Month: November 2021

How To Optimize Your Facebook® Ad Audiences For Lower Cost Per Lead & Acquisition

Micheal O'Neill

How To Optimize Your Facebook® Ad Audiences For Lower Cost Per Lead & Acquisition

Table of Contents

Facebook® ads can be a bit of a bottomless pit for cash unless you can get the right message in front of the right audience. 

Every month, thousands of people jump into Facebook® ads without the correct strategies and end up wasting their hard-earned cash. 

Many people would be better off putting their cash in an envelope and mailing it to Mark Zuckerberg, because at least then they wouldn’t have wasted the time setting up their ads.

The majority of Facebook® Advertisers never get their ads off the ground. And they end up saying things like, “Facebook® ads don’t work,” or “My clients aren’t on Facebook®.”  But one of the big reasons they are not getting the results that they want is that they have selected inappropriate or suboptimal people to display their ads to. 

Most people fantasize about their ads generating sales and converting cold, interest-based audiences when the reality is that even the best Facebook® advertisers struggle with these audiences. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use interest or behaviour based audiences. The issue is that most people move in for the kill and ask for the opt-in or the sale far too early.

What I am about to share with you in this post is proven methodology for engaging with your audience through your ad campaigns and enticing your very best candidates to self-select and put their hands up so that you can follow up, and show them ads that solve a specific problem for them.

This will significantly boost your engagement levels and will ultimately result in lower Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).  

Get this right, and you will cut out days, weeks, and months of pain, frustration, and wasted money. Yes, you still need to put in the work. But you will know that you’re on the right track and that you’ll be short-circuiting your Facebook® ad success.

This strategy is one of the quickest and fastest ways for you to slash your CPL and CPA especially if you’re only starting with Facebook® Ads. 

I will explain the three levels of Facebook® ad strategy that every Facebook® ad campaign needs, the ad type that works best with this strategy, and why the Apple iOS 14.5 update ensures that this is one of the most valuable ads that you have in your arsenal. 

And then I will wrap up with four additional audiences that you can leverage to significantly reduce your CPL and your CPA, and how you can start building these audiences today. 

Why We Need A Better Facebook® Ad Strategy 

Ad costs are rising. Now, this isn’t just true on Facebook®, and it isn’t because Facebook® is deciding to put up its costs. That’s not the way it works. 

Simply put, Facebook® has a limited amount of real estate that they can serve ads on. By real estate I mean the newsfeeds, right column, stories, results, videos, search and messages of their Facebook® members. 

As more and more advertisers enter the auction market for this limited real estate and are willing to spend more and more money to serve ads to Facebook users the price to serve said ads increases.

As ad platforms mature and gain popularity the cost of advertising increases, it’s simple economics. But here is the thing, the increased costs are not the issue, it’s the fact that most people don’t have a system for optimizing their funnel and maximizing the immediate and lifetime return of each lead they attract.

When it comes to optimizing your audience one thing that many people don’t consider is that they are not just competing against other advertisers in your industry. You are competing against everyone who may want to target the individual Facebook® user that you are targeting.

For example, you may be in the fitness industry but someone who is a perfect target for your ad may also be a dog owner, a bitcoin trader as well as an avid golfer.

And guess what the people who are most likely to opt-in and purchase from you are the same people who are most likely to subscribe and purchase from other advertisers.

So before we start the argument that Facebook has no shortage of real estate to advertise on we have to understand that a substantial portion of people, even if they perfectly fit into our defined audience and we craft the perfect no brainer offer, they still won’t take the action that we prescribe.

All this to say, that the most valuable audiences, the ones that we want to get in front of, are not just attractive to us but attractive to others and that is the reason why they are the most expensive.

There is very little we can do on an audience targeting level to change this. However, what we can do, deploy a strategy that identifies the people within our broad audiences who are most likely to take the action that we want, using the cheapest possible ad types and then use that data to retarget them with ads that ask them to take some action.

The 3 Levels Of Facebook® Ads Every Campaign Needs

When deployed the strategy that I’m about to share is a proven winner but you still need to apply all the steps and optimizations that we’ve already discussed in this series including your overall strategy, offer, landing page & creative.

So before attempting to launch this strategy make sure that you firm grasp of fundamentals because they will need to be deployed with this strategy too.

With that warning out of the way let’s dig into the 3 Levels of Facebook Ads Every Campaign needs.

Top Of Funnel (TOFU)

The Top of Funnel is all about engagement. At this level we want to keep our audience size large and more than likely we will be relying on interest-based audiences. 

When using cold interest-based audiences one of the problems we face is that people don’t know who you are, understand what you do, or the transformation you can help them achieve. As a result, if you go directly for “the ask” they are unlikely to take the requested action.

This is the problem that we must address. One of the big objectives for the TOFU is to drive engagement with our content and give people an understanding of who we are, what we do, and how we help people. 

Our goal is to find the people who are engaging and consuming our content so that we can then move them up to the next level and retarget them during our middle-of-funnel campaign. 

Across the TOFU level, we want to hook people into your concepts, your values, and your approach. Your campaign objectives will be reach, traffic, engagement, or video views depending on your ad format. 

Now, why engagement and not a conversion objective? There’s a time and a place for conversion campaigns, but the TOFU is the time to get in front of people and let them self-select. Because there is no specific “ask”, engagement campaigns using the objectives above are the cheapest form of ads that you can run. 

Now, just because they’re cheap doesn’t mean we don’t need to work hard and be strategic about the content. In fact, the content for your Top of Funnel ads is just as important as the content for your conversion ads.

So what content works best? Your TOFU content should be unbiased, informational, educational-based content. Think about how you can best engage people and show people that you understand them, the problems they face as well as the hope and dreams they hold. 

Your call to action will be relatively weak. As in you’re not asking them for any level of commitment. The “ask” is simply to watch a video, consume your post, read a blog post, and maybe comment or engage. Any action that doesn’t require a big commitment, because if somebody doesn’t know you, they’re unlikely to commit to something significant.

Middle Of Funnel (MOFU)

When we enter the MOFU phase, we’re going to leverage the audiences built from interactions from the TOFU phase. We are transitioning from the awareness stage to the evaluation stage and as these people have previously engaged or interacted with your content you can now bring the relationship to the next level.

You can look at your MOFU as the bridge between your free content and your offering. If the goal of TOFU was to engage with your audience, show them you understand them and the problems they face, your MOFU content seeks to filter and sort out the people who are not just interested but motivated to take action.

Our goal here is to move people from a prospect to a qualified lead, by enticing them to exchange their email address in return for something valuable via a lead magnet opt-in. 

Earlier in this series, I went into detail on the best lead magnets and what a lead magnet should do. 

In summary, the best lead magnet is one that helps your Perfect-Fit Client get unstuck and take their very next step on their road to the ultimate transformation that you can help them achieve. To do this you have to understand the micro problems they face and provide fast-acting tools to help them move forward.

What are some of the hot lead magnet formats at the moment? Checklists, quizzes, cheat sheets, templates, scripts, roadmaps, and fill-in-the-blank worksheets, are all working well at the moment. 

Some less appealing magnets are guides, white papers, ebooks, videos, mini-courses, webinars. There’s nothing wrong with any of these, and many have worked well in the past but the bigger the Lead Magnet and the longer it takes to consume the less likely someone is to implement it.

People are tired, people are lazy. A great lead magnet delivers its value within 15 minutes of it being downloaded. 

Your primary goal for your MOFU campaign is to get people to opt-in for your Lead Magnet. There are two different ad objectives you could use for this level of your campaign: i) conversion objective or ii) the reach objective. 

As everyone in the MOFU audience has previously interacted with your content on paper the reach objective is the one that should work best. Whereas if you choose a conversion objective, Facebook® will only show your ad to the subset of people within the retargeting audience which they think will be likely to convert.

This is always something that I test in my campaigns and I’ve been surprised at times of which one wins out. So I’d advise you to test both approaches.  

