4 Ways Facebook Remarketing Will Improve Your ROI

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a tactic that lets you advertise to people who have visited your website and shown interest in your product or service. The way it works is relatively straightforward: Visitors come to your website, you segment your website visitors and create custom ads and then show those ads to those website visitors via Facebook.

Learn how using Facebook remarketing will improve your ROI.

Generally, remarketing on Facebook helps boost conversions and lowers the overall cost per customer acquisition.

However, the biggest advantage of remarketing is that you’re only showing your ad to people who are genuinely interested in your product. You can remarket to people who have visited your website, but haven’t purchased yet; customers who have completed a sale; and people who may not know about your product, but are likely to be interested in it.

Brands use remarketing to target website visitors on Facebook.

For remarketing to work, you have to do your best to determine which users visited your website organically or via paid search traffic, and then find them on Facebook or Twitter. Don’t worry—it’s easier than you think!

Read on to find out more about the advantages of Facebook remarketing and how it can help your business.

#1: Lower Cost per Click

Remarketing on Facebook usually has a lower cost per click when compared to remarketing on search engines. The reason for the lower cost is that Facebook traffic is supposed to be less targeted than search engine traffic.

On search engines, users are looking for a given product or service, and therefore they are asking for your service (pull marketing). On social media, you are exposing users to an ad while they are doing something else, and therefore they might not be as likely to convert (push marketing).

The result is that Facebook ads have a lower price point than search engine ads, because technically, Facebook users aren’t looking for your product or service right now.

Create a custom audience with a combination of attributes.

But as you probably know, targeting via Facebook can be as granular as you like. Use that to your advantage. A hyper-targeted audience guarantees cheaper traffic from the audience you’re after—in this case, users who have visited your website, but have not converted yet.

The way to convert the audience you’re remarketing to is to have consistent, quality marketing. Customize your message in a way that includes relevant and additional information to what customers already know about your product from visiting your site.

Not only does targeted Facebook remarketing give you more bang for your buck, but you can also expect to see a higher click-through rate than other general Facebook campaigns, lower cost per acquisition than first-time visitor conversion cost and higher engagement.

#2: Drive Higher Conversions

Converting first-time visitors into buyers takes time. If your industry is competitive, people are more likely to browse multiple sites before completing a purchase.

In most cases, people visit your site, and then click away so they can compare your prices with someone else’s. When they’ve gone, some visitors may forget your name and you end up losing a sale because they can’t find their way back to your site. Or maybe they missed that one selling point that could have made the difference.

Create a custom audience to target website visitors who didn’t convert.

Remarketing to your website visitors who didn’t convert works to remedy those situations. When those visitors see your ad on another site (e.g., Facebook), you become more recognizable and that boosts your chances of completing the purchase cycle.

#3: Capitalize on Social ProofYou can exclude users who have completed a sale by simply creating a custom remarketing segment for people who have visited your thank-you page, and then preventing them from seeing your campaign.

You don’t have to limit your remarketing to potential customers. Showing ads to a wider audience—like those who have already bought from you—allows current customers to interact with potential ones. Happy customers often share positive comments and engage with your content.

When current customers comment on and share your ad, it’s more appealing to new customers.

When a potential customer sees those comments via remarketing, he’s likely to have a more positive impression of your brand and that can maximize your chances of conversion.

That connection also increases brand loyalty—and loyal customers are worth more than new customers, because they’ll continue to buy from you at no additional (or at least minimal) cost per acquisition.

Speaking of loyalty, when you extend your audience to include current customers, upselling is much easier, more social and more engaging. When customers see your familiar company on Facebook and Twitter, the chances you’llgenerate engagement and additional conversions are much higher.

#4: Expand Market Reach

I’ve talked about remarketing to potential and existing customers, but you can also broaden your remarketing audience to those who share characteristics with those groups.

You can do that by using an offsite pixel to create a custom audience in your Facebook Ads Manager that includes people who have visited a particular page on your website. As discussed, those lists can include potential and existing customers.

Create a lookalike audience to broaden your reach.

You can leverage those lists to create a lookalike audience. The advantage of using lookalike audiences is that you’ll reach relevant potential customers you were missing out on, and who are also likely to be interested in your product or service and ultimately convert.

