Of all the aspects involved in setting up a Facebook Ad, possibly one of them is the most deceptively simple.

Your audience segmenting portion is what sikes the most people out when trying to build a successful Facebook advertising funnel.

And of course, if you pull up the page in Facebook, you’ll see why that is.

On the page, you’ll see a bolded title that says “Audience” and then a basic set of boxes and options to choose a location, age, interests, and more.

It hardly takes up even a 3rd of the page.

Doesn’t seem like there’s much to it, right?

Well, don’t be fooled. Too many people, whether experienced marketing specialists or hopeful beginners, breeze through this step without a second thought.

And yet, it’s really not hard to see how it’s so indispensable to spend a few extra minutes on it (if not longer).

If our ads are going to people who only have a passing interest in our product or service, we’re not going to be making many sales.

And if other forms of marketing are any indication, you can really generate enormous results through narrowing in more on your audience.

It’s also true that social media gives marketers a laser beam like power to target highly specific audiences.

So for our next step in becoming Facebook Ad masters, we’re looking at how we can better understand Facebook targeting, step-by-step.

Defining Your Customers

First things first. Before you even click a single attribute, if you haven’t made an outline of your customers’ interests and demographics, stop!

While you can always experiment and adapt your targeting, having that information in a concrete form provides you with a physical reference point.

This way, you’ll be able to evolve that outline into some topnotch lead targeting confidently.

And with how complex targeting can get, keeping track of your efforts is paramount.

Some of the best ways to create this initial outline are to review your already existing customers as well as spying on your competition a little.

Then all you need to do is list the different values, psychological factors, and demographics that help define them.

Protip: In our case, don’t forget to factor in whether or not the customers you’re considering use Facebook. Even though the social media titan has billions of users, it’s always a question worth considering as the social media landscape matures.

Going Beyond Local

Once upon a time, you could really only target people by geographic location without further consideration.

But now, you have additional contexts when it comes to location, but also some further factors to take account of.

In addition to targeting audiences that are in a current location, you can also choose between people who live in, have recently visited, or are traveling to that area.

Now that’s getting down to some specifics!

Although you might have to use your creative thinking cap for a moment on how these can apply, they open up an entirely new world of possibilities.

At the same time, you can target locations like never before.

Maybe your product or service would hit particularly well for people at your local airport who are about to fly?

Punch it in and add it! This is truly the power of social media at its finest.

Protip: At first glance, you might think that going as broad as possible here is the way to go. But as we’ve seen in our previous articles and with strong research behind it, local-level marketing can improve the quality of a lead greatly.

Pay Attention to Age, Gender

These two category selections are probably the easiest to overlook.

And you can imagine why: they’re set up as a basic set of dropdowns and a series of 3 buttons.

What would be easier than that?

Not so fast!

We’ve seen before how men and women don’t just differ in how they view different types of marketing, we’ve also seen how they differ on consuming that information.

Having a firm idea of what message you’ll be using for each gender and age group you’re targeting is a big necessity.

For example, perhaps your sales funnel is built around a masculine niche like beard oils.

Men between the ages of 25 to 35 might be your prime demographic.

But what about their mothers, women between the age of 55 to 65, who are looking for holiday gifts for their sons?

A new message targeting this group might be equally or even more effective.

Protip: A brief note on the languages option. While it might seem pretty straightforward, don’t forget under-served markets for your sales funnel. For example, hiring a Spanish-language writer to help you craft an ad could represent an unparalleled opportunity in the waiting.

Cracking into Detailed Targeting

Okay, so far, so good. Now we’re going to look at the most complex aspects of targeting.

We’re going to go point-by-point to see how these factors can be used to magnify your conversion.

Even though we’ll touch on many of the options, don’t feel like you must use every single one.

Go with what makes sense for your brand, and your sales funnel.

But at the end of the day, this section is the bread and butter of what makes social media marketing an extremely powerful tool for our funnel efforts.

• Drilling Down on Finer Demographics

From generation marketing to the role that income plays in spending, this section gives us the ability to harness all the data that people put on their profiles. In reality, none of these should be overlooked when it comes to your sales funnel.

However, the few that many Funnel Hackers will find helpful are education, including fields of study; income level under financial data, and generation. Some of the more interesting ones that offer novel opportunities are relationship status, life events, and political affiliation.

Mixing and matching these can help you to see that, for example, your market isn’t just women between the ages of 19 to 30, but those women who are in a relationship and thinking about getting married (which represents a huge marketing segment in and of itself).