Bottom Of Funnel (BOFU)

During the BOFU stage is where we ask for the sale. So far during TOFU & MOFU, we have delivered real value all of which without asking for anything other than an email opt-in.

From a sales perspective getting an opt-in is an important step as it invokes a psychological principle called consistency. Once people make a decision and take an action in a specific direction, they will feel compelled to behave consistently with what they have said or done previously. This is one of the reasons that gaining micro-commitments in advance of a big ask is so powerful.

On the BOFU level, your audiences are tight. We’re only working on retargeting people who’ve taken specific actions from higher levels in the funnel. 

That could be people who have registered for a lead magnet or people who have proceeded through a certain amount of steps in a launch or indicated some intent to purchase. And as a result, these will be threads with the lowest spend but the highest Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

During the BOFU stage, we can make some assumptions about the people we are targeting. 

We can assume that these people already know us because they’ve already been through some communication process in the upper levels of the funnel. 

We can assume that they understand the problem we solve, that they’re familiar with the method we use to solve the problem, and that they’re vested in solving their problems. 

So based on that then we can then start honing in our messaging on how our offer is going to impact their lives. We can get right into the specifics about, how we’re going to help them achieve their goals, we can outline any risk reversal, and give them a deadline. 

We can use any of these triggers because we know with certainty that at this stage they are very much aware of the problem facing them, they have gotten a good sense of who we are, and they understand how we can help them achieve the ultimate transformation we know is possible for them.

4 Audiences To Begin Leveraging Today For Lower Cost Per Lead (CPL) & Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

As I mentioned above most people fantasize about their ads generating sales and converting cold, interest-based audiences when the reality is that even the best Facebook® advertisers struggle with these audiences.

So what audiences should be looking to first to test and hone our offers?? 

Retargeting Website Visitors

Well, the first place we can look to is our website visitors. Notwithstanding the iOS 14 challenges, the pixel on your website is still a really valuable source of audience data.. 

The starting point is to ensure that the pixel is installed throughout your entire website. Within Facebook® Ad Manager I would have one audience tracking all website visitors, that’s anybody who visits any page on your website. 

Then I would break my audiences down between individual service and product pages and your blog or content pages. The significance of this is that if somebody has visited your blog content, they are slightly more qualified than somebody who’s just visited your home page or an individual landing page. 

Speaking of landing pages you also want to have custom audiences built for each individual landing page and their associated thank you pages. 

And remember from a retargeting perspective, until you have traffic at scale you can combine all of these audiences together initially but the longer you delay tracking them individually the longer it will take them to build to the critical mass required to become highly effective.

When launching Facebook® Ads for a Lead Magnet the first campaign that should be built is a retargeting campaign for website visitors, meaning that once someone visits your website they get retargeted with an ad on Facebook® driving them to your lead magnet. 

But not all retargeting audiences are equal. For each custom audience that you think is valuable, I would also include a time dimension. 

The people who are most likely to take the action you specify are the people who have visited your site within the last 3 days. Depending on the complexity of the ad campaign, I normally set up a one-day, a three-day, seven-day, and then out to 14, 21, 30, 60, 90, and 180-day audiences for relevant pages.

Often I will rarely target the 30, 60 & 90-day audiences but you never know when you might them so it is better to have them set up and running in advance.

Retargeting Facebook & Instagram Post Engagements

Another powerful audience is people who have engaged with your Facebook® and Instagram page and posts. 

Let’s say you produce weekly blog content. One approach is to take each blog and create a post on Facebook® giving some value and teasing what’s in store for the reader if they were to read the remainder of the blog.

From here we create an ad based on the post and put a small amount of cash behind it, anywhere between $25 to $50 per blog post. 

The ad objective will either be for blog page visits or engagement. With either objective, you are building your retargeting audience from the website and your engagement audience on Facebook & Instagram. 

In addition, your blog should be promoting an opt-in of some kind which means you might pick up additional subscribers. If you are doing this regularly you can build large pre-qualified audiences in advance of launching your MOFU Lead Magnet opt-in ads which will outperform cold interest-based audiences.

Leverage Your Existing Customer & Prospect Lists

And another one that sometimes people forget about, is your customer and prospect lists. Both people who have purchased from you in the past and opted into your list can be uploaded into Facebook® and a custom audience created.

For most people with sub hundred thousand lists, these audiences are not hugely powerful in their own right, but they do allow you to create Lookalike audiences which are a complete game-changer.

What does a Lookalike audience mean? Lookalike audiences are a way of leveraging existing audience data to provide Facebook® with a baseline to identify other people with similar traits and who are likely to act similarly in the Metaverse.

Despite the grumbling, iOS 14.5 has not impacted the ability of Facebook® to build Lookalike audiences. iOS has stopped Facebook® reporting on actions taken by people on 3rd party websites for the purposes of retargeting but Facebook still knows who the people that took specific actions are and therefore can still produce solid Lookalike audiences.

Practically, when creating lookalike audiences I will create multiple versions of the same audience. The measurement of a Lookalike audience is based on a percentage of the total population of a country or countries that you have selected. 

What you are doing when creating a lookalike audience is that you are asking Facebook to find the X% of the population of your target country(ies) which look most like your base audience.

Normally what I do is I would create 3 Lookalike audiences

  • 1%
  • 1% – 3%
  • 3% – 8%

I then run each of those lookalike audiences against each other in different ad sets to see which performs better. You might only test it for a week to see which audience comes out on top and then promote that as the primary audience.

So that wraps up this section on optimizing your Facebook® audiences for the lowest possible Cost Per Lead (CPL) & Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

And, remember this is a process so you don’t have to get it all right on day one. It is a matter of continually refining and improving your audience building and optimization. The earlier you start the quicker you will see results so get stuck in and create your audience-building plan today.

Let me know what challenges you face with your Facebook ads, whether you’re just getting started or a seasoned pro looking to scale your ad campaigns.

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5 Steps To Lower Facebook® Ad Cost Per Lead And Cost Per Acquisition

Micheal O'Neill

5 Steps To Lower Facebook® Ad Cost Per Lead And Cost Per Acquisition

Table of Contents

In this blog, we will roll up our sleeves and get down and durttty with 3 steps you can take to tune up your Facebook® Ad creative to slash your Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

But first a word of wording. The goal of your Facebook Ad Campaign is not to simply get the lowest CPL (or CPA if you are offering a mini-front end product or immediate upsell). The goal is to produce the most cost-effective leads which go on to provide the highest lifetime value.

And by lifetime value, I mean the leads that will go on to convert for offers further up your Perfect-Fit Client Value Ascension Roadmap.

It will take time to establish the metrics and data required to determine the leads most likely to do so but it is essential to have this front of mind when undertaking any optimization actions.

This is why sometimes an $8 lead is far more attractive and will provide a greater Return on Ad Spend than a $0.50 lead.

When it comes to optimizing your Facebook® Ads the fact is, there are no absolutes. There is no one type of image, video, headline, or body copy that will outperform another type every time. 

What will work best for you is dependent on your business, what you’re promoting, who your audience is, the problem you’re solving, and even down to your audience’s level of awareness about the problem, the solution, and the method by which you’re bringing about the transformation. 

That’s why I want to introduce a framework to think about your Facebook® ad creative optimizations. Because even the best Facebook advertisers can’t pick the winning version of a good ad with any greater certainty than a flip of a coin. 

 

The truth is, the only way to know what is going to perform best for you is to test. And the only people that can give you the feedback that matters are your audience. 

But unless you have a specific process to follow, and understand what all the metrics mean, the optimization process can be confusing, so that’s exactly what we are going to look at today.

We will start with how best to set up your ad campaigns to facilitate the optimization process. From here we will look at optimizing your images and videos, before finally providing a framework for optimizing your Facebook® Ad copy.

