Top (free) Ways to Power UP Your Facebook Marketing
Updated: Sep 27, 2023
I’ve been advertising on Facebook for 6 years now - last year I managed over $2.4 million for one client alone and one thing I've learned; you don't need the best, most expensive tools to help you to manage large ad spend and multiple ad accounts.
And this is especially true for those business owners who have taken up the challenge of managing their advertising on their own.
You just need REALLY good tools and efficient systems in place to help keep your head above water day to day.
In other words -
You need to set your online workspace up in such a way that you can see which campaigns and accounts need your attention right away so that you can focus your time and energy there.
Being able to identify and put out fires before they burn through precious advertising dollars will be a huge advantage.
Noticing your CPA is on the rise, BEFORE it balloons out of control,
Observing that your conversion rate is falling BEFORE you notice the email about your site being down,
Being able to see at a glance which ads are performing well and quickly taking action to scale them.
All because you have systems and tools at work helping you to do several jobs at once.
Put simply - efficiency in managing your advertising and reporting is the low-hanging fruit of optimization and scaling Facebook Ads.
From the perspective of a media buyer, having to manage multiple campaigns across multiple clients, can easily become overwhelming.
Data is moving faster than a single Media Buyer ever can.
And so, having a process in place that allows you to do this with relative ease will allow you to maintain results for all clients while you scale marketing for your own business and take on more accounts at larger spends.
And as a small business owner, this will allow you to test more efficiently and scale your business.
If that's something that you're currently struggling with, these are the top strategies and tools that I would suggest to anyone advertising on Facebook or Instagram to make your life easier.
Here are the tactics everyone running ads on Facebook should be using everyday
Let's start with strategies & methods first.
First, understand that a well organized campaign is one that by definition is (or, has the potential to be) a successful campaign.
The Greek poet Archilochus is credited with saying,
"We do not rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training."
Use a Campaign Planning Template
Replace 'training' with 'preparation' and you have a quote applicable to all of business and life.
We cannot realistically expect to succeed if we have not planned and prepared for success.
In application, this is as easy as planning out your campaigns before you ever open up Facebook Ad Manager.
On a Google Doc (or some other collaborative software) write out the following;
(Or, you can grab our campaign planning bundle HERE)
Campaign
Campaign Name
Campaign Objective
Audience
Campaign Destination (For example, a lead campaign that goes to a lead form. And then specify which lead form.)
Audience Name (Avatar, if applicable)
Targeting (interests, demographics, and location for this audience)
Platforms & Placements
ADs
New or existing ad post: To use an existing post, use post-IDs
Tip! Use Post-ids to retain engagement for your ads! Test high performing ads with new audiences and objectives without losing engagement.
Creative: image or video used
Tip! For videos, take the time to add subtitles. This will help expand your reach to those in your audience who are hearing impaired and those who otherwise wouldn't be able to watch your video with the sound on.
Primary Text(s)
Headline(s)
Description(s)
Format
Carousel, video, photo, collection
Partnership
If yes, you'll need either (1) a partnership ad code from this partner, or (2) to be added to their business manager
Facebook Page and/or Instagram page
Make sure that the page you select has given the ad account access to run ads on their behalf.
If you have access to both the ad account and the Facebook/Instagram page used, you can easily grant access between the two through business manager settings
Destination: lead form, website link, instant experience, instant experience, event page, call (phone number),
Tip! For website links, don't forget to add url parameters to further increase the accuracy of each ads performance.
Set Clear Objectives
The first step in setting goals for improvement, is taking a moment to take stock in where you're at.
This is more than just knowing that you want more leads or more sales.
Before that, you'll need to take time to assess and calculate your business KPIs or key-performance indicators.
These are numbers like, how much you're willing to pay for a lead (goal CPL), how much you're willing to pay for a click (goal CPC), how many clicks before one eventually turns to a lead, how many leads before one eventually leads to a customer, how much on average it costs you to acquire one customer, how much one customer is worth to you over a lifetime, etc
Some of these numbers may be harder to calculate if you're just starting out in advertising your business as you probably won't have any data to use to calculate your KPIs.
