With over 160,000 fans and counting, our Secret Entourage Facebook page has always been a valuable asset to our brand and continues to serve its purpose daily for expanding our reach, growing our brand, spreading awareness, and be a driver of sales and signups. Our page does grow naturally through our status updates we put out that usually go viral but that is a discussion and a topic for another day. Growing your Facebook fans with real, targeted fans is very easy but takes a small investment. You’ll see in our step by step guide how we gained 1284 fans at a extremely lost cost of $0.08 per fan.
Our Facebook campaign in question can be seen in the report screen shot below. A few key things to notice is that we spent $102 total which netted us 1287 fans. We actually had several variations of ads, hence the Blue/Green campaign names but ultimately the Green performed the best and brought in a total of 1284 fans itself at $0.08.
You can see the campaign started on 7/14 and we received 341 fans that first day. It slowed down a little bit as we progressed and that is because our targeted audience remained the same so they kept seeing the same ad over and over. This is why its always important to test everything from new targets to new ad images. As you start to get fewer Facebook fans and your cost per fan creeps up to the $0.50 mark, that’s a good indicator to make adjustments. Every industry is different but paying more than $1 per fan is not a wise decision in most cases. So let’s see how we did this…
When you first launch a new Facebook campaign, it gives you several options to help reach your goals. The option we want is to “Get More Page Likes”. The other options are for advanced users and to promote specific posts on a page. Those all have their purposes but why complicate things. The next step is the creative aspect where you will make the most significant changes.
Your “Headline” is probably the second most important element of your ad behind the image itself. A lot of people choose to use their brand name as the headline but in our experiences we’ve seen more people click on ads that had a very strong message and call to action. After all, you’re showing ads to people that don’t know your brand yet. If you’re in the business of fitness training then something like “90 Day Fat Loss Guide” would work. This works for several reasons, first being that you set the expectation already with ’90 days’ and second is that the word ‘guide’ already alerts the person that they can gain something by clicking. To sum it up, your Headline should dictate what a user will get/see once they click through.
The body of “Text” is nothing more than a continuation of the Headline. You’re limited with space so you’ll have to make your message short and to the point. But keep in mind to use common marketing tactics such as sense of urgency or exclusivity. In our case, we simply stated that by click our ad, you’ll be greeted with motivation and business advice for entrepreneurs. Remember to always capitalize the first letter of every word.
The “Landing View” is where your user lands after clicking your ad. By default we left it to the normal Timeline which should be fine. If you are constantly updating your page and engaging with your audience then you’ll have nothing to worry about since that is what a user sees. No one wants to like a dull page! However, if your goal isn’t fans but rather something else like sales or email sign ups, then sending users to a custom landing page for those purposes will result in higher conversions.
Lastly, your image is the single most important element in your ad. You must utilize the allowed dimensions of 100 x 72 pixels. Anything less than that is a wasted effort. With only so much real estate allowed, you must try to utilize everything! You have to find a very hot photo that is aligned with your brand but that also makes sense. Notice how all those dating ads show specific nationalities of really young attractive women? It’s like that for a reason to hook you in. It is also very important to leverage the image to add text on top of it. This has worked well for us with a very bold statement of “ESCAPE THE RAT RACE” on top of a red Aventador. Both the car and the message kill two birds with one stone. Keep in mind not all ads are equal and this is why you have to test MANY variations to find a winner. If your ad has a click through rate higher than 0.25% then you’re doing good!
The next step is to choose your demographic. There’s a few ways of doing this with the work cut out for you already. If your business is similar to another business, you can use tools like Alexa, Quantcast, & Google Ad Planner, to see the demographic of users that browse a particular website. However, we know our audience for obvious reasons. For this particular campaign we wanted to target people that like exotic sports cars since we incorporate lifestyle heavily into everything we do.
We always target users within the United States. If you target other countries you might get fans that don’t speak English and spam your page which ultimately gives you no benefit.
Being that SE has always been by Gen-Y for Gen-Y we targeted ages from 15-30. Most of the people in this age are probably dreamers at this stage so we want to attract them in. You can require exact age match but it’s ok to loosen it a little bit.
What you target is the most important thing here. We don’t even bother with anything broad and only target “Precise Interests”. As you start typing in a word, you’ll see a lot of topics have a # hashtag prefix. This simply means that those people may be related to other similar things. We consider that a little too broad for us so we want to only use “Precise Interest”. The best way to look at this is a “Precise Interest” equates to a corresponding Facebook page the user already likes. If a user already likes the Ferrari Facebook page then they’re a prime target. Keep in mind not all Facebook Pages will come up as “Precise Targets” unfortunately but usually the big ones do.
The last few settings are pretty simple with the most important setting being “Connections”. You probably want to show your ad anyone that is NOT already connected to your page. Likewise, you can target people only connected to your page if you have a product or service you know they might buy.
Since our audience size is fairly small at 480,000, it’s ok to leave the remaining settings the way they are. There is not right or wrong audience size but you ideally want to have several hundred thousand. A million might be pushing it in most cases. Also keep in mind that you’ll need a proportionate budget to keep up with a larger audience.
The last few settings deals with the budget. Only you know how much you can afford so think of your ideal budget and then just divide that by 30 days to come up with your “Per Day Budget”. The last important setting is to have the “Optimization” setting be set to “Your bid will be optimized to get more likes on your Page”. This way you let Facebook handle all the bid and budget management. Just be sure to keep a close eye on everything to ensure you’re trending upwards and not downwards.
In the end, your result should be getting consistent Facebook fans for pennies on the dollar that not only become active on your page but also visit your website and maybe even make a purchase. This guide is not to follow or copy but to rather make you think outside the box a little bit. You’ll have to add your own unique twist to it as only you know your business better than anyone else. The key things to take away is that you’ll want to create a great ad with an exciting image and headline. To support that ad, make sure you have a laser targeted demographic. It’s better to have things a little tighter to be able to expand than be too broad and blow through your money.
Hope this helps!