What we will cover today is one of the most fundamental skills required to run profitable Facebook® Ad campaigns. No matter how good you get at drafting ad copy and designing your images or shooting your videos, not alone will you always be able to improve, but the fact is you are always going to have to continue optimizing even the best Facebook® Ads.

With Facebook® Ad there’s no such thing as set and forget, there’s no such thing as coming up with the one ad that works forever. Even if you have a good ad straight out the gate, you are still going to have to optimize it over time, because ads decay, and that one ad will never survive and perform optimally long-term. 

When you nail this skill, it’s going to guarantee that you can take losing campaigns and turn them into winning campaigns and take winning campaigns and turn them into home run campaigns.

How to Set Up Your Facebook® Ad Campaigns to Facilitate the Optimization Process?

There’s a famous phrase when it comes to selling, which is ABC, that stands for “Always Be Closing”. From marketing and specifically from a Facebook ads campaign perspective, I like to say ABT, “Always Be Testing”. 

But to get your testing and your optimization process in place, the first thing you need to do is you need to start with the right foundation. The first part of ensuring this is making sure you have multiple ads in play. 

This might seem a very simple point to make but you have no idea how many times I have been contacted by a frustrated Facebook Advertiser who wasn’t getting results and when I opened up their Facebook® Ad campaign there was one lonely little ad trying its best but failing to live up to expectation.

When I’m starting on a lower budget (anywhere up to $250 per day), I will normally have two to three unique versions of the ad copy including headline and body copy. In addition, I like to start with at least two versions of the image or video. That will give you a total of four to six ads. 

If you are starting with two versions of the Ad copy I would draft one long-form and one short-form, to begin with. Properly optimized long-form content will nearly always outperform short-form content, but initially, it will be easier to start getting conversions with your short-form content. The other thing that I love about short-form content is that it puts more of an emphasis on the headline. It gives you an extremely good test of how solid your headline is.

My normal starting point for a low-budget campaign is three ad copy variations: one short, one medium, and one long format. When these three versions of ad copy are mixed with two image or video versions you have a starting point of 6 Ad variations which is perfect.

With any more than four to six versions on lower budgets, Facebook will struggle to build the data required to assess each of the ads. It’ll favor one ad variation and push that over the rest. This means you are unable to make a solid determination as to the effectiveness of the copy in the other ads. 

If you start with less than four to six ad variations it’ll take you way too long to test your creative. 

In addition to this, you will ideally have at least two ad sets. That’s two ad sets targeting two different audiences. In practice I build the 6 ads in the first ad set and then simply duplicate them all over the second ad set, meaning the only additional work you need to undertake is to update the audience settings.

How to Approach Optimizing your Facebook Ad Campaigns?

Now you’ve launched your ads. When will you have enough data to start the optimization process? You want to give your ads at least three to five days to settle down. You won’t have any firm data before that. Sometimes ads are wildly successful in the first couple of days. Other times, it can take them a couple of days to catch, to gain traction, and for Facebook to figure out who best to show the ad to. 

Ideally, you would let your ads exit the learning phase before starting the optimization process. You exit the learning phase after 50 of the events that you’ve optimized the ad for have occurred. That may be page visits, conversions, button clicks, or an event like Lead Magnet registration.

If you have a mini front-end product, you could be optimizing your ads for the purchase of the mini front-end product or events further down the funnel.

After 50 of whatever event you specify your ad will exit the learning phase. Sometimes on lower budgets, especially when you’re starting with $20 a day or $30 a day, it might not be possible to wait until you exit to start the optimization process. 

Whichever situation you find yourself in after that initial three to five-day period, you then need to sit down and analyze your stats and come up with a hypothesis about what needs to be changed.

There are lots of variables, but you need to look at them and ask yourself: What do I think is wrong? And what do I think if I improved would improve the results of this ad? You could look at the image or the video first, you could look at the headline first. 

And remember, your goal is not always to get the cheapest front-end outcome. Your goal is to get the leads and front-end clients that go on to convert on your primary offers further up your Value Ascension Roadmap. Initially, however, cost per lead will probably be the best metric to work to. 

When you review your numbers you will start to see trends based on which copy and media element is performing best. This is why it is so important to start with multiple ads as it gives you instant data to work with. 

You want to optimize for the action furthest down the funnel that you have reliable data on. And what I mean by that is you may not have sufficient data initially to make a call on which ad is converting best, but there will be other clues like the click-through rate, page visits, or even the CPM. 

In the early stages of an ad, I very often optimize for page visits as opposed to the conversion objective, like opt-in, because you have to let Facebook figure out who is most likely to take the action that you want. And if you overprescribe your objectives initially, it can limit Facebook's ability to learn. You have to feed Facebook with data for it to work best.

Remember, one of the most important things about optimization is to never kill the golden goose. If you have an ad that’s getting you results, don’t make any changes to that specific ad. Duplicate the ad and optimize the duplicate because if you make a change that decreases ad performance it is almost impossible to get it back to its prior performance levels.

How to Optimize Your Facebook® Ad Images for Higher Conversions?

When approaching images for your Facebook® Campaigns I always, start with a native first strategy. Until you know the exact words and triggers that convert you want to blend in to stand out. 

What do I mean by native first? If you think about the average person scrolling through Facebook®, they’re used to seeing photographs from their friends, and family members. They’re used to seeing images that look like they belong on Facebook®. 

When you include a graphically designed image with your Facebook® ad, straight away people know it’s an ad and initially, that can create some friction. 

Obviously whether or not it’s a bad thing that your target audience on Facebook® knows it’s an ad depends on their level of awareness of you, and what you are offering.

If somebody is predisposed to consuming your content and you have brand recognition, as in your audience recognizes your logo, very often it can be a good idea to include your logo. 

But if you’re advertising to a cold audience who has no idea who you are you are best to go the native route. When going with a native image it is important to have some contextual link between the photograph and the overall message of your ad. 

Ideally, your image would speak to the transformation or your authority to help someone achieve the transformation. It could be a photo of you doing the very thing that you’re promoting, someone else doing it, or it could be you helping somebody achieve the transformation on offer.

And remember, what’s the purpose of the image or the video? The goal of the image or video in a Facebook® Ad is to capture your Perfect-Fit Clients attention. It has to stop the scroll. You have to have an image or video that stops somebody in their tracks. 

If you are going with a graphically designed image, what are some of the ways that we could take the principles we’ve discussed and apply them? One common way to achieve this is to use an image of what it is you’re offering. 

If your lead magnet is a checklist or a three-step cheat sheet, for example, you could have a picture of the checklist maybe with the pages fanned out. Obviously, not so visible that people could read exactly what’s on them, but enough to give them a sense of what they will get. Or maybe it could be a picture of you holding the lead magnet.

Bottom line, the best Facebook® Ad consultants can’t predict the winning creative between two well-performing ads. The best and the only way to find out is to put it out there and test it. And that’s why you always want to start with two options so that you can see which one is winning, which one is losing.

This will give you the data you need to start making optimization decisions. When you start seeing clear winners and losers, you can either tweak to improve the existing image, or you can introduce entirely new images, but always have a hypothesis in mind and track your changes over time so that you have a record of what has worked, what didn’t work, and make sure that you don’t end up down dead ends testing something that you’ve already tested. It happens more frequently than you think!

How to Optimize Your Facebook® Ad Videos for Higher Conversions?

There are three different types of video ads that you can deploy. 

  1. The text and image-based video. 
  2. B-roll style where you voiceover stock video or your video relevant to your promotion. 
  3. ”Talking head” style direct to camera 

The easiest is the text and image-based video with some musical background. And these are often where you take your ad images and combine them into a short video. Canva enables you to do this easily. 

You could also do this in PowerPoint, or any of Adobe family apps. In some ways, this is creating a video for the sake of a video and leveraging the fact that as people scroll, the video will start playing and the motion will more than likely stop them in their scroll. This is a good approach and an excellent place to start. 

If you’re serious about getting the best results for your ads, I would invest time and effort in having you in the video speaking. This will build rapport and increase trust more than the other two options. 

