Building a Winning Ad on Facebook for Small Businesses

Facebook is a MASSIVE platform with countless users who spend a ton of time on it. 

Because of that, it’s prime for businesses trying to market their products and services to these people. 

With Facebook ads, we are able to not only target the people who live in our areas, but we are also able to target people who are strikingly similar to our current customers. 

I find a lot of people don’t have a ton of direction when they try it out and when they attempt it the performance falls flat. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

With that being said here’s what I think are the critical steps to running a winning ad campaign for a brick and mortar business:

Step 1.

Organize your best clients or best customers into the reasons why they came in and saw you. 

What did they feel when they were looking for you?

How do they feel now?

Why is this the case?

You’re looking for specific pain points from them, to understand the reasons why they did the things they did and what made them choose you. 

Step 2.

Organize the responses into a story using their specific pain points. The story should be written from the third person so the reader essentially follows their journey. 

The copy here is critical. 

Because you want to build a “That sounds like me” moment with your prospects. 

In addition to that, you have to understand that we are speaking to the irrational and emotional part of the brain. The part that makes decisions almost immediately based on constructs from past experiences. 

We call this the elephant and the rider. The elephant is the irrational and emotional side, while the rider is the one seemingly in control and the rational side. 

Because of the way our brains work you have to motivate the elephant first with stories and emotional content to break the ice and then the rider can analyze after. 

This is why people react so profoundly to stories!

You can learn more about this by reading “The Happiness Hypothesis”

Step 3.

Build the landing page. The crucial piece here is to continue to motivate the elephant to push forward and want to be part of what you do. 

We do that by compiling success stories and testimonials/reviews on this landing page with established pain points from our story created as the copy on the page. 

Step 4. 

Create the Facebook ad. Using the copy you created in step 2 create an ad in Facebook business manager using a custom audience from your email list. 

To create this custom audience upload your email list to business manager in the audiences section. Then create a 1% lookalike audience from that list. 

 Set the ad to your local area and don’t touch any other targeting parameters. 

Why? Because a lookalike is already matched to be strikingly similar to your current list of customers. 

If you don't have a list or audience available then target this campaign to your local area within 5 miles and set up 4-6 interests based on what your target market is interested in. 

Look at influencers people like, sports teams they follow, magazines they subscribe to etc.

A short 15-second video that captures attention and breaks the mold works incredibly well for these campaigns. 

Short, sweet, concise and speaking to the elephant!

The headline should be the most important sentence from the story you have. The most profound and impactful statement. 

The last step is to organize your budget. I always recommend no less than $30 a day for brick and mortar businesses and for a more effective campaign I highly recommend $50-$100 a day. 

And with this you have to let the ad run for at least 5-7 days to allow Facebook to work to understand the ideal person to put the ad in front of. They call this the learning phase.

In fact, a $1500 a month budget seems to be the sweet spot. 
 

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How Do I Create Compelling Calls to Action?

Nothing I’m doing is working and I can’t seem to figure out why I’m not getting business!!

This is what I often hear from frustrated business owners who are tired of failing and can’t seem to figure it out. 

The solution is often to outsource your marketing or to copy what someone else is doing because they seem successful. 

The problem with copying someone else is the fact that you don’t know their goals with the campaign or their long-term strategy. Without this, you can only play a short-term game until you need to switch to the next flavor of the week. 

I call this shiny thing syndrome. People often bounce from one thing to the next based on what seems to be working when others do it or when a shiny new piece of technology comes out seemingly ready to solve all business problems. 

The way you solve this problem is to take a step back and work to understand where you want your business to be in the next 30 days, 3/6/9/12 months and 2 years from now. 

Once you figure this out find your best clients or customers who you would love to replicate. These are the people who have been customers or clients for years and years

With your long-term strategy in mind and your best clients at hand, you have what it take to create effective and compelling calls to action. 

This is even more important right now with people being flooded with sales messages and bait and switch tactics all over the place to the point that the public doesn’t trust anyone who owns a business or sells products or services and it goes against the new algorithm set forth by Facebook. 

If you’re on Facebook advertising (and you most likely should be) it’s incredibly important to produce compelling content that creates an emotional bond with your customers. 

This content should follow the pillars of great content that I often talk about:

1. Motivation 
2. Education 
3. Make people laugh 

Why? Because Facebook is obsessed with people on their platform having a great experience and not being bombarded with brands trying to sell shit all over the place and you can’t blame them because without people they have no platform. 

Now let’s rewind back to when we talk about building a list of your best clients or customers. 

Take that list and use it to poll them about their experience. You need to ask them the specific reasons they came to see you and the specific reasons they keep coming back. 

Something like:

1. Why did you choose us?
2. How did you feel when you were looking for a solution before you purchased?
3. How do you feel now?
4. Why do you keep coming back?

This works best in person and typically generates the most genuine results, but can also be done via email if you’re trying to do this at scale.

From this list of questions take the answers you get and compile it into the call to action you need using the words they used to describe you. 

You can literally use their exact words and phrases to build this as you’ve obtained social proof and the why behind why people love you straight from them. 

This is even better on video. Get a decent mic (the Rode Lav + os a great starter lapel mic) and record their responses, add a bit of music and you’ve got a winning call to action. 

When it comes down to it you really need to understand how stories come into play in your marketing. They create an atmosphere to where you can build social proof and keep people engaged and creating a feeling of “that’s just like me” from them. 

Go out and get this started! Just reading won’t do it for you! I’d love to see what you create!

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Building a Culture of Raving Fans

Content is everywhere and you’ve probably heard the term “content is king” thrown out everywhere by every single talking head. 

But the big problem we face comes down to how to produce that content and how we make it unique, different and stand out from the sea of content available literally everywhere.

This comes down to knowing what your brand is, how it’s defined, what its personality would look like if it was a real-life person. 

The way this is defined is understanding and defining your message across your entire brand and making sure that it speaks to the exact people you want to speak to. 

These people should feel as though they are part of your story. 

The hard part is learning how to continuously create that story and to tell it in a way that’s unique to you specifically. Not in a way that lumps you in the same way as everyone else. 

This is where the introduction of original content comes into play. This is content that is specific and unique to you and that you produce yourself or in conjunction with an agency. 

To learn and understand how to build the story you need to understand:

1. Your brand
2. Your employees
3. Your customers

In your original content, you need to focus on all three of these subsets and telling a story to continuously involves them. 

To start this process define and outline the strengths, unique characteristics, the story and the personality type of each one. 

Then take all of this and compile it into a winding story that dives into your staff and customer and because it’s so well thought out it drives your brand into it as well. 

This isn’t about a call to action, tricking people or expecting immediate returns. 

It’s about building a movement around what you do, creating a set of raving fans and staff and turning your product or service into an experience. 

This experience is something that should be so powerful that your customers don’t care about what you sell or how you sell it. They should be so excited about your brand that they will support you in literally anything you do without question. 

And this doesn’t stop with the story it goes into every experience a customer has with your brand and furthermore the experiences your employees have with your brand. 

These experiences combined with the story dictate the way people feel about what you do and as a result what they say about what you do. 

If the experience is strong enough you will have a base that will spread the word for you, will tell everyone about what you do and will share every single piece of content you put out. 

Original content starts with understanding every single subset of your brand and continues to build on and to drive that experience that keeps people captivated and excited for years and years. 

It takes a minute to trick someone but takes a lifetime to captivate an audience and build a movement. 

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