Facebook ads offer endless potential for female business owners to increase social visibility. This social awareness can be the spark to driving more customers down your sales funnel. Facebook ads that convert can be as elusive as they are ripe with business potential. As a female business owner, you can call upon your creativity and intuition to create effective campaigns that truly work.
Can You Convert with Social Ads?
To convert more potential customers, you should employ social ads. Why? Well, for one, the average website conversion statistics aren’t that great.
For example, the average conversion rate for online shoppers worldwide is 2.95 percent, according to Statista.
That leaves about 97 percent of online shoppers visiting your website not ready to make a purchase. If your business is U.S. focused, the stats aren’t much different. In fact, only 3 percent of online shoppers in the U.S. are ready to make a purchase.
How can female business owners drive more “ready to purchase” people to their websites? By implementing social media marketing strategies that scream value proposition. The value you create should also be directed toward your social followers’ unique needs to drive them toward the bottom of the funnel.
Can you convert using social media ads? The answer is most definitely yes. In fact, the overall business spends on digital ads is expected to nearly double by 2020.
When it comes to your business’ growth and success, it is essential to take advantage of every digital opportunity available. Here’s how you can do just that using Facebook ads.
Why Facebook Ads?
According to Pew Research Center, 79 percent of people online use Facebook.
This is on average 50 percent higher than any other social media platform. This makes it a valuable asset for marketing your business and connecting with your target audience in a meaningful way.
Let’s Talk about Budget
One of the first questions most marketers ask is: how much should I invest on Facebook ads? Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to this as it will vary, business by business.
It can be challenging to move your business forward in a powerful way if you don’t have the budget to spend on social ads and influencers.
The old adage, “It takes money to make money” is tried and true. If you don’t have an ad budget in place, you need one. Finding funding for marketing campaigns is actually pretty simple, and the ROI is 15 percent on average, making it absolutely worth it.
Once you have enough of a budget to get started, you should be able to quickly recoup your startup investment and very quickly make a profit. The only way to know exactly how much it will cost, and how much you can make, is to start by testing, knowing it will take some time for you to figure out the magic numbers.
Using Social Ads to Push Buyers Down the Funnel
The ultimate strategy behind powerful Facebook ads is using a variety of creative, like videos and Facebook Live Videos that showcase your value proposition, hyper-focused target marketing, and doing it all across multiple devices at multiple times.
Sounds easy right? It is time to roll up your social media sleeves and take a long hard look at your Facebook sales funnel. Discovery, Consideration, and Conversion are the three main steps that will churn consumers through the bottom of your funnel.
Step 1: Discovery
The discovery step of developing a successful Facebook ad campaign is by far the most important. If you can’t get your target audience through this part of your funnel, the next two steps simply don’t matter.
Changes in Facebook have placed an emphasis on animated content, as opposed to the standard static content. The top social platform is rewarding ads that showcase videos, carousels, gifs, and Facebook live ads.
One of the best ways to ensure female business owners maximize social ads is to connect with influencers. By finding relevant social influencers in your niche and industry and having them go “live” with your products or services is an expert tip for success.
Mark Zuckerberg went “live” to promote the shift the social media giant’s switch to video content.
“So Live video checks a lot of boxes for Facebook: It pulls in users, keeps them coming back, encourages them to post more original content, and gives Facebook a big runway for new advertising dollars,” Jillian D’Onfro of Business Insider said.
Refine Your Facebook Ads for Targeted Discovery
To create an ad on Facebook, you’ll need to know a few key demographics to really get the most from your ad. You will choose a broad audience target to begin and then refine your ad as you go.
First, log into your Facebook Ads Manager and select “Video views.”
You will get a drop down to name your video ad campaign. This can be generic, but it is a good idea to make the name relevant to easily find and track the ad.
Next, you will need to set up your audience parameters, like location, age, gender, and languages.
Let’s say you are targeting young professional women in the U.S. who only speak English. This will give you a potential reach of 37 million. This is still a bit too high to begin your ad campaign.
The next step is to narrow your audience down even more. Ideally, you want to have your first ad reach to be within one to two million people. Use the “Detailed Targeting” section to lower your reach.
For example, if you have a tech-minded product or service related to women’s health, you would enter that into the “Detailed Targeting” section. This will give you a nice broad, yet semi-targeted ad campaign of 1.7 million.
After that, you will set your ad budget and hit continue to launch your video ad campaign.
Once your Facebook video ad runs for a day or two, you should be looking at engagement metrics to fine-tune your ad even more. It takes a little time up front, but once you hit the sweet spot, you can save your audience again and have it ready for when it’s time to deliver new videos to drive them even further down your social sales funnel.
Step 2: Consideration
With these new audience metrics, you can begin social segmented marketing to drive your viewers from Discovery to Consideration.
Let’s say you have noticed a larger number of your viewers are between the ages of 30 and 35. These viewers are also located more in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., like Oregon and Washington. It is time to create specific Facebook video ads just for them.
Here’s a Facebook Ad that is California focused . . .
For these video ads, you will want to focus on the benefits of your products or services for that target audience. You can also find a well-known influencer from that region, that your newly defined age group follows, and leverage him or her to promote your products or services via Facebook Live.
Expert Tip: Create audiences based on the percentage of a video that viewers watched a video. You can create an audience for people who saw 10% of your video, 25% of your video, or more. This tutorial shows you how. By creating audiences for all the different percentages of video views, you can further segment and target each audience and give them different creatives (such as deeper discounts the more they watch).
You can follow Step 1 to create a new video ad campaign. The key is to connect even further with your potential customers, building confidence and a stronger commitment to purchase from you.
Step 3: Conversion
Once your targeted audience feels very comfortable with your business and the benefits your products or services serve up, they are ready to be converted. How can you get your audience from Consideration to Customers?
This step in the social sales funnel is a strategic one. People may still be on the edge of converting, but need a little nudge to make that purchase. To make this happen, you can offer incentives or discounts to get them to commit.
These may be people that have clicked through to your website via a Facebook video ad. They may have added products to the checkout cart. Or they have interacted with an influencer ad and now have more confidence to buy from you. The ultimate aim is to give them, even more, reason to make those purchases.
At the discovery stage, you would create audiences based on people who “added to cart” but didn’t check out. This is your “closest to conversion” audience. This audience should have their own ads dedicated to pushing them to conversion. Whether you use the scarcity principle to get them to convert, or offer them a steep discount, you need to keep serving this audience with new ads as incentives to complete the purchase with you.
Social Ads Have a 15 Percent ROI
Female business owners can leverage social ads and unlock unprecedented growth and success. Leveraging your female audience will speed up this process even more. Make the most of your social presence and grow your business now with Facebook ads!
