Running ads on Facebook can make your entrepreneurial dreams come true or can be a nightmare. It all depends on your Facebook Advertising Strategies.

Let’s start from the beginning. Facebook is a pay-per-click marketing channel. This means that you’ll be paying every time someone clicks on your ads. You can also be charged based on ad impressions, video views, and other metrics.

Having a solid Facebook PPC (pay-per-click) strategy helps you to get more people to your website and increase the sales revenue.

But what makes a good Facebook PPC strategy?

After managing tens of Facebook ad campaigns, I can tell you this: The perfect Facebook ad strategy includes both successes and failures.

You can’t have one without the other.

However, you should also create yourself a safety net by applying multiple Facebook PPC strategies at once.

If one strategy fails, you’ve still got others that bring you the results.

Up next, I’m going to share the 12 Facebook advertising strategies that in my experience often deliver a positive return on investment.

Are you ready to step up your Facebook ad game?

Facebook PPC Strategy #1: Experiment With New Ad Placements

When analyzing Facebook advertising costs, AdEspresso found that your cost-per-click can vary by 700%, depending on the ad placement you’re using.

For example, displaying your Facebook ads to people via the Audience Network is way cheaper than advertising on Instagram.

However, the lowest cost-per-click price doesn’t always guarantee the best results.

You can experiment with different Facebook ad placements to find out which one has the lowest cost-per-conversion and the highest ROI.

Currently, there are nine different Facebook ad placements available in the Ads Manager:

• Facebook Desktop Newsfeed
• Facebook Mobile Newsfeed
• The Right-hand Column
• Facebook Instant Articles
• Facebook In-Stream Videos
• Facebook Suggested Videos
• Instagram Feed
• Instagram Stories
• Facebook Audience Network

For example, the Instant Articles ad placement lets you place your Facebook ads into the instant article feeds of mobile Facebook users.

Here’s how a Facebook mobile ad looks inside an instant article.

While Facebook news feeds are the most widely used ad placement, it doesn’t mean you couldn’t benefit from other platforms, such as Instagram ads or offers displayed among Facebook Suggested Videos.

Facebook PPC Strategy #2: Combine Facebook Ads & Google AdWords

The fact that Facebook ads and Google ads are often managed on different platforms (e.g. Facebook Ads Manager and Google AdWords), it doesn’t mean you can’t combine both for improved results.

Many brands I’ve worked with have seen great results by using (in addition to other Facebook Advertising Strategies), the following PPC strategy.

Step 1:

You target a cold audience with Facebook ads. For example, you could target a Facebook Saved or Lookalike audience with an ad introducing your product’s benefits (like Asana does in the ad below).

Step 2:

Once a person clicks on your Facebook ad, they’ll be entered into your remarketing funnel. Now, it’s time to log in to your AdWords account and create a remarketing audience.

Step 3:

You’ll set up a Remarketing List Search Ads (RLSA) campaign on Google AdWords.

RLSA campaign means that you create a remarketing audience of past website visitors and increase your bids on Top AdWords keywords for these people already interested in your product.

Using RLSA helps to outbid your competition without wasting too much budget on targeting cold leads. You’ll only catch the warm leads.

Step 4:

The prospect who previously visited your website searches for your product-related keyword on Google and your Google ad shows up as the top result.

Step 5:

The prospect clicks on your Google ad and becomes a customer.

Key Takeaway: you can use Facebook ads as a top-of-the-funnel marketing tactic and later convert the prospect by using other PPC channels.

Facebook PPC Strategy #3: Combine Facebook Ads & Content Marketing

It is said that your content marketing strategy should focus 20% of the resources on content creation and 80% on content promotion.

If you publish a blog article or eBook but fail to get people reading it, you’ll lose out on many potential customers.

No readers = No sales

That’s why, whenever you publish a new blog article, you should also put a lot of focus on the promotion.

For example, when AdEspresso publishes a new blog article…

They always share it with their Facebook fans as well.

Ahrefs is following a similar strategy by boosting their Facebook posts for increased reach.

If you’re not 100% convinced if Facebook is a good platform for content promotion, consider this:

• The cost-per-click price on Facebook is rather low compared to other paid channels
• Audience targeting options let you reach many potential buyers
• Facebook lets you combine the paid promotion with your post’s organic reach
• Facebook Boosted Posts are easy to set up and manage

The easiest way to include content marketing in your Facebook ad strategy is to share a blog article/eBook on your brand’s Facebook page.

Next, you can wait a couple of hours for the new Facebook post to spread in the newsfeeds, organically. Then, boost your post to increase its reach.

Facebook PPC Strategy #4: Set Up Strategic A/B Tests

Regardless what’s you pick amid the different Facebook Advertising Strategies, you should always use Facebook ads split testing to experiment with different campaign elements and find out what works best.

Check this example by Infusionsoft experimenting with different ad design colors to see what their Facebook audience prefers.

But what should you A/B test first and what’s the best strategy for getting started?

