Optimizing Facebook Ads for small business.
Trying to run Facebook Ads on a small budget can be extremely tedious. It requires the knowledge of how to stretch a dollar and ensure a positive return on whatever it is you may spend. If you are one of the small business owners that believes Facebook Ads either don’t work or require a large budget, this article is for you. Here’s how you can run effective Facebook Ads on a small budget.
Facebook offers a wide variety of opportunities to grow your business with tailored ads. Everything from funnels, to campaign objectives, to testing, every function and feature can be easily overlooked when optimizing a small ad budget. Here are just a few features you can use to optimize your Facebook Ad campaigns.
Utilize retargeting campaigns.
Unless if your company is brand new, chances are you already have a handful of website visitors, customer contact information, and video views on social media. Retargeting campaigns are a great way to re-engage potential customers who have previously shown interest in your brand. Retargeting potential customers is also the most efficient way to increase sales, promote offers, and increase website traffic. Better yet, you can run effective retargeting campaigns with just a few dollars a day in ad spend. Granted, I would recommend running another campaign along with that just to ensure a steady flow of website traffic and engagement.
The most common ways to retarget an audience (and most effective) are by retargeting website traffic and video views. You can create these audiences in Facebook Ad Manager by clicking the matrix icon and selecting “Audiences”. Once you get to the Audiences page, click “Create Audience" and choose an option from the dropdown. To create a customized retargeting audience, select “Custom Audience.”
From here, you have a variety of options to choose from. I would recommend choosing website visitors from the past 90 days, video views of at least 3 seconds or more from the past 365 days (25% of the video viewed or more is also a common practice), and anyone who has engaged with your Instagram or Facebook Page within the past 90 days.
Make sure you select an accurate time frame for past engagement (past x amount of days) as well as all of the videos that you want to include in your retargeting audience. For example, if you only want to retarget video views from your last campaign, click “Choose videos…” and scroll through to select each desired video. You can also use this feature to target your most popular content.
Facebook can take up to 30 minutes to compile this anonymous list of profiles, but you can create an ad for the audiences while you wait. When creating your next campaign, you will be able to find your new audience (along with the size of that audience) under your Ad Set > Audiences > Saved Audiences > Custom Audiences. You can then add each of your custom audiences that you want to retarget.
Once your audiences are complete, you can create a new campaign. Select the objective you would like to use (I suggest Reach for retargeting), outline your budget (about $5/day for every 10,000 audience members), and create your ad. Keep the number of ads you create under 3; any more and Facebook Ad’s algorithm will take longer to fully optimize your campaign, especially with a small budget.
You can read more about the benefits to retargeting on Facebook on the Facebook for Business website.
Segmented targeting and tailored content.
Especially when confined to a small budget, segmented targeting can be the most beneficial way to get the most out of your ad spend. This feature allows you to pinpoint specific characteristics and interests of your audience and speak directly to them. (This technique can also be used in your retargeting campaigns.)
For the longest time, I admittedly did not believe in all of the hype surrounding Facebook targeting strategies. While it is true that the content of your ad is what determines your results, Facebook’s targeting features allow small businesses to be more specific than ever before with their messaging. Let’s take one of my own campaigns for example.
This screenshot shows the results of a campaign I was spending $20 a day on. For the first two or three weeks, I ran the cold targets ad set alone. After deciding that $1.55 per landing page view was outrageous, I decided to change up my Facebook Ad strategy a little.
I then introduced a B2B, restaurant, and retail industry-specific ad set. Each of these ad sets contained a single video ad with tailored copy speaking to the pain points and struggles of small business owners in those specific industries. My B2B ad spoke about how we help local businesses in the service industry drive more high-quality leads and accumulate new clients through our local SEO and online advertising services.
The restaurant and retail ad sets each spoke to the necessary function of digital marketing in driving more online orders, sales, and carry-out. They also provided value on how these industries can leverage social media, website content, and digital ads to achieve their goals. By the second week of these ad sets running, they were averaging between 75 cents and $1.05 per landing page view each.
