retargeted Audience

For the third layer of your sales funnel, try targeting:

  • Existing Leads
  • Pricing and Sales Page Visitors: maybe they forgot to buy! Maybe they were on their iPhone and couldn't make the purchase (Facebook can track people between their devices)

3.4. Approach

The more specifically you can talk to your audience, the more effective you'll be able to sell them. If your audience at this stage is CEOs of construction companies, you can talk directly and specifically to them.

Communicate what your audience is going to get out of this offer. Show them social proof and testimonials. Use their own words in your copy.

CEO Warrior is a coaching company for service business providers. This ad uses words that came directly from customer interviews.

This ad from ClockShark converts like crazy. ClockShark's audience has a big problem with paper timesheets. This ad uses specific strong copy that came directly from customer interviews ("Paper time sheets are messy. And you hate them", "you end up wasting even more time going through them, trying to make sense of it all"), lists its specific features and cost, has a clear call to action ("get rid of paper timecards today and start using the newest time-tracking technology with ClockShark"), and a testimonial. Anyone can say "my software is the best" - testimonials from real customers are more effective.

Summary

Facebook ad qualifying process

Facebook ads can convert a complete stranger into a prospect by offering them value. A prospect with a lead magnet can convert into a lead. A lead converts into a customer 💸

This process is hard, so stay determined. Did your first blog post become viral? Was your first business amazing and really successful? It's going to take you a couple of times. Don't give up!

Questions

Facebook cuts long copy off at 2 lines. Is it worth doing really long copy? Your images also had a lot of text, which Facebook doesn't like.

I know it sounds weird, but people read long copy. We did hundreds of A/B tests between long and short form copy. Long form outperformed short form copy every single time.

Facebook's visual rule is not to use more than 20% of your image for text. Facebook limits the reach on text more than that, but images with text convert way better. Experiment with it - you'll learn a lot. In my experience, images with text-heavy testimonials perform well.

Follow @mojcamars, email her, and download her slides.

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