Ecommerce Influence Podcast 230: How To Get Started With Facebook Advertising
by Austin Brawner and Andrew Foxwell
One Of The Questions We’ve Received From Several Listeners Recently Is, “Can You Guys Talk About How To Get Started With Facebook Advertising?”
We’ve done quite a few episodes where we talk about scaling up your Facebook ads, but we’ve never started at the very beginning.
Today we’re doing just that.
If you’ve never advertised on Facebook before, or you’re just starting out, this episode is for you.
We’ll talk through how to set up Facebook Business Manager, how to start building audiences for different parts of the sales funnel, how to approach your initial budget, and what success looks like in your first few months of advertising.
Enjoy!
Episode Highlights
6:35 If you’re just getting started with Facebook advertising, here are the first steps.
8:01 Dynamic Product ads: what are they and why you need them.
8:50 Creating customer avatars to inform your interest-based targeting.
10:51 The main hurdles you may come across when setting up Facebook Business Manager.
13:00 How to check whether you’ve set up Business Manager correctly.
14:34 Where people often get stuck with creative and the components of great content.
16:51 The three phases of the sales funnel and how to start building audiences for each phase right out of the gate.
20:13 How to approach the first three months of advertising: crafting your brand message, how much to spend, and what success looks like.
23:23 What is your Cost Per Acquisition goal, and how do you determine it?
26:38 How to understand your initial Facebook advertising metrics.
28:16 Where to go next after you’re getting comfortable with your advertising.
29:35 How to decide which objective to pick for different parts of the funnel.
31:31 Two objectives you shouldn’t be using.
34:07 The key component you have to understand when you get started with Facebook advertising and what success often looks like for the first several months.
Transcript
Austin Brawner: We actually, we've got a lot of feedback. I sent out an email with a kind of request. It was like what would you like us to talk about? What are things that are helpful that we should dive into? And one of the responses we got, which was great was, "Could you talk a little bit about starting advertising and starting email marketing?" Because a lot of the episodes that we have are about scaling and that's because mostly we talked about, working with established eCommerce business owners.
But one flip side of that is that you may have an established brand on Amazon and are trying to transition and you need to figure out ... or you're trying to start a new channel. And we want to dive in today and talk a little bit about starting new channels, starting Facebook advertising, how we would approach it, starting email marketing, how we also would approach that.
Andrew Foxwell: Yeah. And this is feedback that we've both heard. So this was kind of a nail in the coffin. The one we just heard this morning, that is, "there's a lot on scaling, as you said, there's a lot on growth, but for a lot of people, how do I just get started? What are the things that I need to get set up?"
And really Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising and email, you know, they're really your key players. If you're a football team, email is your linebacker, Facebook's your wide receiver and obviously this is, we're both American, so this is an American football analogy. But one's the striker, one's the defense, midfielder, I don't know, but they're key components.
Austin Brawner: I would say. Email is your running back. You're just tried and true. You're moving three yards in a cloud of dust. It's going to drive profit in the business.
And so this episode today, we want to talk about both of them because they pair really, really well together. And often I don't even recommend people dive into advertising until they have some sort of a backend part of their business they can be utilizing and capturing the effects. They're like second-order effects of advertising, which is you capture more emails and you can follow up and drive repeat sales. So why don't we start, we're going to start with Facebook.
Andrew's going to dive into how would you approach getting started with Facebook advertising for somebody who has not done it before but has a business and they have a product that they're selling. So they're not starting from scratch with a product just from scratch with Facebook advertising.
Andrew Foxwell: Definitely. So there's a lot that you could go into here, but there are some really fundamental components that you have to have in place first to get started.
One is you have to make sure that you have the Facebook Business Manager properly set up. Now this is a tool from Facebook that allows you to bring in your staff. It allows you to create your Facebook pixel. It allows you to connect to your ad account and your page properly. And it allows you to make sure that everything is sort of correct and your house is in order. So, that's really one of the things that you need right out of the gates is to set up Facebook Business Manager.
The second thing that you need is you need to have your creative set up, so you need to have some creative. Normally I recommend if people have never done it before, you need to have between five and 10 pieces of creative. And you can go through our creative podcast episodes previously of what's working, but this is images of your product in different ways and in different backgrounds and things like that.
And then you need about five to 10 different copies, so different copy about your product. What makes it different. And again, you can learn more about those deeply in previous episodes about creative. But along with setting that up, you need to, you know, what are you going to be pitching basically, right?
The third thing that you need if you're an eCommerce business, which you're listening to this you probably are, is you're going to need to set up your dynamic product ads. And dynamic product ads are the ability for you to take your product catalog. And when someone goes and looks at a product on your particular website and views it or adds it to cart, it allows you to show the ad dynamically to that person based on the product that they've looked at. Okay. So that's a component in remarketing that will help to close the loop on a sale. And is many times the lowest hanging fruit that you're going to get.
So those are some of the main ones, this set up. You want to have your creative together and kind of getting that built and then you're going to have your dynamic product ads.
The final piece that you're really going to want is your prospecting audiences to begin with. So the way that I like to do this with people who have never advertised before is you sit down and you actually draw out or write out what your top three or four main customer segments or customer avatars are. Okay, who are they? What are they like? What do they look for? You know what kind of brands are they into?
Because you're not going to be able to do lookalike audiences yet, which are audiences that are built off of other audiences or other website traffic and things like that or customer lists because you're a new company. But you're going to build mostly off of interest-based targeting. So you have to make sure that they're different enough. So an example of this would be things like we're in Chicago, so let's say you have one group that's really into pizza. Okay? You have another group that's really into football. Then you have another group that's really into sailing. Okay?
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