Facebook Ads: Understanding your Customer’s WHY is core to your success (episode 101)

by April Buencamino-dy

If you listen to our sister show eCommerce MasterPlan, you’ll have recently heard me chatting with Rob about his phenomenally successful new eCommerce venture where they achieved sales of £200k in just the first 8 weeks of trading. Well, Rob’s here to explain the detail of how he created the Facebook Ads that achieved that, which is a service he’s now offering other eCommerce brands through his marketing agency TIME.

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Getting into Facebook Ads

Rob got into Facebook Ads through a mixture of blog articles, YouTube, and just finding himself in different algorithm rabbit holes.

He says he’s happy he did, because the growth of his eCommerce business was fueled by Facebook Ads.

Creating the Right Message

Rob did a lot of testing in and outside of Facebook for his eCommerce business, the Moon Phase Studio, and he continues to test to this day.

Use the data within Ads Manager to make decisions, but also remember that there’s data outside of Facebook. This information is about your customer, their needs, and looking deeper into who they are from empathetic point of view.

That translates into how you communicate with your audience to connect with them. 

No Existing Customer Base

If you don’t have an existing customer base, do review mining and competitor mining.

Check forums and scour the internet and listen to what the people are interested in and what their problems are, and build a profile out of what you’re able to research. For competitor mining, you can even go on Amazon to check the reviews and what customers are saying.

So even if you don’t have a customer base on day 1, there is still plenty of information you can get.

What It Means to Understand the Customer

You have to be led by the data you gather and understand and use that right from the beginning.

Interview people because from this, you’ll know what barriers are there as well as their key drivers. When you have these two things, use that in your copy and design, and in the look and feel of your website to get through them.

This is the PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution) framework, and it’s very helpful in coming up with your copy.

Turning Research Data into Facebook Ads

When you know your customer’s pain points, you can use one of them as the hook in your copy. Then use that copy to make people click on your ads.

Additionally, test videos as well because video normally outperforms everything else.

If you have the time and budget, you can also break down your ad into smaller pieces and start testing the different parts. Rob adds that Facebook is great because you can try different strategies and find out what works.

Insider Tips

If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with Facebook Ads – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?

You need to know all of Facebook’s policies.

Do the Facebook Blueprint courses and learn what’s allowed and what’s not on the platform.

Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve Facebook Ads performance?

Inside the Facebook Ads Manager, go to the column setting and identify the metrics you want to look at.

Arrange those columns based on your metrics, in the order in which your sales funnel plays out. When you have it done in that order, it will be easy for you to see where in your funnel something has gone wrong, and you’ll be able to fix it.

If someone listening wants to learn more about Facebook Ads is there one cheap/free resource you’d recommend?

Answer from Download Time Agency’s Empathy Blueprint to increase your click-through rates, drive conversions, grow your community, and build new products through the power of empathy.

Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in Facebook Ads?

If you logged into Ads Manager recently, you would have seen a bar at the top that says, “Target interests are changing”.

Pay attention to that. Don’t think that you’ve already nailed your campaign and that there’s no need for you to work on it again. Now is the time to re-test what you have.

Connect with your customers and understand them, and let that come through in our creatives. Get your messaging right, and the results will come.

Interview Links

Rob on Social media:

Sponsored by…

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The company’s hybrid customer-data and marketing-platform model allows companies to grow by fostering direct relationships with customers, without giving up their valuable data to popular big-tech ad platforms. Over 80,000 innovative companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, Living Proof and Huckberry sell more with Klaviyo. Learn more at www.klaviyo.com.

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