I recommend that you start by split testing different Facebook audiences as this is one of the key campaign elements that affect your results. After you’ve discovered your perfect Facebook audience, you can move on to A/B testing your ad visuals.

A study by Consumer Acquisition found that ad images are incredibly important — they’re responsible for 75%-90% of ad performance.

Here’s a simple A/B testing strategy I’ve used with many clients for finding well-performing Facebook ad creatives:

Step 1: Test 3-5 highly different ad designs

First, try to find out the general design language liked by your target audience.

Step 2: Test 3-5 variations of the winning ad design

Once you’ve found out what your target audience likes, you can continue experimenting with slight alterations of your top Facebook ad design.

Instead of testing 5×5=25 different ad designs, you’ll end up testing only 5+5=10 designs. That’s a huge saving in your A/B testing budgets!

When you use AdEspresso for campaign creation, you can set up complex experiments way faster than Facebook by uploading a few different images, text, and url and you will have every possible combination of ads generated in a few clicks.

Smart Tip: With AdEspresso you can set up all the multivariables that you want to check which ad variations work best, and it takes you just a few minutes.

Want more Facebook A/B testing ideas? Check out this article: 16 Genius Ideas for Your Facebook Ad A/B Testing

Facebook PPC Strategy #5: Set Up a Facebook Marketing Funnel

The interests and knowledge of the people you’re targeting on Facebook can vary to a large extent, depending on their place in your marketing funnel.

A regular Facebook marketing funnel has four stages:

• Attracting cold audiences
• Converting warm audience
• Closing deals with leads
• Delighting your existing customers

And you know what? If you want to create high-ROI Facebook advertising campaigns; you’ll need to craft a different offer and marketing strategy for every stage of your marketing funnel.

Once you’ve set up your Facebook marketing funnel, you’ll have a lot better overview of your offers and audiences.

You will also find it easier to develop the right offers and campaigns for different target audiences, helping your ads to receive a higher Relevance Score.

Facebook PPC Strategy #6: Target Your Competitors’ Fans

When it comes to Facebook advertising, being a small business competing against many larger companies isn’t that bad.

It means that you can target those competitors’ Facebook fans and steal away some of their customers.

To target your competitors’ fans, create a Facebook Saved Audience and under the Interests category, enter the names of competing brands. For example, if you’re building a marketing tool, you could target people interested in some of the industry’s big players.

Top benefits of targeting you competitors’ fans:

• Your target audience has a need for a product like yours
• The people are already familiar with your product’s concept
• Creating Facebook Saved Audiences is a simple way to create a marketing audience

If you’ve neglected your competition up to this point, now’s the time to include a new hack in your Facebook marketing toolset.

Facebook PPC Strategy #7: Get Started With Remarketing

In the Awareness stage of your marketing funnel, cold audiences can be reached both via display advertising and Facebook Saved Audience targeting.

However, your sales messages will have a lot bigger effect on the leads who have already been to your website.

If you want to reach all the prospects across your entire marketing funnel, you’ll have to use remarketing tactics 80% of the time.

Here’s what makes remarketing one of the most powerful PPC strategies:

• People are already familiar with your brand and product – they’re more likely to make a purchase
• You can remarket to different audience segments – this also lets you craft highly relevant ad messages and offers

You can set up new remarketing audiences by installing the Facebook Pixel and creating new Custom Audiences.

There are many types of remarketing audiences that you can create:

• Specific landing page visitors
• People who have visited the Pricing page
• People who abandoned their shopping cart
• Your blog readers and fans
• Customers who already purchased from you

Pro Tip: When setting up your remarketing audiences, don’t forget to exclude the people who have already converted on your offer.

 

Facebook PPC Strategy #8: Earn More Facebook Page Likes

Do you sometimes feel like Hamlet when making a decision on what you’re gonna use amidst all the Facebook Advertising strategies? I do!   And when I’m creating a Facebook ad campaign with the objective of getting more Facebook page likes things get tougher, because you must be super clear about your goal.

Getting more likes for the sake of likes is not a sustainable marketing strategy.

However, there are more reasons to collect additional Facebook page likes (besides boosting your marketer ego by increasing a vanity metric):

• Your Facebook posts will reach more people organically
• You can create Facebook campaigns targeting your fans’ friends -so that people who see your ads will trust your brand more as they can see their friends liking it.

Here’s a Facebook Like ad campaign example by Aggregate blog.

How to create a Facebook Like campaign

Creating a Facebook Like campaign is simple. Just go to the Facebook Ads Manager and select the “Engagement” campaign objective.

Next, you’ll need to select the “Page likes” objective.

The most important part of your Facebook Like campaign is the ad itself – it needs to attract attention so that people will hit the “like” button.

You can also create a mobile Facebook ad campaign that allows people to both like and contact your Facebook page, just like MindTitan has done.