If you know a specific problem that your product or service fixes, find specific benefits within different audience segments and tailor your ad content to those specific pain points. For example, if you own an auto repair shop near a college campus, you could run an ad promoting your oil change deals that targets students of the university who live within a 5 - 15 mile radius and are 18 - 24 years old. You could also specifically mention the common problem of non-local students being unfamiliar with trustworthy places to take their cars for repairs and oil changes. The more specific you can be in your ads, the more relevant your brand is to the consumer - especially with accurately segmented audiences.
If you’re not sure which targeting options to pursue, you can view Facebook’s in-depth guide for Facebook Targeting Strategies here.
With retargeting campaigns, you can create an ad segment for each specific characteristic or interest. For example, take your custom audiences and create a three different ad sets for them. Then, segment your retargeting audiences further by specific age groups. Your ad sets would look like this:
Ad Set 1: Website Visitors, 3 Second Video Views, Facebook Page Engagement, Instagram Profile Engagement; Age 18 - 24
Ad Set 2: Website Visitors, 3 Second Video Views, Facebook Page Engagement, Instagram Profile Engagement; Age 25 - 39
Ad Set 3: Website Visitors, 3 Second Video Views, Facebook Page Engagement, Instagram Profile Engagement; Age 40 - 60
Each of these segmented audiences would allow you to tailor an ad to a specific benefit your product or service provides each age group.
Use cost-efficient campaign objectives.
While conversion campaigns are great, they are by far the most expensive campaign objective on Facebook (or any other social media platform). They require several hundreds of dollars a day in ad spend (at least) to fully optimize and produce any results.
If you are spending less than $1,000 a month on Facebook Ads, your primary focus should be long-term results. You should be utilizing cost-effective campaign objectives that help get the audience to the next step in your sales funnel, rather than pushing for immediate sales. Run a campaign that is optimized for website traffic or engagement, so you can follow up a more engaging audience with an effective retargeting campaign.
Read more about how to choose the right Facebook campaign objective here.
Allocate about 75% of your budget to this cold audience campaign. This audience is often referred to as the top of the funnel; the people who are not familiar with your brand and see no value in it (yet). Use the strategies talked about previously to segment ideal audiences, tailor your ad content, and encourage a link click or video view. Note: While both would be effective for this step, engagement objectives are better for smaller budgets, rather than website traffic objectives.
Allocate the remaining 25% of your budget to a Reach campaign to retarget those who have taken action within the cold audience campaign. Create a custom audience for video views from that campaign, website visitors, page engagement, etc. Use this campaign to promote an offer, provide more value, build trust and credibility, or use a lead magnet to acquire emails and other contact information.
It is important to keep in mind that the smaller the budget, the fewer complexities your campaigns should include. Try to keep one ad to each ad set and less than 3 ad sets to each campaign. Also, make sure that the size of your audience is accurately reflected by your budget. Too small, and your frequency will be too high, killing your campaign results and wasting ad spend. Too large, and your ads may not ever reach the right people, or even run. Facebook has been known to shut off campaigns that have too large of an audience to prevent wasted ad spend on a campaign doomed to fail.
It’s also important to realize that while a small budget may not allow for immediate results, it most certainly can benefit you in the long run. Budgets of all sizes can still help local businesses drive more leads, accumulate a larger audience, increase website traffic, and eventually drive more sales. You just have to remember, working with a budget of any size requires a different strategy and approach.
Small businesses can use Facebook ads to increase engagement on social media, build a large audience of potential customers, retarget audiences to get a sale, and drive more quality leads. A small budget just requires more patience and segmented strategy. While the budget should reflect the size of the audience, your long-term campaign strategy should reflect the size of your budget. Don’t be afraid to spend money accumulating an audience for retargeting down the road; sales will come with time.
