If you`re having some difficulties marketing your business on Facebook, I`ve got some good news.

You`re probably even getting some decent results but you know you can do better.

Well, my friend, then I think you`re in for a heck of a ride.

This post was written to help you master Facebook advertising and attract the kind of customers you`re looking for.

What I`m gonna share with you are the fundamentals. Everything you need to know to lay a solid foundation and conquer Facebook advertising.

You`ll probably feel a bit overwhelmed by the end. But I promise you that every minute you spend on this page will be worth tenfold to your business.

Get ready for some amazing insights. Together, we`re going to take your business to the next level with Facebook advertising.

Let`s dive in.

#1 – Know Your Prospect Better Than Your Best Friend

The biggest mistake entrepreneurs and marketers make is really not understanding their prospects well enough. They assume too many things about their audience.

Failing to understand their characteristics and behaviors will cause you problems, I promise you.

With so much information out there these days, there`s really no excuse for not understanding your target audience.

From blogs, Facebook groups, Amazon reviews to listening to recordings of your customer`s calls, data is everywhere.

Get Inside Your Prospect`s Mind

You just have to put in the work.

In order to succeed with Facebook advertising or any advertising for that matter, you have to know your customers better than you know your best friend.

This means knowing their pains, desires, their average day, how they make decisions, who`s involved in the decision-making process and also how they like to consume content.

I can`t emphasize this point enough, understanding your ideal customer is vital to your success as a marketer and entrepreneur.

Once you understand your prospects well enough, you`ll be able to start crafting a marketing message that will resonate with them.

#2 – Research Your Audience Properly

Now that you know who your ideal customer is, the next step is around finding more information about them. Here`s what typical marketers do.

They go out there, launch a bunch of campaigns with zero audience research and then wonder why they did produce anything.

You just can`t neglect to do your research and expect extraordinary results. The next question would be “where exactly do I find more information about my ideal customer?”

Where to Find Information About Your Customers

I`ve touched on this point briefly in the first tip but now I`m gonna show you exactly where to look for:

• Facebook groups related to your niche
• Questions people ask on Quora about the problems you solve
• Surveying your email list
• Listening to recordings of phone calls you or your team had with your prospects
• Look for reviews of books on Amazon that your audience might be interested in
• Talk to your best customers in person or on calls

As I said in the beginning, there are no excuses for not knowing your prospects better than you know your best friend.

This list will help you get valuable information about your audience.

And most importantly, it will make sure you`re not playing with fire when advertising on Facebook.

It can get risky if you don`t know what you`re doing, especially if you don`t know anything about your prospects.

#3 – Leverage The Tools Inside Facebook

Facebook gives you a wealth of information that sometimes most advertisers disregard.

Advertising on Facebook has become more about leveraging the power of their tools than anything else. What am I talking about here?

Ever heard about Audience Insights and Detailed Targeting? I`m sure you did!

Those are the tools you should be leveraging to complete your audience research once you have all the other information.

The detailed targeting option inside ads manager gives you suggestions about the interests you`re going to target.

On the other hand, Audience Insights gives you the ability to look for similar interests to the ones you want to use for your campaigns.

Page Likes Is Your Best Bet

If you already know that people are interested in real estate, you can use Facebook Audience Insights, and there you`ll find that those people also like “Zillow”, as an interest. If you want to grow your business on Facebook, you have to not play fair.

While your competition is relying on hope, doing the minimums, you`re using all the tools at your disposal to attract the customers you want.

These are two of the most powerful research tools you can use and Facebook gives them to you for free. Take advantage of them.

#4 – Brainstorm Your Hooks

What is this, fishing? Maybe. Fishing for prospects if you want to see it that way. What the hell is a hook, you might say? Let me explain.

A hook is nothing more than a message meant to attract your prospects to the offers you`re making.

In other words, a hook is the “glue” that ties your ad and the offer together.

Still confused? Let`s see an example.

Suppose you`re a mindset coach and you`re offering a webinar.

