7 Ways to Apply Inbound Marketing Tactics to Your Facebook Ad Strategy

Mackenzie | December 04, 2018

Optimizing Your Facebook Ad Spend With Inbound Marketing

In recent years, a solid social media ad campaign has become just as important as a PPC ad campaign for many industries. The fact is, most people spend a great deal of time on social media sites, and because of the exceptional targeting power of social media giants like Facebook, the platforms offer the segmentation data and the exposure many inbound marketers are looking for.

If your company is thinking of starting a Facebook ad campaign, or already has a Facebook ad strategy in place, applying a few inbound marketing tactics can help optimize your Facebook ads for ultimate results. Here are 7 inbound marketing tactics you can use to boost the effectiveness of your Facebook ad strategy:

#1 Target Facebook Ads To Your Buyer Personas

Remember those buyer personas you spent so long drafting and editing? Well, they're good for a lot more than just your website content. Use your buyer personas to determine your Facebook ad targeting settings. You can't make content (or ads) perfectly suited for everyone — so don't try.

Instead, segment your ads based on buyer persona, and build different Facebook ad sets to target different personas with different interests. Facebook offers a vast suite of targeting tools, so you can set ads to go out to people with specific likes, dislikes, hobbies, job titles, and more — all things you probably already have outlined in your buyer personas. Use those buyer personas to develop Facebook ad campaigns that go out to consumers you already know have an interest in the products or services you offer.

#2 Set Clear, SMART Goals

Inbound Methodology tells us that we should always set SMART Goals. That is, goals that are Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

This principle is directly applicable to your Facebook ad strategy as well. Whether you're looking to boost engagement, or drive traffic to your website, it's important to define a goal for each Facebook ad you create, so you understand immediately when your ad is successful, and when it's not. Here's how you can apply SMART goal setting to your Facebook ads:

Specific: 500 likes, or 100 new followers. A specific, ultimate goal for your campaign to work towards.
Measurable: If your goal is to drive traffic to your site, is there a certain percentage of traffic you're looking for? Do you want a certain number of new contacts? How will you measure the success of your Facebook ad?
Attainable: If your last campaign resulted in 15 new followers, you shouldn't set a new campaign goal of 100 followers. That's just unrealistic. While it would be amazing if you reached 100 new followers, you need to make sure your goals are set based on real, hard data, and are possible to reach. Otherwise, your results will always be discouraging, and you may not be able to see the benefits that your ads are creating.
Relevant: Your goal should be relevant to the campaign you're putting out. If your ad talks about the story behind your company, your goal might be engagement focused. If you're advertising a free ebook or webinar, your goal might be more conversion-based.
Timely: Don't let your Facebook ad run in perpetuity, but don't set it to run for just a few hours either. Plan for your campaign to run for a specific amount of time that will help your company work to its goal, and that will produce enough data for you to learn from and implement on your next ad campaign.

#3 Tell, Don't Sell

When it comes to creating ads for social media, especially for Facebook, it's key to keep inbound marketing best practices in mind. That means forget about the hard sell. Especially if you're a B2B company, a "Buy Now" ad isn't likely to convert the way you want.

The best way to get today's consumer to interact with your brand is to offer something that's actually attractive to them. Instead of running an ad with your company logo and description, offer a free ebook or whitepaper.

Write a bit of compelling content that tells a story, rather than tries to "sell" your company or your product.

Consumers run from the hard sale like the plague, so put effort into drafting a narrative, and offering up something unique and worthwhile. The more interesting and compelling your offer, the more effective your campaign will be.

#4 Test, Smartly

Always test for your goals by sending out more than one version of your ad. You never know what photo, what content, or even what call-to-action button consumers will respond best to, so it's always good to test your ads.

How to test multiple Facebook ads:

Let's say you have two different graphics for the same ad. Create one ad set, targeted to your specific buyer persona, and upload the first image to that set. Launch the first set, and then go back into your Facebook ad manager. You can now duplicate that set — so the ad with the other graphic goes out to the exact same consumers — and simply change the image. Set both ads to deploy simultaneously, and you'll be able to watch the ads progress, and see which graphic performs best in your targeted audience.