One way to calculate these numbers is to work backwards.
Ask yourself - how much is one average sale worth to me, or what is the product I want to sell most? Do people typically buy several of your products at one time? How much of the revenue from this sale is profit?
Is there enough room here in your numbers to allow you to pay to acquire more customers?
Numbers like these can also reveal if you're under charging for your product or service.
Another, easy substitute for organically calculating these numbers is to take a look at your competitors.
Many times, industry advertising benchmarks are available online.
Another method for getting access to your competitor's numbers is to join industry communities - in person or online.
Once you're in a community with people in your industry, you can ask them honestly what results they're getting from their advertising and other business questions.
You might be surprised at the forthcoming and honest answers you'll get from simply asking.
Consistent naming conventions
Being able to identify campaigns and their destination, product, and objective at a glance will make your job of managing your ads much more simple.
If you're tracking on other platforms too, Google Analytics for example, consistent naming conventions will allow you to segment and filter data easily so that you can gleam how products and funnels are performing compared to each other.
Here's a simple naming structure for you to follow, one that I've used for several years now;
Campaign Naming
objective - offer - funnel or productname - budgettype - audiencetargeting
Example;
leadgen-auditoffer-askamediabuyer-cbo
(here l1, is short for level 1, indicating that the funnel contains a cold audience.)
Adset Naming
trafficlevel - type - audiencename - country - age - gender - optimization strategy
Example;
l2-ca-fb-eng-180d-us-18up-mf-auto-videos-conv
(here l1, is short for level 1, indicating that the funnel contains a cold audience.)
AD Naming
Change these as needed. To make it easier, you can use THIS spreadsheet to plan and name your campaigns.
Now, let's cover some tools and software you can use to virtually duplicate yourself and help automate your work
Filter View (Facebook Ad Manager tool)
This first one is stupid simple.
If you're a media buyer reading this, you've definitely used this tool before, but many small business owners handling their own marketing might not be aware of this simple and useful tool.
Within the backend of Facebook Ads Manager, you're able to quickly sort through campaigns, adsets, and/or ads to view performance across similar assets.
Start by simply
Facebook Rules & Ad Scheduling
One of my top favorite tools is to use Facebook Rules.
Facebook Rules are one of the tools built into the Ads Manager platform of Meta. Surprisingly, even though it was created by Facebook, it's super useful!
This is the perfect tool for people with large spend accounts - or anxious people hwo feel the need to check their campaigns 5x a day. Use Facebook rules to watch your account while you sleep.
Chatbot
If Robots are willing to do the work for you - let them!
Here's an example of a real estate chatbot.
Hard at work, greeting and qualifying a prospective client while their human sleeps.
Especially if you're growth focused, it's important to start implementing automation throughout as much of your business as possible.
Establishing some type of bot in your funnel early on will help prevent you from scrambling to setup automation once it's 100s of people coming in that need your attention.
You can easily create your first chatbot, like the one you see here, using drag and drop software like Chatfuel or Manychat.
In as quickly as 15minutes, you can connect this chat software to your page, setup your default welcome message, and even connect your bot to a Facebook ad or some other part of your funnel.
You can even place a widget for a chatbot on your website!
Create a Unified Marketing Dashboard
A comprehensive dashboard is perhaps the most important tool an organization can possess.
With an aggregated Data Dashboard (that's one that includes data from all marketing channels), everyone in the organization can see where performance in the company is at.
That much is obvious.
Furthermore, as a marketer, whether this is the only hat you wear or not, your job is not just to plan and execute on the marketing -
It's to evaluate and analyze performance, and then to interpret and communicate that data to your team.
Anyone who has been tasked with this can attest to how much time that can take and how surprisingly difficult it can be to communicate properly the data that each teammate needs.
