Don’t give anymore of your precious marketing dollars over to Facebook without a strategic plan. It pains me to hear when brands are stilling falling into the trap of “boosting” posts on Facebook without really having a plan or knowing what kind of outcome they want.
Please, stop throwing away your money.
Before I give 1 cent of my client’s hard earned money to Facebook, here are 5 things I always do.
#1: Set Up Conversion Tracking
Ensuring the conversion tracking pixel is set up correctly on your website is like learning how to step into your binding before you ski. You can’t think about riding a chair lift, learning how to pizza pie or learning how to turn, when you can’t even get into your ski binding. Conversion tracking implementation is the thing you need to do before you even think about all of the other things.
#2: Import Existing Data into Facebook
Segmented email lists and website traffic data will only strengthen your campaigns. It’s like giving Facebook the meat it needs to grow their muscles.
#3: Build Google Tracking URLs
It’s equally as important to feed data into Facebook as it is to feed data from Facebook into your Google Analytics (or whatever platform you use to track website traffic). This gives you a better perspective on things like bounce rate, page views and time on site, which will give you better data points to make sure you campaign is on track.
#4: Choose An Objective/Goal
I’m not talking about choosing your Facebook objective. I’m talking about choosing the goal you want to achieve for your efforts. Even if you goal is “conversions,” you might not want to start with the conversion goal on Facebook for a variety of reasons.
Some goals might include;
- Reach customers who have already purchased from us with a new offer.
- Launch a new product to a new audience
- Test a free-trail of product or service to acquire leads
#5: Choose the Target Audience
Before deciding what your budget or creative should be, first you should know who you want to target. Do you want to target people who have already shown interest in your produce or service (smaller budget), or do you want to target people new people (bigger budget). Once you know your audience it will be easier to figure out your budget and build the campaign creative that will speak to the audience you want to reach.
Don’t throw a bunch of different Facebook campaigns at the wall to see what sticks. Set up your campaigns properly, test them and then grow from there.
Have a good weekend!