But here’s the thing, when you’re drafting your script for the video, the script is as important as your ad copy, if not even more so. And if you’re using video, you have to spend as much time dialing in your script as you do your ad copy.

Video Ads can be hard to get right and often will be likely to produce lower conversions initially but if you persevere you will be investing wisely and it is a skill that once cracked you will reap massive rewards. 

Whenever I talk about video ads the first question I normally get asked is, what length should these videos be? 

Your video should be no longer than 60 seconds, 45 seconds, if possible, and ideally even shorter than that. The shorter the better. 

Your script will depend very much on your audience and the steps you have taken to engage them earlier in your campaign. Do they know you? Are they aware of the problem you solve? Do they know the method you use to solve the problem? Based on this, you will have to prioritize the positioning required in the video. 

Facebook® Ad Video Script – Phase 1 – The Problem 

(Max 20 Seconds)

The opening part of the video needs to address the problem that you solve. This has to answer the question for your audience what’s in this for me? Why should I listen to the rest of this video?

Start with a big hook. They need to understand the problem that you are promising to solve. Through your explanation of the pain they face, you are building a connection. 

This should be no longer than 20 seconds in duration. 

Facebook® Ad Video Script – Phase 2 – Authority 

(Max 5 Seconds)

In the next phase, you have to build authority. You have to answer the question why should they listen to you?

This is not about telling them that you’re brilliant, but it’s about subtly positioning how you have helped people just like them to get the result you are promising in the past. 

It’s demonstrating how your previous experience and knowledge are invaluable and instilling confidence that you are the person who can finally help them break through and get the result that they want.

This phase should be no longer than 5 seconds in duration. 

Facebook® Ad Video Script – Phase 3 – Solution 

(Max 20 Seconds)

In Phase 1 you’ve introduced the problem, now you need to explain the solution to this problem. Ultimately the solution is to sign up for the Lead Magnet or purchase the product on offer but you have to give them some insights into what that solution is.

Having given them insights into your strategies to solve their problem you then link it to the lead magnet or product that you are offering.

Facebook® Ad Video Script – Phase 4 – Call To Action 

(Max 15 Seconds)

And then finally, comes the call to action. You have to give them the exact steps that they need to take to get their hands on the solution to their problem. If possible it is massively powerful to work in a description of the transformation that they could achieve with your Lead Magnet or product and how their life will improve.

Now let’s look at the format of the video. Most videos are based on a 16:9 resolution with the two most common formats being 1280X720 or 1920X1080 

Videos Ads on Facebook® work best in a 1:1 square resolution so 1280X1280 or 1920X1920.

If you record your video in a 16:9 format the best approach is to place the video in the middle of a square background with an attention-grabbing headline at the top and subtitle in the space underneath the video. 

One of the big reasons why this is so effective is because the square shape takes up more space on the Facebook® feed. This is especially true on mobile where the majority of your ad views will come from.

Square video ads take up the majority of a mobile screen when scrolling and you can use the headline above the ad to catch people’s attention as they scroll in a manner that the native Ad headline doesn’t. It’ll take up the whole screen. You want to command that area. 

Experiment with the color of the background for the square ad our goal is to stop the scroll and I have found that brighter colors tend to gain more attention than softer pastel colors. 

And finally, your subtitles. And, I know this can take time, but if you can animate the words by including emojis, underlining specific words, or even just bolding some keywords it makes a huge difference to your ad performance. 

Copywriting Framework to Look your Facebook® Ads Through

Your Ad Copy will make or break the success of your Facebook® Ad Campaigns. Unfortunately, nobody can tell you what will work best for you. 

What I can tell you however is apply the principles from the earlier sections in this series – Profitable Facebook Ads: Crafting A Knockout Offer and Your Step-By-Step Formula to Landing Page Optimization and Profitable Facebook Ad Campaigns you are going to be 5 steps ahead of your competition.

  1. Connect with your audience through their self-interest. 

  2. Answer the question: What’s in it for me? 

  3. Demonstrate that you can solve a very specific pain point. 

  4. Promise a specific outcome, a highly desirable outcome. 

  5. Painting a compelling future, 

  6. Make a compelling offer, that somebody would feel stupid to turn down

But now I want to dig a little deeper into a framework you can apply when thinking about drafting and optimizing your Facebook® Ad copy. Using this framework will ensure that your ads jump off the timeline and grab your Perfect-Fit Clients by the collar….in a good way.

There are four components to an irresistible offer that make people sit up and pay attention.

These components sit nicely together in an equation described excellently by Alex Hormozi. I like to call this the Shut Up And Take My Money Equation.

This equation can be deployed in paid offers when drafting sales page copy, or they can be deployed in your ad and landing page copy for no-cost offers. 

Remember that the offer of your ad is to get people to take action and visit your opt-in page and prime them for the next step. If your offer is not strong enough to get them to invest the time, effort, and energy to visit your landing page, your ad will fall flat on its face. 

There are two drivers on top of the equation and two drivers on the bottom of the equation. The goal is to increase the two drivers on top of the line and decrease the two drivers below the line.

So What Are The Four Elements of The Equation?

Irresistible Offer Equation – Part 1 – Primary Outcome

This is your main promise. This is what your Perfect-Fit Client wants. It’s the expression and feeling and experiences that your Perfect-Fit Client has envisaged in their mind. This is the gap between their current reality and the life that they want. 

Your job is to help them bridge the gap and to paint a vivid picture of what their life will be like once they achieve their innermost desires. But what is it that people desire? Well, Josh Kaufman explains five core human drivers that influence behavior as follows:

Core Human Driver 1 – Drive To Acquire

This is the drive to acquire, this is the desire to collect material and immaterial things like a car or influence. While it is normally easy to see how this driver applies to our offer we have to ensure that we fully understand what it is that our Perfect-Fit Client wants to “acquire”.

Remember not everyone feels driven to acquire a Ferrari. We have to be extremely careful that the promises we make are fully aligned with (…firstly… what we can deliver) what our Perfect-Fit Client truly desires. 

Core Human Driver 2 – Drive To Bond 

This is the desire to love and to feel valued in your relationships with others. While a driver like, acquire, might be easier to see it applies to our lead magnets and offers, of equal strength could be the drive to bond, either through connecting into your community or helping people connect and bond with others in their life. 

Core Human Driver 3 – Drive To Learn 

This is the desire to satisfy our curiosity. As Course Creators and Membership Site Owners we might get excited at the prospect of seeing the Drive To Learn, but a huge word of warning, most people don’t want to learn more. They want the outcome of what learning will bring about. 

Core Human Driver 4 – Drive To Defend

This is the desire to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our property. The drive to defend is a massive, massive trigger. Remember, people will do more to avoid pain than they will to attain pleasure? How will what you’re offering to prevent future pain for your Perfect-Fit Client?

Core Human Driver 5 – Drive To Feel

And then finally, a drive to feel, which is the desire for emotional experiences like pleasure or excitement. In many ways, the ultimate transformation that you are providing will end up here. Why do people want increased business success? why do they want to make more money? Why do they want to learn more? Why do they want to defend? Well, more often than not it is to secure or protect a future pleasurable state.

You need to weave each of the drivers above through your offer understanding how what you’re describing is triggering one of the above drivers.

The more drivers your offer connects with and the better you communicate with those drivers, the more attractive you will become. You might not necessarily be able to hit on all the core human drivers. 

But the more you hit on, the more that you will connect with people’s innermost desires, and the more that you will move people to take the action that you want.

Irresistible Offer Equation – Part 2 – Perceived Likelihood of Achievement

The second above-the-line element is the perceived likelihood of achievement. The more certainty you can provide as to the likelihood of success, the more chance that they will take the action that you prescribe. 

There are lots of ways you can do this including risk reversals, guarantees, showing how you’ve helped others achieve the promised result building authority, and social proof. 