• Dominating the Interests Category

Here’s another often overlooked area of Facebook Ads. You might think it’s best to open up the Interests section of Detailed Targeting and start clicking away. You probably have a good idea of whether or not your audience is into fitness and health or shopping and fashion. In many cases, your sales funnel will fall under one or a few of these. But I’m going to give you two tips here that will send your conversion through the roof. The first is super simple: click that checkbox under the Detailed Targeting section near the bottom that says “Expand interests…” This little checkmark allows Facebook to use the power of their networks to find connections we might never see.

The second trick is to type in some specific interests into our Add demographic option. Think about it this way: instead of targeting people who are just interested in luxury watches, why can’t we target people who exclusively read the popular watch site Hodinkee? We know these Facebook users are on fire about watches, so much so that they belong to the watch enthusiast community. Those are some quality leads! And now, Facebook is going to suggest to us, even more, websites, blogs, and venues that similar people are interested in.

• Using Behavior to Getting, Even More, Granular Control

This is probably one of my favorite sections. It gets us thinking about not just who our audience is, but how they act. And since we also want them to take action, doesn’t it make sense that their most common actions are important to the picture? You can hone in on everyone from avid photo takers to small business owners.

There’s even a spending habits method section, where you can target people with the high-end dept. Store credit cards. Or even those people with gym memberships or who are likely to move soon. Having access to this level of marketing data, not to mention being able to target based off of it directly, would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Take advantage of it here!

• Ensure You’ve Considered Excluding Certain Leads

Although combining all these categories together can give you an audience profile that rocks, don’t skip the exclude people feature. By clicking this choice, you can then work backward to prune out leads that make less sense for your funnel. Let me give you some examples. Say we’re selling a brand-new type of computer software to early tech adopters.

But we know that avid console gamers have less of interest in this offering. Why would we want to serve these leads an ad? Instead, let’s exclude them and focus in on our early tech adopters who also aren’t avid console gamers. This isn’t a part of the tool that you’ll use every single time, but it’s one not to leave off as you shape your strategy.

Protip: If you haven’t guessed yet, we can create some very targeted audience profiles for every one of our ads. With this type of power, we can also construct ever more robust sales funnels. However, don’t feel obligated to jam your targeting full of parameters if you don’t have to. Do what makes the most sense for every funnel you launch.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your targeting efforts?

Which ones have you overcome and found the biggest returns from?

Thanks for reading A Funnel Hacker’s Guide To Facebook Ad Targeting which appeared first on ClickFunnels.

When it comes to marketing live events using Facebook and Clickfunnels I have learnt so much over the last few years, what works, what DOESN’T (oh that was expensive) and how to make sure that you get the best possible outcome.

The major takeaways I have had is that combining these three things has allowed me to generate some pretty powerful results, like spending $400 in ads to generate over $40,000 in front end sales at an event or helping a client generate more leads in a day for his event than he had in the last 6 months.

Why Do Live Events?

Let’s start at the beginning, why should we do live events, let alone market them?

Marketo published an awesome guide on event marketing, and they listed the top 4 reasons for an event;

1. Branding and awareness
2. Generating leads
3. Engaging with prospects and existing customers
4. Educating attendees

I think they missed the biggest one, though… SALES!

Live events are the perfect selling platform for you to get your product or service out there, as long as you are confident enough to present in front of people.

What Type Of Events?

Now, what sort of live events are we talking about here?

Well, I have marketed events that range from Free – all the way up to $4,000. Just today I was checking the analytics for a $4,000 event we are promoting and we had to sales for $0.76 each.

Now that is absolutely ridiculous but it just shows what is possible when you get things setup correctly.

For the purpose of this article I’m going to focus on the lower end events, the free or under $100 events as that’s the easiest way to get started and really, it can give you the best ROI if you can sell as well.

So let’s break it down into three easy to follow sections.

Event Setup

This can cost you thousands of dollars if you do not do it properly.

I recommend if you are just getting started to start with a free event, the reason being that the biggest thing people look at is the opportunity cost.

Is your event going to be more beneficial for me than anything else I could be doing?

If you factor in money at this point in time and you are not very well known them you compound the opportunity cost, and it pushes your audience away rather than bringing them in.

So my recommended setup would be a free front-end live event.