Conclusion

Leveraging the Facebook data and tools available to you, you can remarket precisely to the audience you need to reach—potential customers, existing customers and even people who have never heard of you. And since there is no minimum investment, it fits easily within all budgets.

via

How to Use Targeted Facebook Ads to Promote an Event

How Facebook Ads Drive People Down a Marketing Funnel

Marketing funnels are useful because they show how people go from hearing about your event to registering for your event. Your funnel is essentially a framework that connects content marketing, social media engagement, email marketing and ads into a functional strategy.

Below is an example of a horizontal funnel (using Facebook) that follows Jane as she goes from awareness of the event, to registering for the event, to telling her friends about the event.

Each stage of your Facebook marketing funnel serves a different promotional purpose.

Now let’s dig deeper into how Facebook ads support each stage of the funnel.

#1: Capture Awareness

The first phase of any campaign is awareness. Maybe someone finds out about your event because a friend was talking about it, or maybe that person subscribes to your email or reads your blog.

In the funnel example above, Jane signs a pledge to support, which is a mini-campaign designed to nurture interest for an upcoming event. Doing a mini-campaign like this isn’t always necessary, but it can be effective, particularly for paid events.

At this stage of the game, I suggest you use any of these Facebook ad options:boosted posts, event ads, post engagement ads or lookalike audiences.

Boosting a post offers a number of ways to target your Facebook ad.

I frequently recommend boosted posts, especially if you have limited staff, training or resources.

When you decide to boost a Facebook post, only boost your best stuff. That way you increase the likelihood that people who see the post will engage with it. To find the posts worth boosting, look at your Insights to find your top event-related posts based on engagement rate and how relevant it is to your current marketing goals.

There may be cases when your best-performing updates aren’t directly related to your promotion. If that’s the case, simply edit the status update, include a call to action (CTA) and link to your campaign landing page. Just make sure your edits feel natural, not forced.

I won’t go into the details about event ads, but I will say that promoting events with ads can be super-powerful, especially if you target the friends of people who have registered!

Page post engagement ads are another option. These are ads you create using a page update and the Advanced Facebook Advertising Tool. This tool gives you many more targeting options than boosted posts. (However, Facebook now lets you use the Advanced Ad Tool when boosting a post.)

Use Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool for excellent targeting options.

Or you can create and use a lookalike audience. A lookalike audience is a custom audience that shares the same likes and interests as your customers, email subscribers, volunteers or even people who attended last year’s event.

Creating a Facebook lookalike audience is as simple as uploading an email list. Who should be on this list? Why would they be interested in hearing about your event? The easy answer to both is anyone who registered for a previous event.

Once you create a lookalike audience with Power Editor, you can use it to target your boosted post by following these steps:

1. Find the post you want to promote and click Boost.

2. Click the Use Advanced Options link in the pop-up window. You’ll be redirected to Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool.

3. Scroll down under Audiences and type the name of your lookalike audience into the Custom Audience field.

4. Select the lookalike audience from the list of suggestions.

5. Select any other targeting options you want to include. You may not need to bother with this if your lookalike audience is based on a very specific email list (for example, previous event registrants).

#2: Nurture Interest

In our example with Jane, we’re using triggered email marketing campaigns. Triggered campaigns or autoresponders are email messages that are automatically sent in response to something the subscriber does.

When Jane signs the pledge, she is added to a specific email list. As soon as she’s added to that list (the trigger), a series of two to three email messages are sent to her, encouraging her to register for the event.

There are a few Facebook ad tactics you can use to support these email messages, but one stands out front and center: email custom audiences.

Create a custom audience to target people from your email list.

The constant challenge of email marketing is getting people to open your emails and click through your campaign links. We can send Jane triggered emails intended to nurture her interest in the event, but we can’t make her open or click. This is where Facebook email custom audiences come into play.

An email custom audience allows you to reach people on a specific email list with Facebook ads. In our example let’s say that Jane opens one of the triggered emails, but fails to click on links to learn more about the event—maybe she gets distracted or gets pulled away to a work meeting.

After her long and stressful meeting, Jane opens Facebook during a coffee break. She sees boosted posts (or event ads) reflecting the same CTAs she read in the triggered email. She may click through the post and register for the event, or take the post as a reminder to register later that night when she has more time for email.

This tactic essentially creates a one-two punch—combining email marketing and Facebook marketing. In our example we’re using an email custom audience with the list of people like Jane who’ve signed the pledge.

You can create a Facebook email custom audience by following these steps:

1. Export the email list or segment from your current donor database, EMS or CRM and save it to your hard drive. You only need a single column (CSV or TXT) of emails. No other data is required (you can even remove the header row).

