How to Make Your Facebook Ads More Enticing Here are seven things that draw people in.
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In their book Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, online marketing and Facebook ad experts Perry Marshall, Keith Krance and Thomas Meloche explain the game-changing tactics of paid Facebook Ads and how you can gain more on your investment—in clicks, customers and profits. In this edited excerpt, the authors reveal seven offers you can make to prospects that will entice them into your sales funnel.
Success with Facebook advertising has three pillars:
1. The offer
2. Audience targeting
3. Ad copy or creative
All of those pillars provide vital support to your campaign. They're all essential and together they'll determine your success on Facebook. But one pillar is much more crucial to your success than the other two: your offer.
Before you can do anything else, you must get the offer right. You have to give your audience a hook that will cause them to click through or opt-in or want to learn more. Failure to deliver serious value in exchange for a sales lead is one of the biggest causes of failure. You can't give people boring stuff and expect them to respond.
After much experimentation and close tracking of results, we now have a list of different kinds of offers that we know work well on Facebook. They're pretty straightforward, and you've probably seen these offers plenty of times before. You might have even used them before. You shouldn't have any problem promoting them to an audience with Facebook ads.
1. Checklists, cheat sheets, guides and reports. You'll certainly have seen these before: simple information products that offer readers quick nuggets of valuable information. The copy itself might take the form of a picture of the product and some hard-hitting copy, often incorporating a number so leads know they'll be able to absorb that knowledge very quickly. Offer people quick bits of valuable information in the form of checklists, cheat sheets, guides, or reports and they'll be persuaded to click.
2. Tool kits and resource lists. Tool kits and resource lists are another form of information product but one that offers the means to achieve a goal rather than the knowledge to achieve a goal. The difference isn't huge. It lies mostly in the content—a list of essential data sources or software products, for example—and in the wording of the copy. The product itself might still be a report, but the copy might mention "tools" or "resources." ("Tools" is better.)
Clay Collins of LeadPages once published a post about his highest-converting offer. It offered his audience "Five Free Tools" and converted like gangbusters. But the offer doesn't have to contain a number of different items. The Motley Fool did very well with an offer to tell audiences about "the one stock they need to own." To get that one resource, all audiences needed to do was enter an email address to watch a video. Very simple and very effective. You can find plenty of templates online that will let you churn out offers like these very quickly.
3. Video series. Videos make for good offers because not everyone wants to read. People often just want to sit back and watch, and they'll pay for that ease with their email address.
4. Webinars. Facebook ads are awesome for promoting webinars, though these work even better when someone has already seen you. Once someone has already received value from you, they'll be more likely to pencil in a date in their calendar to get more value. That value could take the form of a checklist or even just a video on your news feed or blog.
5. One tip. A single tip can make for powerful offers on Facebook, and it can even be used to bring leads into a funnel that eventually ends in high-ticket items. For example, we had a client who had a service offering that cost over $5,000 and centered around helping couples deepen their relationship. But you can't just sell a $5,000 service with Facebook ads—that's way too expensive for a first impression. We needed a process that created trust and familiarity before hitting them with the full product offering.
The Facebook ad and landing page offered just a single tip that drew a lot of curiosity: "The real secret of making your partner fall head over heels in love with you all over again!" This landing page was getting a 40 percent-plus conversion rate.
That's a big result that comes from the offer of a single piece of information. In fact, they got a lot more. The landing page offered an entire book about relationships that usually costs $30. The lead could get it for free plus $5 postage and packing. At that point, they were already in a funnel. They would then be taken through the next step in the funnel, which would include direct mail, a phone call, etc., to move the buyer prospect closer to that $5,000 service.
6. Free book offer. If you've got the content to give away, it's a hugely valuable strategy. You can try both of these methods to see which works best: Either make the offer for the book, or offer the most outstanding and valuable piece of information within the book.
You'll find that the most effective strategy is the one that offers the most value to leads, but both will work.
7. Physical products. All six of the ideas above are for digital products -- they're instant, easy to order and simple to deliver. But you can also play on people's impulses and offer physical products.
The choice of product is critical. It has to be something that people would pick up without thinking too much. If you can imagine it in the rack next to the cash desk at Home Depot or Staples, you're on the right track. Again, the idea is just to get people to click, leave their details, and start moving through the funnel.