One of the strongest ways to reinforce this for people is through sharing success stories of your previous clients as you not just say that you can produce a result but you are demonstrating how you have achieved this for others.

Look through your ad copy and identify where you’ve spoken to the likelihood of achievement. How are you setting them up for success and providing them with the belief that they need? And remember, this is belief in themselves, belief in you, and belief in the process or the methodology that you’re using. 

Part 1 & 2 sit above the line of the Irresistible Offer Equation and to increase the likelihood of someone accepting our offer we want to increase and maximize both of these elements.

Irresistible Offer Equation – Part 3 – Time Delay

How can you guarantee quick wins? We’re all impatient. We all want results right now. What is the very shortest time frame that you can promise some results? 

It doesn’t even need to be the full transformation. It could be just the first stop on your journey. If you can decrease the time delay that somebody will achieve their dream outcome and you can also give them a guaranteed likelihood of achievement, now things are starting to heat up. 

In fact, fast beats free. As in, the monetary cost is not as important as the timelines to achieving the promised transformation. This is one of the reasons why I always say people need to be able to consume and achieve the transformation of a lead magnet within 15 minutes of gaining access to it. 

If it’s any longer than that, people will lose interest. And more importantly, you can’t provide a promise a speedy result.

Irresistible Offer Equation – Part 4 – Effort & Sacrifice

The fourth element, the second below the line, is effort and sacrifice. I said it once and I’ll say it again, people are lazy. They all want results right now without lifting a finger. 

This is where streamlining your process, getting to the core of the issue, and cutting through as much of the clutter as possible is absolutely essential. If you can show people how your process can save them energy and effort and sacrifice, they will love you for it. But remember, this can’t just be empty promises. 

This is one of the reasons why the success of your Facebook® ad campaign is highly dependent not just on your ads and your Facebook ad strategy, but on the overall premise and promise of your funnel. 

You have to make sure that you have thought about the steps that you’re giving people. Cut through all the pain and effort people need to go through to get the result you promise, and package it in an extremely easy, usable, and frictionless process.

The combination of how you verbalize these four elements in your ad, will in a large part, dictate the success of your ad. From an optimization perspective, continuously refining your copy through these lenses is massively powerful. 

You may not be able to bring all four elements into play, and that’s fine, but when you do, your ad copy will take off. And every time you tweak your ad copy, you need to ask yourself the question, have I increased the dream outcome or the perceived likelihood of achievement? Have I decreased the perceived time delay or the effort and sacrifice? 

If you can’t see how you can do any of these, then perhaps you have to find a different angle or approach to your Facebook® ads and what you’re promoting.

And remember…

Optimization is a process. There’s no wrong and right. It’s a massive experiment. I outlined my process for approaching the optimization of your landing page in the last video of this series, and it still applies here. 

An approach to optimization:

  1. Research
  2. Hypothesis
  3. Prioritization
  4. Testing
  5. Learning

Be methodical and always keep an optimization diary. Document your hypothesis, the changes made, and the results, so that once you’ve conducted your experiment, you don’t fall into the trap of repeating the same experiment in the future.

So today we’ve looked at an approach for fine-tuning your Facebook® ads. Remember, this is a skill that you have to develop over time. There’s no one-size-fits-all. The most important thing is that you have a structured approach, you learn to read the data, and act accordingly. 

We started with setting your ads up to facilitate optimization, e looked at some ideas for optimizing your Facebook® ad images and video, and finally, how to think about optimizing your copy. 

So let me know what challenges you face with your Facebook ads, whether you’re just getting started or a seasoned pro looking to scale your ad campaigns.

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Your Step-By-Step Formula to Landing Page Optimization and Profitable Facebook Ad Campaigns

Micheal O'Neill

Your Step-By-Step Formula to Landing Page Optimization and Profitable Facebook Ad Campaigns

Table of Contents

Your ability to optimize your opt-in and your offers is one of the key skills that you need to develop as an online entrepreneur. Very rarely you will ever hit a home run. 

Without the ability to optimize your landing pages, your cost per lead will be high, meaning your Facebook® ads won’t be profitable, and you won’t be able to attract fresh, Perfect-Fit prospects into your world. 

This will result in list stagnation and ultimately your online business will falter and you won’t succeed in spreading the transformation that you know you can help people achieve in the world. 

But when you nail your conversion rate optimization, you will be able to profitably attract Perfect-Fit Clients into your world. You will be able to attract leads and recover a positive ROI in the short term and those leads will then be primed to convert when you promote your primary offers to them. 

And the result of all this is that you’ll be able to invest with certainty in your lead generation process, attracting streams of Perfect-Fit Clients into your world and ultimately amplifying your message and impact.

If you’re an online course creator or a membership site owner who is about to launch a Facebook ad campaign, who has a Facebook ad campaign that’s underperforming or you have a Facebook ad campaign that’s working well and you now want to scale well, this post is for you. 

Today, I’m going to look specifically at your landing or opt-in page optimization, but the same basic principles apply to sales or offer pages. 

I’m going to look at three core elements of landing page optimization. 

  1. Page layout and the key elements to be included. 
  2. The five core elements of landing page optimization. 
  3. How to approach conversion rate optimization.

It isn’t always evident just how important landing page optimization is until you analyze the figures. Let’s say you have a Facebook® Ad campaign driving traffic to an opt-in page and that page is converting 20% of people who visit.

At a 20% conversion rate, each lead is costing you $10.

If you optimize your landing page and take the conversion rate from 20% to 40%, with everything else remaining constant, your cost per lead will drop from $10 to $5. 

A 40% conversion rate is ok but it is possible to do so much better. In most campaigns, this should be your starting target rate. So what if we were to go a bit further, and optimize the  conversion rate from 20% to 80%, 

At an 80% conversion rate, with everything else remaining constant, your CPL will drop from $10 to $2.50. 

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a powerful tool in reducing your cost per lead. The reason why I place so much emphasis on CRO is that it’s next to impossible to get the sort of improvement possible through CRO  from tweaking your Facebook® Ad audience, or creatives. 

CRO It may not be the most glamorous part of Facebook® advertising, but it’s the part that will provide the greatest return on investment, especially in the early phases of your campaigns.

Key Components of a Landing Page

Often, we want to get as much stuff as possible onto our landing page to convince somebody that they should sign up. But what I have found in practice is the simpler and more straightforward your page is to start with, the more effective and higher converting your landing page will be. 

Over time, when you start applying these optimization concepts, you will be able to add more content because you will know what to test, how to test, and how to track people’s reactions.

When designing your opt-in page, especially for a free lead magnet, a key concept is; less is more. When starting out make sure you keep your opt-in page to the depth of a single screen. Focus on getting all relevant information onto this one page while leaving lots of “white space”. 

Here are the elements you want to include on your opt-in page. 

Headline

First, you have a headline, which is probably the most important element of your landing page. Your headline is a couple of words, six to 10 words max, which describes exactly the premise of your lead magnet, in order words, what your Perfect-Fit Client can hope to achieve or avoid when they implement your lead magnet.

Subhead

Then comes your subhead which gives them some further qualification on your headline. Your subhead will be 1-2 lines of text max. The purpose of your Headline and Subhead is to outline the key benefits of your offer and how their life will be better once they have put what you have to offer into action.

Body Copy

Then you’ve got your body copy, which is normally 3-7 bullet points underneath your subhead. When you are drafting your body copy don’t just tell people what is in your lead magnet. Tease them with the opportunity of what is possible for them once they have the knowledge you are about to share in their life.

Image

Every landing page should contain an image. The image should connect with your Perfect-Fit Prospect. Either it should represent their struggle, their opportunity, or what they are going to get when they give you their email address. 

Another approach is to build the bond between you and your prospect by using a photo of you which in some way supports the transformation that you have to offer through your lead magnet. 