Facebook PPC Strategy #9: Experiment With Facebook Lead Ads

If you think about your Facebook marketing funnel, you need to convert people from one stage to the next. One of the best ways to do it is to incorporate Facebook Lead Ads in your PPC strategy.

The main benefit of using Lead ads instead of regular Facebook ads is that people can download your content and share their contact information without leaving Facebook’s platform.

Once a person clicks on the “Download” call-to-action button or somewhere else on your ad, a new pop-up window appears with their contact details already filled in (if they’ve shared them with Facebook).

That’s incredibly convenient!

AdEspresso also ran an experiment to see which Facebook ad type works best: Facebook Lead Ads vs. regular ads with a landing page. They concluded that:

When re-targeting website visitors, Lead Ads are more likely to win on mobile, while Landing Pages are more likely to win on Desktop.”

Keep this in mind when setting up a Facebook Lead Ads campaign with the goal of moving people into the next stage of your marketing funnel.

Facebook PPC Strategy #10: Create a Facebook Video Ad Campaign

A report by Kinetic Social uncovered that video ads have the lowest eCPC compared to other ad types, with an average eCPC of $0.18.

Moreover, more than 500 million Facebook users watch Facebook videos every day.

This makes video ads one of the best Facebook Advertising strategies available. We could consider it the key Facebook PPC strategies to be testing in 2017.

It doesn’t even matter whether you’re advertising to a B2C or B2B audience. There are plenty of video ad ideas that could fit your strategy.

For example, you could create a Facebook video ad displaying your product and explaining its benefits.

As you start creating a marketing video for your Facebook campaign, consider making videos that are native to Facebook, following all the Facebook video ad best practices and size guidelines.

As reported by eMarketer, Facebook native videos have the average engagement rate of 6.3%, compared to 3.2% for Youtube videos and 0.2% for Instagram videos.

Here are all the latest Facebook video ad specs you should follow:

• Ad copy text: 90 characters
• Aspect ratios supported: 16:9 to 9:16
• File size: up to 4 GB max
• Continuous looping available
• Video can be as long as 120 min., but most top-performing videos are 15-30 seconds

Read more: Facebook Video Ads: The Secret Weapon You’re Too Afraid To Use

Facebook PPC Strategy #11: Advertise Limited-time Offers

As you give people too much time to make a decision, they’re going to postpone it and their excitement will pass. However, when presented with a limited time offer, people get worried about missing out on the awesome offer – they’ll develop FOMO (fear of missing out). A study on Millennials found that more than 65% of respondents experience FOMO when being unable to attend an event where their friends are going.

You can introduce FOMO to your Facebook PPC strategy by promoting limited-time offers.

For example, Target’s Facebook ad creates the sense of urgency by limiting their discount offer to a specific date.

Here’s another Facebook ad example by Udacity, inviting people to roll in for their new course before March 31.

Here’s some hacks and tips for creating urgency in your Facebook ads:

• Define clear campaign dates, e.g. “Today only” or “Offer ends in 24h.”
• Offer a significant discount that would make people complete their purchase, e.g. “Get 40% off today.”
• Keep your Facebook ad offers simple and brief
• Place your best offer in the Facebook ad’s headline or the image
• Make sure that you can deliver on your offer on the landing page

Facebook PPC Strategy #12: Use Facebook Ads for Retention

Once you’ve acquired a new customer, you should do everything in your power to keep them.

According to a report mentioned in Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Moreover, retaining the existing customers is the top revenue source for many retail companies.

There are many reasons for keeping your clients happy and content:

• Positive referrals are a powerful marketing channel
• High-quality customer experience differentiates you from the competition
• You can create upsell and cross-selling campaigns to increase sales

And while you may not be aware of this yet, Facebook advertising is a great marketing channel for customer retention.

When developing a Facebook PPC strategy for customer retention, focus on sharing valuable content that’s helping your customers.

For example, Holini is sharing a blog article on hiding UTM parameters. The article’s both relevant and useful to their target audience – marketing managers.

You could also keep your customers engaged by conducting fun surveys and showing that you’re interested in your Facebook audience’s opinion. Here’s an example by Ahrefs:

Tip: When conducting surveys, look for ways to repurpose the data is case studies, testimonials, or publish an informative report on the current state of your industry.

Quick Recap

And here we are! I hope you found some inspiration for updating your Facebook Advertising Strategies with one of these PPC approaches, and you can’t wait for testing new tactics.

Here’s a quick overview of all the ad strategies we explored in the article:

1. Experiment with new ad placements
2. Combine Facebook ads & Google ads
3. Combine Facebook ads & content marketing
4. Set up strategic A/B tests
5. Set up a Facebook marketing funnel
6. Target your competitors’ fans
7. Get started with remarketing
8. Earn more Facebook page likes
9. Experiment with Facebook lead ads
10. Create a Facebook video ad campaign
11. Advertise limited-time offers
12. Use Facebook ads for retention

If you have questions regarding any of the strategies, let us know in the comments, and we’ll do our best to find an answer!