Whether you’re a business owner looking to break into the inexpensive advertising side of Facebook to grow your business, or an entrepreneurial spirit hoping to establish a side hustle running ads on Facebook, it’s important to set up a winning Facebook advertising strategy.

Establishing a plan of attack will help you maintain focus, waste less time, and get better results. If you’re a business owner, that means less wasted ad spend and more revenue. If you’re an advertising manager, that means return clients and references.

Either way, it’s simply the best way to operate!

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of what we believe to be the top tactics for a successful Facebook advertising strategy, you should know that this information is coming from the realm of actual experience.

The Facebook Side Hustle Course has successfully helped many students to grasp and execute the tips we are about to share with you – some to the tune of quitting their nine-to-five jobs completely!

We’ve also had business owners take their side hustle, advertise for it with our methods, and turn it into a full-time job where they can be their own boss.

This stuff is legit, our tips are actionable, and the course is definitely worth a look if you’re interested in getting serious about advertising on Facebook.

Now, let’s get into the seven tactics you need to establish a killer social media advertising game.

1. Know Your Audience
2. Establish the Pain Point
3. Choose the Right Campaign Objective
4. Build a Killer Ad
5. Craft a Funnel
6. Engage Your Audience
7. TAFO

1. Know your audience

This is an area where many businesses immediately mess up. It is important to know who your ideal buyer is, and you need to be able to describe them in detail.

Who are they? How old are they? What income bracket are you targeting? Is their marital status important? Does their family life come into consideration? Do they live in a centralized area, or are they online shoppers?

The more details you can flesh out (pun intended), the better you can begin to formulate an avatar representative of your universal target. It has to be said: most businesses simply cannot sell to “everyone” with great success.

Fortunately, Facebook is the collector of pretty much all data on its users, and this becomes a playground for the marketer who knows their audience. With the ability to build custom audiences, you can target audiences by age, gender, marital status, occupation, education, location, and even income to an extent. Having an appropriately targeted audience increases your chances of getting clients right away.

2. Establish the pain point

This is another critical aspect of marketing that can be overlooked by novice advertisers, causing ad spend to go to waste.

In advertising, the pain point is what motivates your audience to buy your product or service. It’s one of the big reasons why knowing your audience matters so much!

Here’s an example: Say you have a client who sells flooring to their local area and they want to start using Facebook ads to increase traffic to their store. Many people who are looking to replace their flooring are doing so because it has been worn out and dirtied beyond redemption, either by children, pets, or time. The pain point for them is having an ugly, dirty, nasty carpet that needs to go, and be replaced by something that can handle the dogs, kids, and foot traffic.

Knowing the pain point of your audience helps you set up the next parts of your advertising strategy more effectively.

3. Choose the right campaign objective

For anyone who has delved into the world of advertising on Facebook, you learn pretty quickly that there are different types of campaigns you can run, and they produce different results.

Conversion campaigns

The whole point of these is to optimize your ad for an objective, and this is one of the more widely used campaigns. They rely on you building a funnel to get customer information. A great way to use this campaign is to promote an offer like a discount or bonus service in a way that allows you to collect information (like a phone number or email address)  from an interested individual. You then use that information to contact them further, and drive home the sale.

Lead generation campaigns

Similarly to conversion campaigns, the goal of these are to get people to give you their contact information. Unlike how conversion campaigns take you to a unique page off Facebook, these allow you to collect the information inside Facebook.

Traffic campaign

This gets eyes on something specific, like a blog post or a website. If you’re trying to promote a sale on your site or get more readers for a blog, this is the campaign that will get your site seen more widely.

Engagement campaigns

These get likes, shares, and comments on your ad post. They’re great for spreading brand awareness.

It’s important to know the difference, and to know what your goal for the advertisement is. If you choose the wrong campaign, you’re just giving Facebook dollars.

4. Build a killer ad

When you have the previous tactics nailed down, you need to focus like a laser on crafting a great ad. These are the things you need to pay careful attention to in particular:

Attention-Grabbing Headline

Headlines are the large text immediately below your ad image. They give your audience a brief look at what you’re promoting.

You want to keep it short but sweet – lure them in!

Eye-Catching Image

High quality, clear images that tell the story right away are crucial. Limited amounts of text in the image will keep you from getting pinged by Facebook.

Choose an image that catches your eye, and keep your audience’s pain point in mind. In our flooring example from earlier, this would be a great time to have a photo of the aftermath of a muddy dog on white carpet.

Copy that Piques Interest

When your headline and image are on point, it should catch your audience’s attention long enough to get them to stop scrolling. But that won’t be enough to keep their attention. This is where strong copywriting skills become highly valuable.

Remember to speak to your audience’s needs. Speak their language.

Call to Action (CTA)
This is often a button in the bottom right corner of your ad. If your ad image, headline, and copywriting did the trick, this button will prompt them to take the next step!

For more information on how to create a killer ad, read 7 Examples of Great Facebook Ads And Why They Work

5. Craft a Funnel

Funnels guide the client from your ad to the sale. They are most often used for conversion campaigns, one of the most widely used campaigns for local businesses. They utilize a landing page outside of Facebook to collect potential lead information (name, phone number or email address, etc). You then send them to a thank you page where you could also provide their coupon or offer.

Funnels like this give you an opportunity to track those who didn’t opt in the first time and retarget them with other campaigns.

One of the best funnel software we use is ClickFunnels. While this isn’t required for successful advertising on Facebook, it’s sometimes the best option for particular clients or businesses.

For more information on funnels, read more in The Beginner’s Guide To Creating A Sales Funnel.

6. Engage your audience

This is especially important for the business owner! Following up on leads has to be a priority. If you’re a business owner, you need to factor in time to call or email the people who go through the funnel to turn them into customers. If you’re running ads for local businesses on Facebook, you need to highlight ways your clients can manage the leads they receive.

It is also important to engage with people as they comment on the ad itself. Showing that you’re responsive is always a plus, and it’s a great way to dispel hesitations about your product or service.

7. TAFO (Test And Find Out)

Within the Facebook Side Hustle Course, one of the biggest mantras that the creators Mike and Bobby share is “Test And Find Out”. It’s a reminder that there will always have to be experimentation and changes made to get your ad just right.

Fortunately, Facebook makes it relatively easy to modify your ads, and because ad costs are incredibly low on this platform, there’s very little to lose by testing different variations of the same ad at the same time.

Advertising is not always an immediate game. Sometimes patience will be required.

Summing it up

The seven tactics above are a great place to start when crafting your Facebook advertising strategy. Knowing your client, building an ad campaign around them, and staying with them to the end of the funnel will help optimize your advertising and ultimately get you more leads and business. If you want more information on any of these tactics, the Facebook Side Hustle Course has all of this in much greater detail, as well as experts ready to help you navigate your strategy in real-time.

Running successful, inexpensive advertising on Facebook is very possible!