Make both your life and the lives of everyone on your team easier and setup a visualized reporting dashboard.
Facebook has recently retired their Facebook Analytics tool, which in all honesty, was never that great of a user experience for the average user. As of now, there is no replacement existing or on the way for Facebook Analytics tool.
Note! There are tools for viewing page 'insights' but this does not extend to customizing data gleamed from advertising.
Within Ads Manager, you can view the performance of your campaigns via raw metrics and there is also the Facebook Reporting tool, but these don't offer a visualization component. Additionally, these tools are less for reporting (despite the name) and have a better use case for viewing and sharing data, not analyzing or interpreting that data.
For the lead marketer in a company, it can also let you know which campaigns are the most successful - you can share this data with creative and product teams to let them know to ramp things up - and which campaigns need your attention ASAP.
This tool becomes all the more useful for companies advertising on multiple platforms and those with larger teams and several decision makers.
The complexity of this can vary. We recommend that you hire a professional to help with this.
Conveniently, *cough cough* Datafyix is introducing a new offer for exactly this.
If you're interested in having a customized dashboard setup for your company, click the button below and let's talk.
Facebook Ad Library & Facebook Insights (bonus! Tiktok Library)
It’s amazing how many people don’t utilize the internal Facebook Ad Library.
If you've never had a chance, check it out. It can be an amazing tool for spying on what your competition is up to.
You can also take a look at what other advertisers, outside of your immediate competition, is spending money on.
We can draw inspiration from anywhere and looking into what people consider worthwhile to spend tens of thousands of dollars on can be telling.
Bonus! There is a Tiktok ad library also! Don't think that the Tiktok library can't be useful to you just because you're not advertising on that platform.
The short form video content that advertisers are pushing on the most popular social media platform can give you valuable insight popular on the most popular
Buffer (or similar scheduling content)
Buffer is a software in which you can front-load social media posts, schedule when you want it to go live, and let Buffer worry about the rest.
Technically, this is not a tool for advertising -
But, still, it's a fantastic tool for those who feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of keeping up with their business profiles.
Simply create your content in bulk (maybe using ChatGPT, more on that in the next bullet point) and let Buffer worry about remembering to post it on time and to the proper channels.
ChatGPT (!)
By now, most of the online world is probably using ChatGPT - but new use cases are being unveiled everyday.
Here's one for you - put ChatGPT to work to help you write your ad copy.
Here are some quick tips for using ChatGPT in your marketing
Get suggestions for copy and headlines for your ad. Tell ChatGPT what you're advertising, who the target market is, and any other helpful details you can think of and it will spit out suggestions for you on headlines that will catch their attention and copy that will convince them.
Tell ChatGPT your advertising problems and ask for suggestions - If, for example, you need help rephrasing your words, feel that your vocabulary is limited, are struggling to word something correctly or want your words to take on a different tone - ChatGPT can help.
Ask ChatGPT what topics people in your industry care about. You can then create content on those topics and create ads pointing to that content.
Need help creating that content? Chatgpt can help with that too! Ask CGPT what primary talking points you should focus on in your article. You can also ask for help researching those talking points so that you can go into more depth.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that you copy/paste text directly from ChatGPT directly, but it is a great place to get ideas and intro/outros which can be the trickiest part of writing.
Summary
This list is exhaustive, but by no means complete.
There are TONS of tools out there meant to help marketers like yourself to successfully expand the reach of the businesses who have entrusted them with their advertising dollars.
Of course, nothing beats simple implementation. So take these tips, strategies, and tools and get out there!
If you're not sure where to start, an audit from Datafyix can help point you in the right direction.
Our audit covers over 50+ data points.
You'll come away with a handy checklist, a list of top priority items (these should be completed first), and an expansive, strategic plan with actionable steps on what should be improved, why, and how.
Ready to see what Datafyix can do for your business?
You can start with a discovery call - just click the button below to schedule a call.