There you show people how to eliminate common money beliefs that prevent your prospects from creating the life they want.

Also, note that these people are unaware of the problem they have. Your hook could be “Is money really the root of all evil?”

Get The Right Hook On The Fish

This hook works great because it challenges a belief that your prospects have ingrained in them since childhood. By doing this, you`re creating a knowledge gap in your their mind.

The gap is “filled” with your offer, in this case, a webinar.

When your hook is super specific and creates a knowledge gap, chances are you have a pretty good one.

It`s important for you to brainstorm several hooks before even thinking about advertising. It is also equally important to test one hook in each ad.

This way you`ll know what hook resonates better with your audience.

#5 – Facebook Advertising Involves Big Picture Thinking

You probably know someone in your industry that operates based on quick-fix approaches. I`d say that they exist in every industry.

Napolean Hill was one of the first men to teach us about the power of our thoughts.

They are indeed powerful. Your thinking can also help you to create killer Facebook campaigns that attract dream customers to your business.

What I`m talking about here specifically is having a long term strategy for your advertising. I assume that you want to be in business for a long time.

If that is true you must look at your Facebook marketing efforts as a long term approach.

This means thinking about the campaigns you`re going to run, mapping out your funnels, and crafting different marketing messages to resonate with different types of prospects.

Strategy Beats Last Minute Preparation

The internet has given us the possibility of easily launching a marketing campaign within minutes. What we sometimes forget is that creating the campaign is just the final step.

Most of your work should be done prior to hitting “publish.”

So, your biggest advantage as a coach is thinking strategically. And taking the time to see in your mind and on paper how your campaigns are going to look like.

Remember this, if you don`t take for the setup, you`ll never experience events.

#6 – Test Like Crazy

Many marketers and entrepreneurs complain about Facebook ads not working. What they fail to realize is that they`re just not testing enough. Here`s the reality.

If three out of ten marketing campaigns work well, you`re in the hall of fame, I mean it. If you only launch four campaigns and none of them produces the results you`re looking for, you`ll likely assume that Facebook advertising doesn`t work.

Adjust Your Expectations

The expectations coming in need to be adjusted, otherwise, you`ll blame the platforms or the market. What you should be doing is assuming responsibility because you`re not testing enough things, period.

I know from experience, getting frustrated because only a few campaigns did well. Guess what? That`s how advertising works!

You miss most of the shots but some will hit the net.

Don`t be surprised to have only one campaign out of ten driving most of your revenue. This is very typical.

Also, don`t get frustrated if you`re not getting the results you want. Even world-class marketers miss most of the shots they take.

#7 – Find The Important Metrics For Your Business

Every business is unique and every industry has different metrics that are relevant. Your job is to find the metrics that are most important to your business.

The ones that make the most difference.

For example, as a service-based business, one of your primary metrics could be applications completed. Another one could be webinar registrations.

Once you know these metrics, your advertising becomes a lot more simplified and predictable.

Know Your Key Metrics

If you don`t have your crucial metrics clearly defined you`ll be wandering around with no clue as to what`s working or not. These metrics will be your guideline for making decisions.

Make sure to set benchmarks for each metric.

Let`s say that webinar registrations are really important to you.

The next step would be to identify your KPI`s. If you get a sign up for $2, you know you can still make a ton of money with those leads.

On the other end, if the cost for sign up goes beyond $10, it`s time to stop that campaign. These benchmarks will give a clear understanding of how your Facebook campaigns are performing.

The key here is to find the most relevant metrics to your business, not to someone else`s.

#8 – Don`t Overly Target… It`s Dumb

Facebook`s amazing targeting can work against you sometimes.

You might think you`re doing good by overly targeting your audience with interests, behaviors and anything you can think of.

When in reality what you`re doing is restricting your chances of reaching the right people.

Once your pixel starts to get a good amount of data, things become easier.

Facebook takes a lot at that information and goes to work to find the people that are most likely to see your ad as relevant and to take the action you want them to take.

