The Three Key Pillars Of Creating A Facebook Ads Campaign That Converts
In direct response marketing there is a 40/40/20 principal. I originally came across this principal in legendary direct response marketer Brian Kurtz's book 'Overdeliver'. A must read for any business owner trying to understand how to effectively market your product or service.
The 40/40/20 principal refers to the 3 key pillars of any successful direct response marketing campaign, list (targeting), offer and creative, and we can easily use the principal when creating our Facebook Ads.
What it means is 40% of the importance of a campaign is your targeting, 40% of is your offer and 20% is your creative. Kurtz even suggested that it should be 41/39/20 weighted to targeting, because it was slightly more important to get the audience right for a campaign to work well.
Why is targeting and offer more important than creative?
Don't get me wrong, creative is still very important but it doesn't matter how pretty your creative is, or how well it is written, if you aren't showing the ad to the right people (targeting) and don't have a strong offer to go with it, you will have no chance of converting anybody.
For example you are trying to sell a rib eye steak to an audience of vegetarians. It doesn't matter how good that steak looks and tastes, or how good your offer is, you're simply not going to convert anybody into a buyer.
Why targeting and offer should be first priority
Let's have a look at a few scenarios below and see why targeting and offer take more importance.
When we set up an ad campaign if we know we have a highly targeted audience, then we could possibly have a fair offer and average creative and still be able to make a sale.
Same goes for an irresistible offer with a poorly targeted audience and average creative. You may still be able to make a few sales because your offer is too good to be refused.
When you can align a highly engaged audience, with an irresistible offer and perfect creative, that's when the magic happens! Almost a license to print money!
How to get the perfect campaign
Test and measure! The only way we are gong to know whether these campaigns are running to their full potential is by testing and measuring the results. This is where with Facebook Ads you can quickly test and measure almost anything to find improvements on your ad and lower your cost per acquisition, which puts more money in your pocket!
You should always be running at least two variations of your ads and trying to beat the control (best converting or winning ad). When you are running ads on Facebook, start by testing things like audience interests, campaign objectives, your offer, images, videos, headlines, call to action buttons as a starting point. Then fine tune your ad from there.
Try and let the ad run to at least 5000-10000 people before disregarding it as this will give you a better indication if it is worth continuing. The Facebooks algorithm can take a few days to determine who the best people are to show your ad to, so make sure you don't cut it off early as it won't be a fair test.