You are missing out on the full potential of Facebook, here's everything you need to win in 2021

Things have changed.

The pandemic has acted as a catalyst to increase the integration of digital technology into all aspects of our lives, including e-commerce, banking, entertainment, education, and telemedicine, 

Facebook has evolved so much just in the last year to facilitate the growth in digital adoption, it has now created a wealth of opportunities for both SMEs and Enterprise businesses alike. 

Some of these capabilities were already available in some parts of the world, recently rolled out to our region. Regardless of whether it's old or new, I plan to discuss all the must-know things for when you invest in the Facebook family of apps to create a profitable impact on your business.

One of the most common reasons why we see businesses fail on the platform is because they are not geared to grow or handle the scale on the platform. 

Some common problems we have seen due to not getting the basics right:

• Not being able to effectively manage users who handle business assets on Facebook (employees leaving, multiple parties working, including agencies). If you are giving access to each of these individuals via the page and sharing the Instagram password, you might face multiple problems. You might be clueless as to who actually has access to your assets and at what level.
• The page is owned by an employee or somebody else who you worked with and now you are unable to find which business manager owns the page or how to get the page ownership back.
• You are getting great results on a campaign, so you invest more, but your credit card keeps hitting the limit. Operational nightmare!
• You have no visibility on your purchases. Website purchases are not reflected from your e-commerce campaigns.
• You have been getting great results doing a few things in the past few years but currently, none of them are giving you the expected results. The costs have increased so much!
• You are facing too many ad rejections and policy violations, although you haven't changed much of what you have been doing for the past few years
• You manage multiple ad accounts or multiple pages are being managed by multiple people. When you want to get a holistic view of everything that’s going on, it looks like soup.

I can go on and on with this list, but I believe you guys have got the gist. Maybe you are familiar with a few of these already. Not to worry. Let’s look at how we can actually solve the above problems and get geared to take your Facebook game to the next level. ;)

Getting Geared For The Next Level!

Setting up the Business Manager 

 it’s simple and it will help you work effectively and efficiently, and will help you seamlessly control who is working on your Facebook and Instagram assets. Click here to for an easy step by step walkthrough with M :D

1. Visit https://business.facebook.com/create, and follow the prompt.
2. In Business Manager go to people and assets, and add the people you want. Assign permissions accordingly. 
3. Connecting assets: Connect your Facebook pages, connect your Instagram account, give access to your audiences, and make sure you connect all your data sources, including your pixel and the SDK.
4. Domain verification: use your website link with ease across the Facebook family of apps. 
5. Verify your Business Manager.

Building Audiences

One of the greatest values offered by Facebook ads is the precise targeting and the ability to target based on behaviour. Let’s reason how best we can use this capability.

 There are three primary audiences. 

1. Core Audiences: location, demographics, interests and behaviours.
2. Custom Audiences: Customer data, Facebook Engagement, Web/App Activity
3. Similar Audiences: will identify the common qualities of the people in Custom Audiences and will build a similar audience based on demographic information or interests. 

You can use all these audiences for your advertising. For example, you can create an audience category like ‘people who have added to cart but did not buy’. You can show an ad personalised to that audience with messaging that motivates them to complete the purchase.

Let’s take a quick look at how we can create these audiences

Core Audience

Go to your ads manager and click on create. The rest is very simple. Follow the prompt.

The most important thing you need to keep in mind when setting up core audiences is to keep an eye on the audience size and the Estimated Daily results. We have noticed that it's best to have a minimum of 200,000 to make sure your ads will deliver the expected results. You can always work back from your KPIs to get a better understanding of how best to set this up. We will discuss this during measurement towards the end. Stay with me ;)

Custom Audience

As digital advertising has been reshaped by a number of significant, privacy-driven changes, it is important to provide transparency and value (personalised offers, early access etc) to build a direct relationship with the consumer.

I do plan to take a deep dive into first-party data privacy and performance to help you navigate restrictions that have come up due to the IOS 14 update and similar updates to privacy policies in a later blog. 

But for now, let’s look at how we can build Custom Audiences and use them to optimise performance.

What Is A Custom Audience, And Why Is It Important?

It is important to deliver to the customer the right message at the right time of the purchase funnel. For example, you need to focus on converting your cart dropouts (people who added to cart but didn’t buy). You now need to show ads to this audience with a push to complete the purchase. This can be a timed offer (‘Buy in the next 24 hrs and get 20% off’). 

In a nutshell, you need to nurture your customer from the point where they first interact with your brand to the point where they make a purchase or any other profitable outcome to the business directly.

Custom audiences allow you to retarget and nurture prospects all the way down the marketing funnel to the point of a customer. You can easily identify profitable audiences and allocate a higher budget to capitalise on the return at a lower cost per conversion.

Here’s a quick video that we did sometime back on nurturing with remarketing audiences, still applicable to this date.

There are multiple ways to create a Custom Audience on Facebook. This can even be based on engagement with your Facebook page or based on the percentage of a video’s views, etc. Let’s take a closer look.

Website Activity

Take your targeting to a whole new level, and start reaching the right people based on the behaviour on the website with the Facebook pixel.

Click here for an easy step-by-step guide, or click here for a quick walkthrough video to set up the pixel and get started.

Customer File

Create your Custom Audience in Ads Manager. Once in your account, go directly to Audiences, then go to Create Audience > Custom Audience > Customer list.

Click here to download a template for the customer list.