Registration Button

The registration button speaks for itself. This is the button that someone will click to enter their details and register for the lead magnet. But don’t discount the impact that the button has on CRO. I have seen simple tweaks to button color and text bring about 10%-15% conversion rate improvements on landing pages that were already converting highly. As we see below in the Call To Action section the impact on your CRO also have a registration button and an image. 

Keep your landing page as simple as possible, to begin with. The best way to think about is. If you don’t know that a specific word is moving your prospect towards opt-in, there is a chance it will repel them. Individual or lose words can have a detrimental impact on conversion rates so the best approach is to start light and over time as you learn the language, phrases, and words that drive conversion you can start expanding your copy. 

What’s The Goal of Your Landing Page?

The goal of your landing or opt-in page is to connect on an emotional level with your Perfect-Fit Client. You want to be very specific about what they will experience when they get your lead magnet into their hands and in particular how their life will look, sound, feel and in very quantifiable ways be better than it was before they signed up. 

In addition to the emotion, you also have to give them some hard logic to back up their decision. 

As humans, we make decisions based on our emotions, but we need to have the logic to justify our decision.. We want to believe that we are logical beings, so you need to give some logic for our Perfect-Fit Client to cling to. Enough logic that they say, “Yes, this makes sense”

But be under no illusion what drives our decision-making process is our emotions and this is where the majority of underperforming landing pages fall down.

If you can imagine a better future for your Perfect-Fit Client that even they themselves have not seen and paint a vivid picture for how they can achieve that through your offer that is when you have dialed in a knock-out, no-brainer offer.

You can 

There are two different approaches when it comes to painting a better future for your Perfect-Fit Client. You can go positive and  move them towards attaining some pleasure or you can help them move away from something negative or some pain point., 

An unfortunate fact of human nature is that we will do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. Many people try to resist this but 9 times out of 10, when you test it, avoidance of pain or highlighting the negative will tend to get you slightly better results. 

But still, I am an eternal optimist so I always run positive v negative split-tests to find out which one performs better in a campaign.

When it comes to the order of optimization I always work in the order listed above:

  1. Headline
  2. Subhead
  3. Body Copy
  4. Image
  5. Registration Button

4 Core Elements of Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization

Design

There are certain tried and tested, proven design features that increase opt-ins and those that decrease opt-ins.

One of the big ones that I shared above was getting the majority of your key information above the fold. People need to have all the information they need to make a decision and the ability to enact that decision without scrolling. 

The only reason you should have information below the fold is for people who are sitting on the fence and need a little push over the edge before signing up.

Far too often, I go to opt-in pages and the button to register is below the fold. Most people land on a page and then they just bounce off it. If they don’t see that there’s some action that they’re being guided to take, so guess what they take the easy action and just leave the page.

Now putting the key information above the fold isn’t an excuse for shoving hundreds of words into a small space. It is a distillation process. What are the fewest words which can have the maximum impact?

From here it is a matter of how the key information is highlighted? You want to have your headline in a larger font. Your headline should be the most prominent thing that people see on the page. 

Then their eyes should be drawn to the subhead. Your subhead will be in smaller font but bigger than your body copy. The headline and the subhead should be the most prominent elements on the page. The acid test is; if the page was to be flashed in front of someone for only 3 seconds would they be able to recount the general gist of the headline and subhead?

And remember simple designs are going to win the conversion battle. People need to be able to see the key information on the page and not be distracted by overly distracting elements or difficult to make out elements. 

Make good use of contrast, don’t place light fonts on light backgrounds. No matter how good something looks, if someone has to grapple for even a second to read it you have lost them. Make sure your message jumps off the page and hits them between the eyes.

And when I say landing page design, effective landing pages don’t have to be beautifully designed.. Very often plain, ugly landing pages convert at a higher level. 

The most important thing is not how beautiful the page looks but that a visitor knows exactly what they are going to get, it answers the question of what’s in it for me?, how their life is going to be improved and tells them clearly the action that they need to take.

Copy

The second key Conversion Rate Optimization factor is your page copy. The most important element of your opt-in or landing page copy is your headline quickly followed by your subhead. You have to be specific, you have to verbalize your promise in concrete terms. Your copy has to future pace your Perfect-Fit Client into a world where they can experience in real terms the transformation that you are offering. 

Broad promises like “follow my method to improve your guitar playing” or “become a better guitar player” just won’t cut it. You have to promise people a specific outcome like “learn to play 10 songs, back-to-back, in front of an audience, within 3 months, while practicing for just 10 minutes a day”.

What difference do you think the above would make to your conversion rate?

CTA – Call To Action

The third key Conversion Rate Optimization factor is your call to action. If want to get somebody to click a button and to open up the opt-in and submit their contact details. The placement of the button and the copy on the button are hugely important. 

First off the button has to be above the fold or visible on the first screen of someone who lands on the opt-in or landing page. And remember, the majority of traffic coming from Facebook® ads, will visit your opt-in page on mobile. 

This means that it is even more important that the opt-in button appears above the fold on mobile. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you should be designing from a mobile-first perspective with the desktop design a secondary consideration,

But it isn’t just about button placement. You also have to make sure that the CTA on the button or button text is benefit-driven. CTA’s like “register now” or “sign up now” are not very effective. Instead, link it to the benefit or transformation that you can provide.

Continuing my guitar example above, one possibility for the button text could be “Discover The Easy Way To Learn 10 Songs In 3 Months”

Bonus points if you can add scarcity to the CTA.

Registration Form

The fourth element is your registration form. Every opt-in page will have some type of form which enables people to submit their details. There are two distinct approaches to opt-in form design which I test on every campaign I run. 

The first is where all the fields that someone needs to fill out are visible on the opt-in page and the second is where the fields of the opt-in form are not visible until a visitor clicks the button to register. Both of these are valid options and I have yet to find conclusive evidence across multiple industries and avatars as to whether one converts at a higher rate than the other which is why I always test each format.

For every extra piece of data that you ask for on your form, you are going to reduce your conversion rate. 

For example, if you ask for the first name, last name, email address, company name, address, phone number, then you are going to have a lower conversion rate than if you only ask for an email address. 

In my own email marketing, I like using somebody’s first name. So I will always at least ask for the first name and email, however, some hugely successful marketers don’t. They just ask for the person’s email address, because it increases their conversion rates.. 

You will need to find the balance in your business and figure out the information that you specifically need from your opt-in form. In the majority of cases, email addresses and first names will suffice. 

However, if you wanted to add in additional data fields, let’s say you’re doing a webinar and you want to improve your show-up rate, you could ask for a person’s cell number. In this instance, a multi-stage form could be a good idea. 

If you do want to ask for multiple data points, you can show the email address and first name fields on the first screen. When they click submit on that, then they get presented with a second screen where they are asked for further information, in this case, their cell phone number. 

This approach works because you are evoking an escalation of commitment. Somebody puts in their email address and their name then they click submit. They think that’s job done. And now they get asked for additional information. At this stage, they’ve already committed to the process and they feel compelled by their need for consistency to finish out the process. That’s why the multi-stage form works so well.

How To Practically Implement Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization?

 

It’s very important to be methodical with your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). That means documenting as you go, because on longer-term projects, you’re going to make a round of optimizations, and sometime later, you might end up trying the same or similar optimization again. 

If you don’t have a documented approach to your Conversion Rate Optimization, you’re going to end up redoing things and losing the outcome or learning from the optimization. Start an optimization diary and document every change you make.

The cycle that I like to follow when it comes to CRO is as follows:

  1. Analysis
  2. Hypothesis
  3. Prioritization
  4. Test
  5. Feedback & Implement

The first thing is an analysis which will normally start with your stats. If you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, have either a Google Sheets or an Excel doc set up where you can track the daily performance of the ads and the daily performance of your opt-in page. It is hugely important not to rely on the stats from Facebook alone. You need to track the actual registration through your opt-in page or your email platform. 

Due to the iOS 14 update, Facebook® isn’t going to be able to report on everybody, who registers through your opt-in page so you’ll be presented with a  cost per lead in Facebook® of a  certain rate. Often, however, you will find that you end up with more email addresses than Facebook® reports, which will have an impact on your real CPL. 