You don`t need to get complicated. When you overly target, you`re not giving space for the algorithm to work.

Let Facebook do the heavy lifting for you.

#9 – Scale Your Facebook Ads The Right Way

There are still a lot of Facebook advertisers who think that scaling their campaigns is all about increasing budgets. This couldn’t be further away from the truth.

Ramping up your budget out of control is a sure-fire way to screw up your campaigns.

The right way to do it is to increase your budget by 50% every 3 to 5 days. It will give Facebook time to adjust to the new budget increase without offsetting your numbers.

What I just explained to you is called vertical scaling.

Other forms of scaling include horizontal, offer and creative scaling.

Horizontal scaling is about researching new audiences. Offer scaling involves playing with different types of offers to the same or different audiences.

While creative scaling means that you`re keeping your ads fresh to prevent your audience from seeing the same stuff over and over again.

Variety Is The Name Of The Game

If you`re looking to scale your business with Facebook advertising, here`s what you need to keep in mind. It`s impossible to do it with just one offer.

The name of the game when it comes to scaling your campaigns is variety.

Facebook wants to keep people on the platform and they don`t want you to show the same stuff to the same group of people over and over again.

#10 – Don`t Sell Too Fast

I never forgot something that a mentor of mine said… “people love to buy but they hate to be sold.”

The biggest problem with Facebook advertising these days is that most marketers are impatient. They want to get that sale as fast as possible. I get it, you want to see the return on investment.

The sooner the better, obviously.

But it`s also important to remind yourself that Facebook is a social platform. In order to attract your ideal customers, you have to take a step back.

Slow Down To Speed Up

Accordingly to the Online Marketing Institute, it takes on average between 7 and 13 touches for someone to become a sales qualified lead.

Sometimes, it might even take less than that.

For example, if your prospects only saw your ads once and you`re trying to sell a high ticket offer, that funnel better do a lot of convincing.

Imagine a different scenario…

Your prospects saw 3 value-driven videos from you, liked your Facebook page, and read 2 of your blog posts.

When you go out and throw them an offer, they`re more likely to respond to your ads.

The more value you put out, the better customers you`ll attract.

So, my recommendation to you is take a step back and take the time to build relationships before asking for something.

#11 – Understand Social Behaviors

I already gave you a sneak peek of how Facebook works as an advertising platform. Here`s the deal.

People don`t log in to Facebook to buy stuff.

They`re there to be entertained and to see what their friends are up to.

Much like in any other social medium, your ads should feel as native as possible.

If your ad looks too much like an ad, it can be a turn-off. Selfie videos work great as ads because they feel personal and native to the platforms.

Even though we`re seeing major changes in the way that people buy from the platforms, such as shopping on Instagram, people`s intent on the social web is not to buy stuff.

How Facebook Advertising Is Different

When you do a search on Google for something you want to buy, you have buyer intent. You´re looking to buy something.

On Facebook and other social mediums, the landscape is completely different.

The buyer’s journey is a lot longer because there are people you`re targeting that are not even aware of their problem.

Understanding this key piece of information will allow you to influence your audience, taking them through a natural progression.

Starting from the moment they first see your ad to the moment they sign up for your offers.

#12 – Implement Variety In Your Advertising

As we`ve discussed previously, showing the same ads to the same group of people is not gonna build you a business.

So many entrepreneurs think they`re gonna set up an ad and run it for ages without touching anything. This belief can get you in a lot of trouble. Why?

Well, because this isn`t 2008. The closest you can get to the “set it and forget system” is by leveraging video but you still have to do some work.

Variety is essential not only in your offers, targeting but also in your creative. You have to test different hooks, different images and offers.

Implementing variety will ensure that you get the most bang for your buck when advertising your business on Facebook.

#13 – Still Not Using Video?

A study by Nielsen concluded that the cumulative brand impact on ad recall increases 74% after just 15 seconds of a video ad and the purchase intent increases 72% after just 10 seconds of viewing.

It`s incredible how much impact only 10 seconds of video has on purchasing intent.