Now if you want (and clickfunnels is amazing for this) you can add in a VIP upsell for anywhere up to $47, giving them front row seating, some added training or some products, the choice is yours.

The benefit of the VIP option is that it allows you to create an ‘event within an event’ which was listed as the number 1 tip from Inc Magazines new rules of event marketing;

“We try to create an event within an event where we can touch a consumer one-on-one, where you can engage directly, and teach them about your product, and do so by interacting in a quality way. I just got back from Sundance, and we were doing VIP and celebrity shuttling to events in our vehicles, and the goal for us is to create an event within the vehicle.”

I love using the template Dark Local Lander for several reasons, but because it is setup with a video optin, it’s something that anyone can use and you cannot really go wrong.

Even if you don’t customize it, and you just use it the way it is then you are still off to a roaring start.

The second reason to use that template or any of the video templates is more psychological.

We are asking people to come to an event, where they will be interacting with us in person, hearing us talk, seeing us walk and basically seeing us for who we really are.

In preparation for this video is going to be key to the optin here – because if they don’t like us on video, chances are they won’t like us in real life, so we are better off NOT having them at an event!

It can be a little harsh, but it ensures that the marketing dollars you spend generate you a result. I am all about ROI.

The Tools & Tech

You will need a few bits and pieces to ensure that you have set yourself up for success with your event;

• Landing Page Software – Clickfunnels (obviously)
• Autoresponder Software –Infusionsoft, AWeber or MailChimp will do
• Event management Software – https://www.dynamicsync.com/

If you are using Infusionsoft I highly recommend Dynamicsync – it allows you to segment your lists by those that attended, didn’t attend, registered, even those that buy and don’t buy which becomes super powerful in the follow-up, plus it allows for text message on registration as well – which dramatically increases attendance rates.

Facebook Ads

Whether you are running an online event or a live event – the structure is mostly the same. A great example of a simple ad is below from Robin Sharma;

Now I understand that this isn’t an event ad – but this has all the principles that you need to be able to create a world class ad and get people to your event.

Designing Your Ad Copy

You can see on this ad that there is CONGRUENCY, which is key – he is only talking about 1 thing, the free training/webinar.The copy mentions the FREE (always use capitals for free).

Training, the image says FREE WEBINAR and the key line at the bottom mentions the upcoming training. This is key to an effective ad. You need to tell people specifically what it is they can

The copy mentions the FREE (always use capitals for free) Training, the image says FREE WEBINAR and the key line at the bottom mentions the upcoming training.This is key to an effective ad. You need to tell people specifically what it is they can

This is key to an effective ad.You need to tell people specifically what it is they can

You need to tell people specifically what it is they can expect, if it is a free live event say; FREE LIVE EVENT. If it is a paid event say; LIVE EVENT and then later on, mention the ticket price.

I personally would have used more ad copy for an event but you can go short form as well.If I was to write longer copy I would have included;

If I was to write longer copy I would have included;

• Benefits of attending
• Outcome of attending
• Who the event is for (obviously in this case not needed as he makes it clear it’s for ‘game changers’

Setting Your Budget

When it comes down to your budget, you are doing extremely well if you are getting conversions for under $20 for a free event – scale it if that is the case.

Average would be $50 per conversion for a free event so if you hit those numbers you are doing well!

For paid events the minimum you should expect is to pay 100% of the ticket price to acquire that lead. If you are worried about making money on the front end, you are doing an event for the wrong reason, so I would rethink doing one to begin with.

Nailing Your Targeting 

Targeting your audience could take us about another ten pages, so here’s just a simple tip – I call it WRF.

W – what do your prospective clients watch?

R – what do your prospective clients read?

F – who do your prospective clients follow?

This should get you kick started on your targeting!

If you want more information on ads and setting up campaigns check out our blog at the end of the post where we have a ton of free resources too.

In The Event (Ie. Sales!)

After running a successful marketing campaign, it all comes down to event experience and the sales you can expect.

The screenshots below are for an event where we had a $17 upgrade to VIP – to help cover some of the marketing expense.

Now if you HAVEN’T sold before I wouldn’t spend as much money as we did on the event, start with smaller crowds and make your way up.

So you will see below we had 107 people register for the event, of which 21 upgraded to VIP. From that, we had 54 attend the event and made $26,000 in sales.

Now most people would leave it there, but because you are reading this blog I know you are a bit more savvy than the normal punter, and we know that we never only have 1 sale opportunity, that is the beauty of a funnel!