When you're testing your ads, it's important to only change one aspect at a time, so you know exactly what is driving more or less engagement, and so you can accurately apply those results to future ad campaigns.

#5 Adjust in Real Time

The digital world is fast-moving. Don't wait for your ads to end to determine their success.

Facebook allows you to adjust and tweak ads at any point in your campaign, and you should take advantage of that. If you're a few days into an ad that's just not performing, you can pause it or adjust your settings for better performance. On the other hand, if you have an ad that's facilitating a ton of conversions and boosted engagement, you can extend it or bump up the budget slightly. Making adjustments in real-time allows you to maximize your budget on the spot. This way, you're not wasting money on an underperforming ad.

#6 Focus on Long Term Value

While your immediate budget and spending goals are important, it's equally important to keep an eye on how much you're spending relevant to your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). When you're just starting your Facebook Ad campaign, it's easy to worry that the money you're spending isn't worth the leads you're getting. A surefire way to figure out if that's true is to consider your customer lifetime value.

For example, let's say it costs you $80 to acquire a customer. Let's also say that your average loyal customer spends about $800 over their lifetime as your customer. Even if you don't make $800 immediately from each customer, you know that over their lifetime as your client, you have essentially spent $80 to earn $800. That's a pretty attractive ROI, if you ask us.

Bottom line — Don't get caught up in the immediate shock of spending, unless you're shelling out a lot on ads that aren't producing new business. Your goal should always be long-term success, and to accurately measure that, you need to look at the ratio of what you're spending compared to what you'll make in the long run from each of those new customers you've acquired.

#7 Inbound-ify Your Facebook Ads — Turn Them Into Funnels

Finally, if you want to apply really successful inbound marketing tactics to your Facebook ad strategy — embrace the funnel.

If you're familiar with inbound marketing, you'll know that it's best practice to create content for consumers in every stage of the inbound marketing funnel. From a stranger to your brand to an interested lead, each consumer at each level of the funnel will be seeking different information. Traditional inbound marketing targets leads moving through the funnel with email workflows that provide the right content, at just the right time. You can apply this idea of nurturing leads through the funnel to your Facebook ad strategy too!

Facebook Ad Funnel Basics

Facebook allows you to create ad funnels, which work much the same as an email workflow. You start with a top-level ad that tells consumers a little bit about your company. Let that ad run for a few days.

Then, send out a second ad to the consumers who interacted with the first ad. If your first ad was a video, then you can send your second ad to just the people who watched say, 20 percent of your video. If your first ad was a static image, you can send the second one to just those consumers who clicked on or in some way interacted with the first.

From there, you can keep your ad funnel going about as far as you want, until you're targeting only the most interested, engaged consumers for that particular ad set. This is a great way to optimize your spending, and it also helps to pull people through the inbound marketing funnel, ensuring they're even more qualified for your products and services by the time they make it to your website.

Though it'll take a bit more work to set up a Facebook ad funnel, it's a useful tool that will give you increased insight into how your ideal customers and target buyers react to your social media advertising strategy.

Why Inbound Marketing Tactics Work for Facebook Ads

Inbound marketing tactics are so effective for Facebook advertising campaigns because they are already designed specifically for today's consumer. The average consumer (who just so happens to be the exact same person you're targeting on Facebook) prefers a warmer sales experience than the traditional hard-sell. Since inbound marketing is already geared to those consumers, it's easily applied to a Facebook ad campaign to boost your results and maximize your spend. Learn more about using outbound marketing to attract, engage, and close qualified leads here.

The foundation of inbound marketing is getting to know, on a personal level, your ideal consumer. If you'd like to know a little bit more about how you can use inbound marketing to grow your company in 2019, let's chat. We're a HubSpot Diamond Certified Agency Partner, and we've been doing inbound marketing for about as long as it's been around. We'd love to help you grow, so schedule time with our president, John Heritage to see what Evenbound is all about.