In a survey, Hubspot found that 45% of people watch an hour or more of video content on Facebook and YouTube a week.

The reason why so many brands shy away from video is that it takes work and they think the videos need to look professional.

It takes work, it does but that doesn`t mean you shouldn`t be doing it.

Your videos don`t need to be professionally edited. Grab your iPhone or any smartphone you have at hand and show up. That`s all it takes!

Using video is also a great way for your audience to get to know you better. They connect better with you.

Don`t shy away from video marketing because it can have a tremendous impact on the quality of customers you attract to your business.

#14 – Leverage Your Customer Data

You probably have your customers` data somewhere. Want to know something? That is a gold mine! 😃

Let me explain.

Facebook as an advertising platform lets you import files with data related to your email list or customers.

What`s so powerful about this tactic is that you can create custom audiences and lookalikes leveraging the original audience, that is your customers` data.

Now, here`s when it gets exciting…

You can upload a spreadsheet with information about you`re most valuable or active customers.

Then, you can create a similar audience to those people and show offers to them.

Can you see how powerful this is?

The reason why this is so powerful is that now you`re targeting potential buyers, not leads. It`s kind of a waste to not leverage the wealth of options that Facebook gives you.

Obviously, you need a fair amount of data for Facebook to even generate those lookalike audiences for you, more precisely, 100 people.

The more data you have the easier it will be for Facebook to populate those audiences.

#15 – Split Test With A Small Budget

By this point, you already know that testing is crucial to attracting your ideal customers. The reason why people get frustrated is that they just don`t test enough.

Luckily, Facebook now makes it so easy for you to test the effectiveness of your ads and your targeting. How?

With their split testing tool, precisely!

Let`s say you`re running a couple of campaigns that are producing a good return on investment and you want to see if you can improve them.

For example, your next step would be to test a couple of ads to another audience and see what performs best.

After finding the winner, you can then take that same ad and add it to the campaigns that were already working well. The great benefit of this tactic is that you`re testing in separate campaigns.

It`s also safe to test.

Split Test Have An End Date

As you probably know, whenever you choose this option, Facebook only lets you run those campaigns for a maximum of 14 days.

I only mentioned testing audience and ads but you can go beyond just that.

Make sure to test on a smaller budget than you would usually use for your main campaigns.

Depending on how much you`re willing to spend to split test, you can find a winner usually within 4 to 7 days, sometimes even sooner.

The key is to use this tool to find out what really works and what doesn`t.

#16 – Pay Attention To Ad Scent

Ever clicked on an ad that didn`t deliver on the promise on the landing page? That was because the advertiser didn`t make the transition between the ad and the landing page congruent.

What about ads that the image has nothing to do with the copy?

I`m sure you`ve seen plenty of those…

There`s a lot of them out there! Let´s face it… most ads suck.

When there`s a lack of congruency between copy, image, branding or offer, we say that the ad lost the scent. In other words, the advertisement is not consistent.

Knowing that people buy consistency, you can already tell how important this point really is when it comes to getting customers on Facebook.

Whenever you`re launching a new campaign make sure that everything is as congruent as possible.

Get The Ad Scent Right

It wouldn`t make sense to talk about eliminating common money beliefs and then have an image of someone walking a dog. Or talking about network marketing and having a picture of a cat!

Make sure that there`s consistency in the fonts you, the colors, your message, offer and images.

The last thing you want is to confuse your prospect with ads or offers that are not congruent. We both know this, when people get confused, what do they do?

Exactly, they don`t any action.

Ad scent is essential for great Facebook advertising.

#17 – Keep An Eye On Quality Metrics

In case you don`t know, Facebook rolled out three metrics that help you measure the quality of your ads. These are three new metrics that came to replace the relevance score.

What Facebook does is comparing your ads` quality with the ads of other advertisers that are targeting the same audience as you.