Facebook Page Activity:

Instagram Activity:

Video View Percentage:

App Activity

Lead Form

Offline Activity

Events

Instant Experience

Lookalike Audiences

This is the real gem! Let’s say you have 5,000 people from any of the Custom Audiences and you now want to reach a new set of 50,000 people who are similar demography, behaviour and interest-wise. You can do this with a lookalike audience.

One common mistake that we see when attempting to target a lookalike audience is that it is often forgotten that this is an entirely new audience and needs to be exposed to the entire journey. For example, don’t target a lookalike audience for the conversion objective right away. Nurture them from the top of the funnel with remarketing.

Use Cases Precision Targeting

Honda India has experienced amazing business impacts. Follow the link below for the full case study. 

Honda India - Custom Audience Sucess Story

• 4X return on ads spend
• 18% lower cost per sale than other digital platforms
• 45% lower cost per lead than other digital platforms
• 2X increase in sales from Facebook

Facebook Shops/Instagram Shops

Show your products easily, and create product sets for ads.

Facebook Catalog

Facebook catalog is a centralised place for holding information about all the items you want to advertise or sell on Facebook and Instagram. You can connect your catalog to different types of ads and sales channels to promote your items, including dynamic ads, Facebook Shops, and more.

Having a catalog enables you to target based on behaviour and remarket similar products to upsell or cross-sell with ease. 

If you are looking to improve basket value, this is one of the best capabilities to get started. We will cover this in depth soon.

Here’s a quick product video walkthrough to integrate with e-commerce

There are multiple ways to advertise a catalog. Let’s take a closer look.

Dynamic Ads: Personalised Based On Behaviour

Dynamic ads automatically show relevant items from your catalog to people who've shown an interest in them online. Dynamic ads match items from your catalog with events from a Facebook pixel or SDK, a piece of code installed on your website or app. Learn how to create a dynamic ad.

Collection Ads: Immersive Product Experience

 Collection is an ad format that shows four items from your catalog under a hero image or video. People can tap on items to learn more or browse similar items. Learn how to create a Collection Ad.

Carousel Ads: Tell A Story, Showcase Details

Carousel is an ad format that shows multiple images or videos people can scroll through, each with its own link. You can choose to fill the carousel cards dynamically with items from your catalog. Learn how to create a Carousel Ad.

Ads With Product Tags: Showcase Pricing For A Look Or Multiple Products

You can create ads with product tags to promote specific items in your catalog. People can click on product tags in your ads to go directly to a product details page where they can learn more about an item or buy it. Learn how to create an ad with product tags.

Collaborative Ads: FMCG Brands Can Easily Partner With e-Commerce Brands To Sell 

If your brand sells items through a participating merchant, Collaborative Ads allow you to run direct sales campaigns. Your merchant partner shares a segment of their catalog with your business, which you can use to run dynamic ads.

Facebook Live For e-Commerc

Although this is not yet available in Sri Lanka, it will soon be. The best way to get access is to have your catalog set up and your Facebook shops set up.

Live videos show very high engagement. It also is a place to showcase your product in a creative way to directly engage with your audience. 

Here’s a quick article on how to get started if you are in an available region.

Messaging For Conversions

There are multiple reasons as to why messaging will be the future of e-commerce. 

1. Deliver a great brand experience that is personalised and responsive.
2. Acquire prospects and nurture to become customer 
3. Drive awareness and increase retention.
4. Availability of primary data for marketing purposes.

Messaging-based campaigns are also a good tool to understand customer expectations and gather insights that can delight your customer.

Click here to learn more about how you can get started

Measurement And Understanding Impact

The most important, and my personal favourite <3

The true impact of measuring is the ability to optimise for profitable business outcomes. We first have to understand business objectives to understand how best to use these available capabilities on the platform. 

No Measurement = No Growth

Common Misconceptions

Facebook Likes/Engagement = More Business Outcomes?

Not true. Research has shown there is no correlation, which makes sense. You see a lot of engagement on things that are not brand-related. 

More Clicks = More Business Outcomes?

If you look closely at the above graphs, you will notice how there is no correlation between click-through rate and brand awareness or purchase intent.

If we know this very clearly, how do we now understand the metrics we should focus on that can actually be a reflection of business growth?

Understand your business objectives:

Measure the right metrics:

Measuring Branding Impact Of Facebook Advertising

The biggest mystery of our time! Ad men have popularised the idea of great advertising to introduce new products and services. It certainly does work, but how effective is it?

Math Men have finally solved the problem. Digital Analytics allows us to track and measure multiple touchpoints to understand impact. There are three main areas of impact that you can look at to analyse results.

Most businesses find it difficult to measure, not because of the lack of capabilities but because they like a measurement plan.

Here’s a quick setup guide to get you started.

1. Build a measurement framework - Click here to use template
2. Set up your Pixel - Enable event tracking
3. Build easy-to-understand reports and dashboards

A common mistake made by businesses is spending too much time, money and effort on vanity metrics that really do not have a direct business impact. For example, page likes.

One of the best ways to understand impact is to run an experiment. Facebook has a built-in capability to measure the following lifts.

1. Brand Lift - Brand Lift Study
2. Conversion Lift - Conversion Lift Study

The greatest capability of Facebook is often forgotten and ignored by many advertisers.

The ability to test. I do plan to do a detailed article on testing on the platform, however here’s a quick overview of its capabilities and how to get started.

You can easily test any hypothesis by using the A/B testing capabilities on Facebook.

Click here to learn more about testing on the platform.

Well, that’s mostly it. The links I’ve provided should help you get started.

The best way to get started is to do a quick analysis of what you have tried and what you haven’t, and make a step-by-step testing plan to understand what works for you and scale accordingly.

Good luck!