Your Facebook ad strategy isn’t working as well as you want right now because things have changed and they’re never going back. And the fact is, the strategies and tactics we’re seeing success with Facebook ads right now look a whole lot different than even a few months ago. The good news is that the solution to getting your ads back on track is simple. And I’ve got a Facebook ad formula that I’m going to share with you here in this video that you can use right away and that will immediately increase the traffic and clicks and conversions that you’re getting from your Facebook ads while at the same time lowering your cost per impression and cost per click, which will allow you to spend less but get more.
It sounds too good to be true, I know, but after going through my Facebook business manager account the other day, all while having an awkward conversation with my accountant about the terrifying direction my life was going as an online YouTube influencer and trying to explain why I spent $100 on life-size cardboard cut out of Adam Sandler, well, we came to the conclusion that over the past 10 years, I and my agency have spent somewhere around $70 million on Facebook ads for our clients.
Now, those early days are all a bit of a haze as I was running on caffeine and dreams, so it could be a little more or a little less, but the point’s the same. That is a whole boatload of money and most of the ads performed well, allowing my clients to build their businesses and buy homes and cars and boats and planes and live their dreams. Though I still drive a minivan because of dad’s life. The point is, you can’t spend $70 million and not learn lesson or two, or 70 million lessons along the way.
And one of the most valuable lessons of all is understanding that over time, things are going to change. The algorithm and placements, and targeting options, and make me feel old, but does anybody remember the abomination of an advertising platform that the Facebook power editor was back in 2013? Fun fact, with the Facebook power editor, we used to download our campaigns as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. We would make our edits there, and then we would reupload the spreadsheets back into the power editor. The whole process was slow and painful and made me seriously question all of the life choices that I had made that had brought me to that point.
But here’s the thing. Back then, the biggest variable to success and the overall performance of your campaign wasn’t the ad itself, but rather your ability to apply an almost Ph.D. level of understanding and mathematics and engineering to design and create and launch a campaign. But then something happened., around 2.93 billion things happened, which is how many monthly active users Facebook has today. And when those users came, they brought along their eyeballs, which, as any marketer knows, are the most valuable part of the human anatomy. Because eyeballs mean attention, and attention means money, and money means.
I don’t know what money means. Well, let’s just say that money acts as a commodity accepted by general consent as a medium of economic exchange that circulates anonymously from person to person and country to country, helping to facilitate trade and serving as the principal measure of wealth. Well, companies like Facebook realized they could make a whole lot more money if they made their advertising platform a whole lot easier to use. Or at the very least, made it so that using their advertising platform wasn’t a complete and total disaster and a nightmare that made owning an agency one of the most stressful jobs in the world.
So we’ve come a long way since then. Now, much of the advice around running Facebook ads falls largely into the camp of set it and forget it. Using things like automatic placements and wide open targeting and allowing the Facebook ad algorithm to do much of the heavy lifting for you. That said, of course, doing things like getting clear on your ideal customer Avatar, making sure you’ve done just a little bit of market research so you can narrow down your targeting a bit, and familiarizing yourself with some of the nuts and bolts of the ads manager, like knowing when to use CBO or campaign budget optimization versus ABO or ad set budget optimization, and knowing if certain placements are or are not going to work well for you so you can either turn them on or turn them off and avoid wasting a ton of money.
For example, a feed placement is pretty much always a good bet, but reels and stories and yes, even the infamous audience network can sometimes work too. This is another subject entirely, though, so I’ll make sure to link up another video at the end of this one that is going to walk you through all of that in more detail.
But for now, the main point that I want you to get here is that the ability to navigate the Facebook ads manager and to create a campaign and get it launched out into the world is no longer the primary variable of the success of your campaigns. And it isn’t even a barrier to entry as pretty much everybody can sign up for a Facebook ads account and get some ads running quickly. Now, this is good because it enables you to set up and launch a campaign faster than ever before. But it’s also one of those blessings and curses things.