The new metrics are the following:

• Quality Ranking: this shows you how your audience is perceiving your ads.
• Engagement Rate Ranking: what`s the expected engagement when compared with other advertisers targeting the same audience
• Conversion Rate Ranking: what`s the expected conversion rate when compared with other advertisers targeting the same audience

Facebook classifies the metrics this way:

• Above Average
• Average
• Below Average (Bottom 35% of ads)
• Below Average (Bottom 20% of ads)
• Below Average (Bottom 10% of ads)

For example, if your ad`s conversion rate ranking is Below Average (Bottom 20% of ads), this means that 80% of the advertisers showing ads to the same audience you`re targeting are converting at a higher rate than you.

These Metrics Came To Make Your Life Easier

Keeping an eye on these key metrics you help you troubleshoot your campaigns in a much more simple way.

Let`s say you have a Quality Ranking of Average as well as the Engagement Ranking but your Conversion Ranking is Below Average.

This tells you that your ad isn`t doing a good job of converting people. It is engaging and it resonates with the audience but it`s not converting well.

What you could do in this case is improve your call to action or your landing page.

Once conversions go up you should see an improvement in your Conversion Rate Ranking metric.

#18 – Be Active On Your Facebook Page

I can safely say that this is one of the secrets that most coaches don`t know about Facebook advertising.

Facebook is a little bit different from all the other advertising platforms. They don`t like you to open an account and start spending crazy amounts of money from the get-go.

Also, your pixel most likely won`t have any data, so it`s going to be hard for you to get great results from your marketing efforts.

Not only Facebook collects data from your pixels and uses them to your advantage but they also look at your page`s activity.

This can have a significant impact on how much you pay for your advertising.

Facebook Is Watching You

What signal are you sending to Facebook when you`re active on the page? That you`re a real human being and most importantly, promoting a real business.

Their main job is to protect the end user. So what does it mean to be active?

Posting regularly with varied content, doing a Facebook Live here and there, engaging with people through messenger and also responding to comments.

All these little activities are registered by Facebook, sending a signal that you`re a real business.

Being active on your page can reduce the cost of your advertising, so make sure you`re there and that you operate like a real business.

#19 – Know Your Goals For The Campaign

I can`t tell you how many campaigns go down the toilet because the objective is wrong.

The reason why choosing the right objective for your campaigns is that Facebook will optimize those based on that same objective.

For example, if your goal is to offer a lead magnet with the goal of getting leads, your best bet should be Conversions.

However, you need to be getting at least 50 conversions a week from your ads in order to for your campaigns to be optimized.

Play With Different Optimization Goals

So, if you`re running ads on a tight budget, it will probably be impossible for you to get to those numbers.

What Facebook recommends is choosing a different optimization goal or a different objective that makes use of the previous step in the funnel.

For example, instead of choosing the conversions objective, you could go with Traffic. Or instead of optimizing your ad set for conversions, you would choose link clicks.

It`s important that you get clear on the exact goal you`re trying to achieve with your campaign. It can have a huge impact on your ability to attract customers on Facebook.

#20 – Stop Looking For Cheap Leads… Seriously!

There`s this common belief amongst marketers and business owners when it comes to advertising on Facebook.

It`s all about getting the most amount of leads for the cheapest price possible. I would say this is becoming an ingrained belief in the minds of our fellow entrepreneurs.

Let me just tell you… cheap leads don`t build businesses, buyers do.

And cheap leads oftentimes mean people who just want freebies or folks that are not that serious about the transformation you can provide.

Focus On Lead Quality

It`s really important for the growth of your business that you stop focusing on just getting the cheapest leads.

What I would recommend doing is putting your energy on attracting buyers. And buyers are usually more expensive to acquire, you probably already know that.

With this in mind, it`s also important to mention that cheap leads have a low level of commitment. There are no worst customers to attract than people who are not serious.

Focus on attracting the best quality leads possible, this will be a game changer, I promise you. Even if that means paying double or triple the amount for the same lead.

It will pay off in the long run.

You`ll have more committed customers and people that stay with you for a long time.

#21 – Use Conversational Marketing

You probably already have a good understanding of how your prospects behave on the social platforms.