Based on the analysis of your stats you can then start to build your hypothesis. 

For example, I had a Facebook® Ad campaign that was underperforming. Our cost per lead sucked, to put it mildly. This was a campaign that we had spent months on with a significant upfront investment, and it looked like it was tanking. 

But a change to just 33 words not just brought the campaign back from the brink, but turned it into a wildly profitable and successful campaign. We were launching a webinar series on which an offer was to be made for a digital product. We ran this campaign by the book even hiring a top copywriter with serious chops to draft the promotional content for the webinar, including the webinar registration page. 

When it came to launch, we were so excited to see this take off, but it stuttered badly. We struggled to get leads from our Facebook ads and the ones, we got were far too high a price to make the campaign work in any way and be any way profitable.

We looked at the Facebook ads and the stats. The click-through rate was okay. We’re getting traffic to the page, but that’s where the campaign was breaking down, it was clear that the biggest issue was not the ads themselves, but the conversion rate of the opt-in page. 

Having analyzed the stats we formed our hypothesis. There were many changes and optimizations that we could have made but we had a feeling that the headline and subhead were causing the majority of the problems.

So with that information in hand, we Prioritized the optimization of the headline and the subhead and moved into the testing phase. We ran a split test between the original page and the revised one, and instantly we saw a result.

Within 3 iterations we had boosted the opt-in rate from just under 20% to 78%, bringing the CPL from $28 to just $7. But the benefits did end there because we took our learning from the opt-in page optimization, fed it back into the optimization process, and applied it to the ads which drove our CPC and ultimately our CPL even lower.

And remember, landing page optimization is a process. It’s not a matter of getting it perfect, it’s just a matter of getting it started. Because 90% of marketing is your ability to plan, act, reflect and refine. Plan for what you want, take action, reflect on your results and then refine your approach. 

And remember, if you ever have a campaign that is not performing how you would like, or the conversion rate of your opt-in page is struggling, we are here to support you, simply book your FREE Focus Strategy Session today.

 

 

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Profitable Facebook Ads: Crafting A Knockout Offer

Micheal O'Neill 2 Comments

Profitable Facebook Ads: Crafting A Knockout Offer

Table of Contents

If you’re an online course creator, or a membership site owner, and either you’re about to launch a Facebook ad campaign, have a Facebook ad campaign that’s underperforming, or one that is working well and now you want to scale it, then this post is for you. 

In this post, we are going to look at your offer and specifically, as it relates to your Facebook ads and your downstream funnels, whether that be a lead magnet, opt-in, webinar registration, or direct-to-sale ads.

For me, your offer is one of the most important elements in any marketing campaign. Most people spend ages coming up with beautifully architected marketing copy and yet throw together an offer in a rush which is a real shame because every time you do this you are leaving lots of money on the table after doing all the hard work.

But before we jump into this, I would like to challenge your thinking around offers. When the word offer is mentioned, most people automatically think in terms of the description of the deliverables for a paid product or service. 

And this certainly is true, but I would like you to start thinking of an offer in terms of any time you ask somebody to take an action. In essence, this means that every piece of marketing contains an offer. 

Whether you want to challenge people to change their opinions or their mindset, whether you want them to visit a landing page or whether you want them to register for a lead magnet or even buy a $7 product or a $4,997 product. In every instance, you are making an offer. 

And the beautiful thing about offers is that they are fractal. In any marketing campaign, you’re going to have these stacks of offers to get somebody from the beginning of a campaign to the end of the campaign.

Both micro and macro offers follow the same approach and the principles that we’re going to discuss today will apply equally. 

Without a strong offer, your Facebook ads will flop, your campaigns will struggle to get off the ground, your business growth will be slow and painful, you’ll continuously feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a mountain. Your promotions will be inconsistent. Sometimes you’ll strike it lucky, other times you’ll struggle. Ultimately, you will fail to have the impact that you know you can have in the world. 

But if you nail your offer through your Facebook ads to your promotions, then you’ll consistently outperform your expectations for both ads and campaigns. You will attract streams of Perfect-Fit Clients with ease, your business will go from strength to strength effortlessly, your Facebook ads costs will drop and your cost per lead along with your cost per acquisition will be slashed. 

So ultimately, your profitability will go through the roof.

The Role Of The Offer When It Comes to Launching, Optimizing, And Scaling Profitable Facebook Ad Campaigns

Offers are one of the key 80/20 levers in your business. Focusing on honing your offer will produce more revenue and clients than almost any other single aspect of your business. A knockout offer will carry poor marketing, but the best marketing in the world will never overcome a poor offer.

One of my clients had been struggling in his online business for years. He had an amazing product that got fantastic results for anybody who followed his process. 

The testimonials from people who went through his course were simply astonishing, and he knew when somebody experienced his course, they’d be hooked for life. But he struggled to gain traction, build his list, and get people to register for his course. 

He knew his business could be doing so much better, but he just couldn’t figure out what the problem was. When we sat down and analyzed his business, then the issue became clear. He was lacking one of the key ingredients needed to fuel an online business, and that was a knockout offer. 

And while it was clear that this was the issue with his primary course, what amazed him was how this issue permeated through so many other areas of his business and his funnel. He was struggling because he didn’t understand the power of a knockout offer.

One thing that cannot be highlighted enough is you have to know your avatar before crafting a knockout offer so that you can speak the same language and answer your Perfect-Fit Clients’ questions and objections with your offer. 

You have to be able to read a page in your Perfect-Fit Client’s diary to them in such a way that they feel you are looking over their shoulder. One way of getting to know your avatar better is through surveys. This is possible if you have an email list or a following on Social.

Ask people specific questions about what problems they’re having, what pain points they experience, what do they want their life to be like? Another source of information is Reddit. Go find the Reddit that specifically deals with your core topic in your business, spend time, research, pick out the specific language people use, copy and paste their words from Reddit into a Word doc. 

What are their pain points? What do they want? What are their goals? What are their ambitions? What are their fears? Where are they feeling disrespected? 

I also love the strategy of getting involved in communities, like Facebook groups. Get in there, ask questions, participate, observe, look at what other questions people are asking, look at the answers that people are giving. All of this will help you build a very detailed profile of who your avatar is, what they want. 

Once you are armed with this data, your job is to then link both the attainment of the positive and avoidance of the negative to your product, course,, membership or coaching program. 

Hopefully by the end of this post, you will be inspired to see every step along your Value Ascension Roadmap as an opportunity to craft a knockout offer to help your Perfect-Fit Client achieve their ultimate transformation, one step at a time.

Your First Job Is To Answer The Question: What’s In It For Me?  

When it comes to offers, the first thing you have to do is make sure people can answer the question,  what’s in it for me? 

Your offer has to answer a very specific problem or pain point.

For example, if I was to put an offer to you, “Hey, please donate $5 to UNICEF.” Sure, that’s just a noble thing to do, and maybe some of you might take me up on the offer. 

But if I was to put a slightly different offer to you. “Please donate $5 to feed a family of three in Ethiopia for a week.” Now that is a different proposition. 

The difference was evoked by the specificity of the second offer. It answers a very specific problem and speaks to a very specific, desirable outcome. 

One problem that I often see with offers is they’re very bland and generic. Using the example of learning to play the guitar. Nobody wants to be “better” at playing the guitar, they want to be able to play 10 songs back-to-back in front of an audience in three weeks, practicing only 10 minutes per day. Again, think about how different those two offers are.

In marketing we always have to overcome one major human trait; people are inherently lazy. This isn’t a slight on anyone, in particular,  it is how we have evolved. 

Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that humans were living as hunter-gatherers and the conservation of energy was essential for survival. If it wasn’t hunting, humping, or contributing to the tribe, it wasn’t deemed important. 