The lifetime customer value was actually $11,000 for this client. So after making 26 sales it meant that the ACTUAL total value of sales was $286,000.

Now I don’t know about you, but I would spend $1872.50 EVERY day of the week to make $286,000 in my business.

This is the most important section of the whole process as if you cannot sell, well you won’t be producing numbers as I shared above.

So let’s recap, the 3 steps;

1. Event Setup – creating your lander and everything that goes with it
2. Facebook Ads – tell your audience what you are doing and show them why they NEED to spend time with you
3. Sales – show them value, then ask them to spend money with you

Overall marketing and running events can be ridiculously profitable, but there is also a ton of downside too as there can be many things that can happen outside of your control.

Personally, it’s fun and exhilarating and you should through your hat in the ring at least once – you might be surprised of the outcome.

My question for you today is, have you ever tried event advertising before? If you have, what’s been your biggest struggle I can help you with? Leave a comment below and I’ll get to your questions.

Thanks for reading The Event Marketing Trio: ClickFunnels, Facebook Ads which appeared first on ClickFunnels.

Facebook, that behemoth that employers and bosses around the world hate for the lack of their employees’ efficiency during work hours, and the familiar network we all use to stalk our friends and neighbours.

In the recent years, however, Facebook has shown a completely new side of itself, with the advertising numbers in massive rise and new features such as video advertisements being rolled out on a near weekly pace.

But why would you want to advertise in a place where everyone else is already advertising?

Isn’t that a waste of money, since all your competitors are there already?

Well, no it’s not, and no they aren’t.

With over 1.4 billion users and more than 900 million visits daily, there’s plenty of people to advertise to. And besides, I can guarantee that not all of your competitors understand the importance of good advertising, or that they think it’s too expensive.

I’ll show you how you can do some simple Facebook advertising for just $5 per day, without having to fear your wallet will be drained or that you won’t get anything good out of it. Trust me on this one, you’ll want to give it a try.

When To Use Facebook Advertising

Facebook is a social platform first advertising platform second, or at least when you’re asking its users, because their business plan might disagree with that statement.

But we’ll keep thinking of it as a social network, which means that you have to promote something of interest to a bored office worker browsing Facebook during his lunch hour, or a single mom ‘just quickly checking what’s happening’ when she should be catching some of that precious sleep.

And how can we achieve that?

First of all, you must know when to use Facebook as an advertising tool, and that’s why this paragraph exists. To educate you on the possibilities of a brilliantly planned and executed advertising campaign on Facebook.

If you’re selling clothes, you’ll want to promote sales and offers on Facebook. If you own a blog or a magazine, you’ll want to reach new people within your target audience, and what better way to do that than by utilizing Facebook advertising.

See the pattern?

Anything that is of any value or interest to the consumer directly will most likely succeed as a Facebook advertisement. Anything with the hint of some viral value will most likely do quite well as a Facebook promoted post, and skyrocket on its own because of Facebook’s inbuilt sharing and tagging abilities.

To put it simply, use Facebook as a way to reach your audience better and to promote to them products, services and content that you might think they’d appreciate and find useful.

What Do You Need To Start?

A Facebook page! Now that we’re finally getting off to a concrete start on this advertising matter, head over to Facebook for Business and click the ‘create a page’ button shown in the image below.

First Facebook asks you to choose who or what you’re creating the page for, and this is what you will see.

After that you’ll need to enter in a few details, such as page name, category and so forth. You being a business or a website owner yourself, I’m sure you know all of these details about the company you’re creating the page for, so I’m not going to hold your hand and teach you to spell your website’s address.

For example, if you’d be creating a page for your dog walking service, this is what you would do.

Finally you’ll need to complete a simple four step process, which I won’t go too far into due to this being an article about advertising on Facebook, but here’s an image for you to make sure you’re in the right place.

Oh, and make sure to define your audience well, because Facebook will help you by suggesting good groups and keywords to target later on as it knows your audience.

After completing the four step process, congratulations! You are now an owner of a brand new Facebook page!

It’s not much yet, but fill in all the details, polish it out and give it a beautiful cover picture and you’re on your way to success.

Let’s Begin – Step 1

Facebook offers you multiple ways to promote your brand, from promoting your Call to Action all the way to promoting an individual post.

Here’s what it looks like when you click on the small blue button that says “Promote” in white letters.