Because Facebook is a social platform, the way you advertise your business there must also be different. So you have to adjust your messaging to the way people like to consume content.

We`ve talked about the importance of creating ads that feel native to the platform.

These tend to be the ones that perform the best. If you look closely at ads that feel native, you`ll quickly realize that they`re also presented in a conversational tone.

Boring Advertising Doesn`t Convert

Ads that are too formal don`t work very well on Facebook. In order for you to get great results with Facebook ads, you must get personal.

And getting personal means employing conversational marketing.

In other words, your copy should feel like a conversation between friends, between you and the prospect. Corporate slang or impersonal language is boring and will not convert.

People crave connections with real human beings and they want to feel like they`re talking to one.

Make sure your copy is friendly, warm, welcoming, positive. Use emojis, they give your ads a more personal feel.

#22 – Simplify Your Facebook Advertising

When working with clients, one of the things that I noticed the most the first time I look at their Facebook ads account is how confusing it is.

I see a bunch of different campaigns with dozens of adsets and hundreds of ads.

Oftentimes, the question that pops up in my mind is “how you manage all this?”

Not only is it hard to manage but you get to a point where you have no clue as to what`s working or not.

Here`s the reality…

Facebook works very hard behind the scenes to deliver a great experience not only to the end user but also to the advertiser.

They don`t want you to have a hard time promoting your business, so their recommendation is that you should simplify your marketing.

Trim The Fat

Instead of having dozens of campaigns, hundreds of adsets and thousands of ads, make an effort to “trim the fat” and have only a few campaigns running.

You could have three or four campaigns running, each one with a different objective. Inside those, you could have three to five adsets max. with two to five ads in them.

Even if you`re spending in the thousands of day, simplifying your advertising not only makes sense but it is mandatory to your success on Facebook.

#23 – Play With Emotions

We both know this, people buy with emotions and they justify the purchases they make with logic. Advertising that doesn`t play with emotions is not only boring but also ineffective.

Are you seeing now how important it is to know your ideal customer better than you know your best friend?

Tapping into their pains and deepest desires will ensure that you`re marketing is conversational as well as emotional.

Use Emotional Language

A great way to trigger emotions with your Facebook ads is to leverage stories. Human beings learn the best through stories.

Another powerful way to play with emotions is to write or say something in your ads that trigger a memory in your prospects` mind, something they`ve experienced in the past.

Most memories have emotions attached to them.

Be sure to make use of “right brain” or emotional words such as “amazing”, “tell”, “happy”, “better”, “worried”, “brave”, “tired”, “afraid”, “because” or “right now.”

These are all examples of words you can play with to make your ads pop and instantly grab your prospects` attention.

#24 – Make Logical Decisions

We`ve talked about emotions, now let`s talk about logic. Where does logic fit in your efforts to advertise your business on Facebook?

The answer is, it lies within you. That`s right! Let me share with you a quick story.

When started marketing online, I didn`t know anything advertising let alone how to run a business.

Every time I looked at my dashboard and I saw a cost per lead higher than I wanted or the number of leads lower than expected, I`d get frustrated and depressed.

No kidding!

I would run 5 campaigns but only one produced good results. Little did I know that this is how advertising works… most of your campaigns will fail.

Data Doesn`t Lie

Now, I share this with you to tell you that all the decisions you make about your campaigns should come from a place of logic, not emotion.

What exactly do I mean by this? Simple… data never lies, people do!

When you stop making decisions based on fear and you start making them based on data, your results will be totally different, I promise you.

Facebook Advertising Tips Recap

After the tips I gave in this post, there are no excuses for you not to go out there and crush it. You have the fundamentals of Facebook advertising laid out here.

Just as a reminder, let`s over the 24 tips I shared with you:

I know, there`s a lot to take in.

Be sure to bookmark this post so you can later go back and refer to this information. I`ve given you my best tips. Now, it`s up to you.

Let us know in the comments, what insights did you get from this article?