2. Select the Facebook page post you want specific email subscribers to see and click Boost.

3. In the pop-up, click Advanced Options. You will be redirected to Facebook’s Advanced Advertising Tool.

4. Scroll down to the Audience section and click Create Custom Audiences.

5. In the pop-up, click Data File Custom Audience.

6. Give your list a name and a short description, select I Agree to the Facebook Custom Audiences Terms and click Create Audience.

Fill in some basic information so you can use your new custom audience for later campaigns.

7. Complete your ad by selecting your email custom audience, your ad run dates and budget.

A quick note: When your list is uploaded, you can target Facebook users associated with that list. When you select the list in the Custom Audience field, you may notice that the audience number is smaller than the list you uploaded. That’s because Facebook only uses emails that are associated with a Facebook profile.

#3: Convert Prospects

If you’ve conducted any type of campaign that includes a landing page asking people to take a specific action, you know all too well that most people won’t do what you want them to do—they may lose interest, get confused, get distracted or even get back to work. Whatever the reason, they fail to convert.

But they did visit your landing page!

You can use that to your advantage by using Facebook website retargeting. The diagram below explains how retargeting works.

When you see Facebook ads for a site you’ve recently visited, you’re being remarketed to.

Facebook website retargeting allows you to target ads at people who have visited a specific page on your website. In our example it’s the event registration page.

To retarget registration page visitors, follow the instructions above for creating a custom audience, but this time when you click Create a Custom Audience, choose Custom Audience from Website. Jon Loomer’s article will help you complete the process from there.

Pay careful attention to the number of days you keep people in this custom audience. You don’t want to keep people too long because the recency effect wears off. For example, if Jane visited the event registration page 30 days ago, chances are she’s way past the point of losing interest.

Refresh your retargeted audience frequently so you’re not marketing to people who have lost interest.

Remember that the most important part of converting registrants is your landing page. If the landing page isn’t effective, retargeting visitors with Facebook ads won’t work that well.

#4: Increase Word of Mouth Shares

To encourage attendees to tell their friends about the event, you can reuse some of the tactics you’ve already implemented. For instance, you can create a new email custom audience based on the list you create from the event registration page, and then ask those people to share your event information.

I also encourage you to create another website custom audience—this time from people who have reached the thank-you page of your website after registering for your event. Next, create an unpublished (or dark) post encouraging registrants to invite their friends to the event and retarget the post to your new custom audience (your registrants).

Create a dark or unpublished post ad in Power Editor.

You definitely want to use event ads at this point, simply because of their strong social proof. Facebook users who are served event ads see which of their friends have RSVP’d to your event.

via

Twitter Photo Tagging

Twitter Rolls Out Photo Tagging on Mobile: “You can tag up to 10 people in a photo and still have all 140 characters at your disposal, making it easier to connect with your friends.”

“Tagging people in a picture makes conversations around photos fun and easy.”

LinkedIn to Remove Products & Services Tab From All Company Pages:  ”You have two alternatives for sharing products and services content that many companies are already using and benefitting from: your company’s updates and showcase pages.”

On April 14, LinkedIn will be “removing the Products & Services tab from all company pages. In the meantime, you can edit your Products & Services content, but you won’t be able to add new items.”

Twitter Allows Users to Share Four Photos in a Single Tweet: “You can also share a series of photos that automatically create a collage.”

“Whether you’re on iPhone, Android or twitter.com, you can view tweets with multiple photos.”

Facebook Expands Lookalike Audience Capabilities: Advertisers can now “create lookalikes based on people who visit their websites, use their mobile apps or are connected to their Facebook pages.”

“The new features for lookalike audiences are available to all advertisers worldwide in Power Editor.”

Tumblr Introduces Two-Factor Authentication: “One key is your password, the other key is your cellular phone—and you need both to access your Tumblr dashboard.”

“Two-factor authentication is available as an option in your Settings page as of right now.”

Here’s more interesting news to follow:

Facebook Shares More Detail on Update to Pages: After receiving “lots of questions from people wondering how these changes—like the updated timeline design, easier access to admin tools and the introduction of Pages to Watch—will impact them,” Facebook answers the questions heard most frequently.

“Pages that have activated messages can view them in two locations: the Activity tab at the top of the page above the cover photo; or in the This Week box that runs along the right side of the page.”

Here’s a cool social media tool worth checking out:

UpTo: “UpTo gives you a more complete view of everything coming up that matters to you—without the clutter.”

via