You need to choose the type of promotion based on what you wish to achieve. For example, if you’re looking to acquire new customers for your dog walking service by having them come by your doggy centre, choose the ‘Promote Your Local Business’ option.

Or if you’re trying to amass boat loads of fresh visitors to your website, you might wish to select the obvious ‘Promote Your Website’ option. This step is as simple as it looks and sounds like, just choose the type of promotion you think fits your purposes best, and go for it.

Now being marketers who are using ClickFunnels, generally your ultimate goal is to attract a mass amount of leads to your website and have them fill in your form (name, email, phone number etc.)

We’re not going to go too deep into the technicalities of goals when Facebook Advertising (we’ll be leaving that for another post) but if you directing traffic to a landing page, “Promote Your Call To Action” generally does quite well.

As you master Facebook Ads you’ll be able to go even deeper into using Power Editor and more.

Write Your Copy – Step 2

Next step is to write some compelling advertising copy, Mad Men style for your new Facebook Ad.

When writing Facebook advertising headlines and text, it can be a bit difficult to structure something that you know will work.

AdEspresso recently analysed 37,259 Facebook Ads and found and shared:

It seems Facebook advertisers have taken this to heart. The median length for a headline is just 5 words long. This means that their ad is immediately clear and to the point each time.

By keeping to this approximate length, you’ll be able to get your point across to your audience clearly and succinctly without any distractions.

Make It Pop – Step 3

Make your ad catch the attention of your audience by uploading a nice and relevant image. Remember, only 20% of the image is allowed to contain text when advertising on Facebook.

Yes I know it can be super frustrating but you also need to remind yourself the platform you’re choosing to advertise on. You want creative which is native to the surroundings so it doesn’t just stand out like another flashing banner ad.

HubSpot exclaims in one of their posts about some of their examples of ads which actually work that:

“A beautiful and relevant ad is great, but without a call-to-action (CTA), your viewer might not know what to do next. “

One of their examples used was from NatureBox:

A Facebook advertisement like NatureBox’s above is clean, visual, relevant and most of all has a clear call to action to the target audience.

Location, Location, Location – Step 4

You really don’t want to be spending your hard earned advertising dollars on people clicking on your advertisement in a completely different country than where your target audience lives.

That’s why you‘ll be giving Facebook the specific location or locations you want your ad to be shown in amongst an array of other targeting options.

This targeting option specifically allows you to promote certain posts or pages to an audience in one country, and certain posts and pages to an audience in another country.

With Facebook’s targeting options you can very specific with your location targeting.

In face, with their newest updates, you can now even drop a pin in the location you’d like to advertise and select a radius of people to target.

(NOTE: This is ideal for local brick and mortar businesses)

Using Interest Targeting– Step 5

And this is where you can make or break the whole advertising campaign, mastering the interest selection.

This is where it comes in handy if you properly narrowed down your page’s audience for Facebook before, because the system can recommend you some really solid groups and interests to target here.

You should try to enter at least three different interests in this selection to attain a good reach for your campaign. Too few people to see the ad and you might just miss out on the whole results side of advertising.

Before you ask “What’s the ideal target audience size?” Facebook advises you that:

“Ad sets perform better when they’re targeted to at least a few thousand people. Consider removing some of your targeting options if your audience is too small.”

Budgeting and Running Your Ad – Step 6

Finally, the budget side of things! This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, and it’s finally here.

Select the amount of money you wish to spend each day on your promotion campaign, and select the duration of the run.

Personally I’ve used many different campaign durations, but I’d recommend running the ad continuously and keeping an eye on its results on a day-to-day basis after the first 5 days.

You need some initial data to be able to get an idea of its performance before tweaking the ad.

Preview the Results Then…– Step 8

You’re ready to publish your ad! If you like the preview of your newly crafted Facebook Ad then you are ready to hit that sweet ‘Promote’ button at the lower right corner and enjoy the results!

So What Now?

Welcome to the world of Facebook advertising, you’re now part of those smart business people and entrepreneurs who understand the value of good old fashioned advertising techniques combined with the modern wonders of technology!

If you’ve got any suggestions, experiences or comments you’d like to share with me, the ClickFunnels team or your fellow readers, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment in the comment section below! We’d love to hear from you.

Last but not least, don’t forget to tune in soon for our next instalment in the beginner advertising article series on AdWords.

Thanks for reading Launch Your First Facebook Ad Starting At $5/Day which appeared first on ClickFunnels.