This is because this new level of simplicity lures in unsuspecting advertisers, new digital marketers, and business owners who may not be familiar with the intricacies of advertising. And it tricks them into throwing together a quick ad and then entering their credit card number and hitting publish, only to later realize that all they’ve managed to do is donate to the Facebook fund and they never even got a lead back in return. So what’s the solution? Well, first you need to understand that the easier things are to set up and launch, the less important the mechanics of those things are going to continue to be.
In advertising, the process of building and structuring the campaign and making sure it ends up in the right places is called media buying. And for large multimillion-dollar campaigns, it’s an important part of making sure your ads stay profitable and that you’re able to scale them up. But there’s another part of the advertising game that’s more important now than ever before, and that’s the creative part, or as we in the ads game call it the ad copy, which is the words and the images and the video used in the ad itself.
We’re going to talk about how to script out the perfect ad in just a second, but if you want help finding the perfect image for your ad, then the best thing you can do is grab a free copy of my perfect Facebook ad image cheat sheet down in the description below, which is going to show you the top seven qualities of high converting Facebook ad images to help you get more clicks and more views and more leads. For now, though, I’ve got a four-part Facebook ads formula that I want to share with you that you can use with every Facebook ad you make from this day forward.
And it all starts with part one, the hook. Part one of any successful Facebook ad is always the hook. The hook is sometimes called the attention capture or the call-out phase, but whatever you want to call it, the objective is always the same. And that is to get someone’s attention. But here’s the thing. You don’t want just anyone’s attention. You only want your ideal target market’s attention. And the best way to do this is to call them out, ideally with some form of a question. And when you do it this way, well, two very interesting things start to happen.
First off, when your target market hears something interesting or relevant or specific to them, their brain naturally switches on and they tune in and pay attention automatically, whether they want to or not. Next, if you manage to make your hook, your call out, your attention capture, a question, well, their brain subconsciously has to answer that question. And again, they do it automatically without even thinking about it. For an easy example of this, let me ask you a question right now. Are you thirsty? Well, whether you are or not, the fact that I asked you a question made your brain automatically come up with an answer.
And the same thing works with your customers. So by asking a question in your ad, it automatically makes your ad more engaging and more interesting, and relevant. It’s not magic, it’s just science. So now that you’ve got their attention, part two is to introduce the problem that you’re going to be solving. Even though we’re only a few words into the ad, this is where so many people start to go so wrong.
The key here is to get to the problem as quickly as possible. In many cases, the hook and the problem can be the same thing. For example, if you sell food, well, your hook could be hungry, which is both a question, a call out, and a problem all wrapped in one delicious taco or whatever food you happen to be selling. The big thing, though, is that it’s here that you want to spend most of your time on their pain, their problem, and the current reality that your prospects are living in. What’s wrong with it? Why is it bad? And what’s it costing your customers to not have this problem solved? For bonus points, you can use one of my favorite copywriting frameworks of all time, PASS or PAS, which stands for Problem Agitate Solve.
We’ve already talked about identifying the problem. The Agitate is just where you beat them up, mentally a little bit. It doesn’t sound nice when you say it out loud, but the reality is no pain, no action. And then you have S for Solve or solution. So let’s talk about that next.
All right, so at this point of the ad, you’ve hooked though. You’ve introduced the problem and you put maybe just a little bit of salt in the wound or a lot of salt if you’re feeling extra aggressive. So it’s at this point, part three, that you want to introduce your product, your service, or your offer, whatever it is that you’re selling. Now, keep in mind, this product or service, or offer that you’re selling could be something as simple as a lead magnet, a free download, or something a little more intensive like getting them to buy now or to fill out an application form. But whatever it is, the point is always the same, and that is whatever you’re presenting should be the solution to the problem that you just dug up in the past point. After all, there’s no point in making somebody feel bad and then not offering them a solution.