We may have fancy iPhones, cars, and all the technology in the world, but we haven’t out-evolved our primal instincts. You need to smack people over the head with why what you’re saying matters and how it will make their life better in specific terms. 

They have to know why they should expel calories to take the action that you are asking them to take. So it has to answer the question, what is in this for me? 

Future Pace Their Experience And Make It Real

Paint a picture of how their life is going to be made better by whatever it is that you’re offering. Never assume that people will connect the dots, spell it out. 

One framework that I find especially beneficial for this is the FDE benefits framework.

F: Functional Benefits

The F stands for functional benefits, or how it improves their lives. If you were to buy a car for example, how it will improve your life? Your car will get you from A to B, it will keep you dry while doing so and you won’t have to clean up horse poo. These are the functional benefits. 

D: Dimensionalized Benefits

The D stands for dimensionalized benefits. This is where you paint a picture for people of how the functional benefits look in their lives. So if I was selling a car, I’d paint a picture of them driving through the countryside with the top-down on their convertible with the wind blowing in their hair, and enjoying the car. 

E: Emotional Benefits

The third element of this framework is the emotional benefits. This is how your Perfect-Fit Clients will feel after they experienced the dimensionalized benefits. Having driven through the countryside with the wind in their hair and enjoying the drive, how will they feel after that? 

You are future pacing them, bringing them on a journey to show them what life will be like for them once they have experienced whatever it is that you’re offering.

Package Your Offer So It Feels Like A No-Brainer

The prominent marketer Todd Brown talks about a SIN Offer. This stands for:

  • S: Superior
  • I: Irresistible
  • N: No-brainer

When you think about how your offer is superior, think about how your offer is better than all the other offers out there. 

If you struggle with this intellectually and you honestly don’t see how your offer is superior, then I advise you to go back to your avatar research and see what pain points or desires you have not included in your offer. 

If we’re looking at an offer from a lead magnet perspective, and you don’t feel that it is in some way superior to other content that’s out there, maybe you should spend some time working on it until you have found an angle that makes it superior.

Irresistible; your offer has to create an emotion that draws people in. Here comes again the importance of your avatar research, because you wouldn’t be able to reach your Perfect-Fit Clients on an emotional level unless you truly understand their language. 

And last but not least, your offer has to be a no-brainer. So somebody has to see it and go, “Yes of course, why would I not accept this?” 

Imagine someone offered you a brand new Ferrari in the morning, no strings attached, no hidden gotchas, would you accept it? Of course, you’d accept it, why wouldn’t you accept it? Even if you have no interest in cars, you’re still going to accept it As you could still sell it, and make a lot of money. 

Every Action Has A Cost: Price v’s Value

Before pricing an offer, let’s look at the different components of an offer, like deliverables, features, and advantages. If your Facebook Ad is driving people to a lead magnet Think about deliverables for the lead magnet, what is a Perfect-Fit Prospect going to get? A checklist? A video? A guide? A fill-in-the-blanks template? 

Then think about the features of your lead magnet. What would that deliverable enable someone to do? If somebody had this guide, checklist, or video, what would that enable them to do better in their life? If they were able to do that “thing” better in their life what would that mean to them? Would they be able to earn more money, would they be able to save more money? Would it save them time or give them more free time. If they had more time what would they do with that time? 

Would they be less stressed and more relaxed, would they be fitter, healthier or stronger? 

And if any of the above is true, what would that be worth to them? 

It’s important to realize that everything that you ask somebody to do has a cost or a price. 

If you ask somebody to think about something, there is a cost to them, there’s a cost of energy, there’s a cost of time. So that is still a price even though you’re not getting paid.. 

If you ask somebody to go from a Facebook ad to a landing page, there is a price that they’re paying, they’re paying with their time, they’re paying with their energy, they are paying with their attention. 

Again, a lead magnet, even though it’s free, there is still a cost. The price that someone pays is their email address. The cost that they are paying is letting you into their email inbox. So there is a real price. 

3 80/20 Levers For Effective Offers

Risk reversal is something that makes a huge difference in the decision-making process. And again, you might say risk reversal does not apply to free products. But that’s not necessarily true. 

For example, if you scroll down to the bottom of this post you will see I have an offer to apply for a Focus Strategy Session and I give a risk reversal. If you come to that Focus Strategy Session and you do not find it useful, I will personally send you a $100 Amazon gift card. 

Risk reversals work because they are guarantees, providing psychological ease. And here’s the funny thing about them, they’re rarely called upon, so normally, they don’t cost a huge amount to offer. 

But you need to be careful, the bigger your risk reversal, the clearer your guidelines are as to what people’s responsibilities are in achieving the desired outcome. 

Bonuses are the second thing that gets people to take the action you want within the timeframe you want. 

If there is a reward for taking an action within a certain timeframe people will be more likely to take action. This can be used for commenting, sharing, lead magnets, webinars, course registration, membership subscription, or any other action you like.

There are two approaches to bonuses. The first one is that the bonus answers specific objections that people may have in taking the action that you’re asking them to take. The second one is that the bonuses help you get the same transformation as the offer only faster. 

And then finally, scarcity, which is one of the strongest triggers of all. Here you need to give people a reason to respond and take action now and this is normally in the form of a deadline even though it can be combined with additional elements 

How Does This Practically Apply to Your Facebook Ad Campaigns? 

Profitable Facebook ad strategy is not just about the ad campaign, it’s about the entire funnel, and that’s the way you need to think of it. 

Your ability to craft a compelling offer doesn’t just kick in when it comes to them pulling out their credit card.

You are creating offers all the way through your funnel:

So let’s look at where that manifests itself. 

  • The offer of your image is to get people to stop scrolling.
  • The offer of your headline is to get people to read the first two lines of the Facebook ad copy.
  • The offer of the first two lines of text is to get people to read the body of the Facebook ad.
  • The offer in the Facebook ad is to get people to click the “learn more” button and visit the opt-in page.
  • The offer in the opt-in page is to get people to submit their email addresses.
  • And then if you have a mini front-end offer in place, now is when you’re asking people to put their hand in their pocket, pull out their credit card, and make a purchase.

The first thing that you need to do from a Facebook ads perspective is to stop people scrolling. How you do that is with the Ad image or video. These two elements are what’s going to capture your Perfect-Fit Client’s attention. 

Most people will not pay attention to the text or the headline until after the image or the video has triggered something for them. Native images tend to work better than graphically designed images, but I would always test this.. 

Facebook used to have a 20% text upper limit on their images, this has now been removed, but I still believe that less text is better when it comes to images. 

So if you are using text to push your offer, work on evoking curiosity. With videos, you have a bit more latitude where you verbalize your offer further throughout the video. 

The second element is your headline. Your headline has to answer the question, what’s in it for me? It has to be something concrete because the headline is what’s going to get them to pay attention to the first two lines of text of the ad. These first two lines are the most important part of the ad copy. Try to work your most powerful triggers into this portion of the ad.

If you’ve done your job with your image, video, your headline, and first two lines of text, chances are somebody could have already gone, clicked the learn more button, and visited your opt-in page. 

Then comes the Ad body copy. A well-drafted long-form copy will convert better than short-form but when you are getting started it is easier to get the short form to convert. Remember poorly drafted Ad copy will repel people and the longer the copy is the more chance you have to turn someone off. 

Your target audience is going to dictate in part the success of your campaign but if you give Facebook a large enough audience to work with they will do an amazing job for you. 

Then we get to our opt-in page. For a lead magnet, I like to keep it simple. I believe that you should have a very clear headline, subhead, a small number of bullet points, maybe four to five bullet points, and an image and that’s it. And these elements should convey your offer without relying on too much bloat. 

Hopefully, it is now clear how essential the role of a strong offer is throughout your entire funnel and why it’s a skill = that you as an online entrepreneur have to continuously work on developing. If you need help bullet-proofing your offer so that you can convert more traffic from Facebook ads, and have the lifestyle that you desire, book your FREE Mini-Strategy Session today.

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