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5 Unique Ideas For Growing Your List Using Facebook Ads (That Your Audience Will Love)

Growing your list, for the brands who are a little too “hip” for white papers, reports, and webinars…

We’ve got your back.

We’ve put together a go-to list for unique, out-of-the-box ideas for attracting prospects and turning them into leads using Facebook Ads.

Don’t get me wrong. Webinars, case studies, and reports all work well as lead magnets. But you won’t find those on this list.

This collection is for brands who want to spice things up!

We’ve seen all of these ideas work for our clients (plus, they’re all a lot of fun).

But before we jump in, let’s cover a few basic Facebook ad principles to help you get the best results for growing your list from whichever idea you put into action.

First, it’s important to understand that warm audiences convert better than cold. So, when asking for something from your audience (even an email address or other personal information), you’ll find that those who have interacted with you before will be more likely to exchange information or money for something they perceive as valuable than someone who has never heard of your brand before.

For that reason, you can think of these ideas as a middle milestone for your prospects.

Use these ideas to move colder prospects closer to a sale by inviting them to engage with your brand at a higher level… one that requires more commitment on their part.

They’ll need to exchange some information for the offering, but these offerings also might require some time on their part to really implement. So, they’ll typically work better with audiences who have had some exposure to your brand already.

And they’ll help cold prospects become warm prospects, so you can more easily market to them in the future when you’re ready to ask for a monetary exchange for a product or service.

Ok, back to the ideas!

The following are 5 unique ideas for growing your list using Facebook Ads.

Growing Your List - Timely Checklists:

If you’re ever at a loss for what to promote, just take a look at the calendar.

Seasons, holidays and industry events could all serve as inspiration for a unique lead magnet or promotion.

We’ve seen good results using seasonal, holiday or other “timely” checklists.

Is there something your prospects should do around back to school or Halloween time? Can you help them get prepared for an upcoming industry conference?

When the season, holiday or event is on your prospects mind, it’s easier to enter the conversation with a helpful checklist (and it’s easier to get your prospects to share since the event is already on their mind).

Here’s an example of a holiday specific checklist that will help in growing your list. In this instance, warm audiences performed better, resulting in 329 leads at a total of $3.86 per lead.

Note: remember to test different audiences, images and copy! All of the campaigns in the previous example made the same offer, but some performed significantly better than others.

Plans

Can you create an experience for your audience and help them walk through a challenge, each step of the way?

Consider putting together a digital kit to help them achieve a small goal.

Try meal plans, lesson plans or planning pages.

These kits could include a plan to follow for a day, a week or a month. It’s a good way to help the audience engage deeply with your brand and develop habits that they’ll want to continue (with your help).

Giveaways

Giveaways can get people talking about your brand and sharing the opportunity with their friends.

This is also a good way to develop a targeted list of people who are interested in a specific product, which means you can market that product to them again later on using Facebook’s retargeting options to show your ads to people who visited the giveaway page!

Ask the Expert

Are there questions that your audience asks over and over? Do they feel awkward asking in a public forum or on your social media pages?

Ask The Expert campaigns send prospects to Messenger where they get to ask you anything they want.

This is a nice way to engage with prospects on a personal level, but you can also create a process for responding where you’re sending prospects to blog posts, downloads or other goodies to get them closer to becoming leads.

Challenges

Why not create a challenge to inspire your audience to take action and reach a goal?

Run the challenge inside their inbox or right inside a Facebook group.

Make it fun with videos or live streams. Invite everyone to interact inside the group for added engagement!

So there you go…

5 unique ideas for growing your list using Facebook ads.

Which one do you think your audience will love the most?

In the meantime, why not find out what the “7 biggest mistakes you’re making with your Facebook Ads are”, and how to fix them:

7 Signs It’s Time To Try Facebook Ads

Do you know the signs that it’s time to try Facebook ads?

"In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create."

- David Ogilvy

In the last 20 years, the internet has made just about everything infinitely easier.

From ordering food to finding a date to seeing a doctor, consumers can access virtually any product or service they desire with unprecedented ease and convenience.

Conversely, the same is true on the business side.

Creating a product or service and offering it up to the right people has never been simpler.

But selling that product or service… that’s a bit more challenging.

As it has become easier and easier to make offers online, the competition has gotten fierce.

For many businesses, social media advertising is a viable solution and could lead to some impressive results (as long as you’re following the right strategy).

But is it for you? Let’s find out.

Following are 7 signs that you should be running ads on Facebook.

#1: It takes your customers more than one visit to make a buying decision

Most businesses fall into this category. People typically won’t make a purchase the very first time they are exposed to a product or brand. This isn’t true in all cases, but consider this… how likely would you be to drop $50,000 on a car you’ve never heard of or seen before?

Sure, that’s a big purchase…

But work your way down. Are you more likely to spend $20,000 on an unknown brand? $5,000? What about just $500?

Even smaller purchases requires a level of trust that is difficult to establish on the first touch.

Facebook Ads makes it easy to keep in touch with people who have visited your page, checked out products, or even who have abandoned their cart.

You may not have turned them into a customer the first time they stumbled across your site, but with a strategic campaign that nurtures and moves them along the customer journey, you’re more likely to turn that prospect into a customer at some point down the line than if they never run into your brand online again.

#2: Customers Can Easily Purchases Online

The less friction between seeing an ad and the customer getting what he or she wants, the better chance they will take action.

For example, it’s easier for most customers to enter their information online once they decide to make a purchase than it is for them to pick up the phone and order via an inbound call center.

Although this isn’t a hard and fast rule (we have clients who run local services who require customers to call or stop by), it helps.

(If you're interested in promoting a local store on Facebook, check out this post for more ideas).

#3 Your Business Is Scalable

If you’re able to service more customers without greatly increasing your costs, you may be a good candidate to try Facebook ads.

That’s because it’s possible to increase your profits while advertising without having to increase costs per goods sold.

For example, if you sell a digital product that won’t run out of stock, and if an influx of customers won’t strain your current team, you can scale your business using advertising and still maintain the same (or greater) profit margin.

#4 You Want To Target a Specific Niche? Try Facebook Ads

Facebook makes it easy to target a very specific avatar. If you know that your ideal customer falls within specific demographics, it only takes a few clicks to find them and show them timely messages.

The better you know your avatar, the better you can target them. Do you want to reach customers in the greater New York area who are between the ages of 25-55? Easy.

Want to target moms living in the U.S. who have children in grade school? You can do that too.

Whoever you want to reach, you can find them on Facebook, giving you a great reason to try Facebook ads

#5 It’s Time To Build An Audience

Facebook advertising is a great way to build an audience. If you are gearing up for a launch, an event, or otherwise want to build up an audience that is familiar with your brand, try Facebook ads; they can work for you.

Besides running ads to drive traffic to a sales page, ads can be used for a number of reasons. Try Facebook ads for building an audience using native video, or sending traffic to content on your website. Or, boost social posts to stay front of mind.

#6 You Have a High Converting Landing Page

If you have a landing page that converts well, why not send over more traffic?

If you try Facebook ads, they can give a quick boost of traffic that would otherwise be difficult to get organically.

If more targeted leads will lead to more customer conversions, you may benefit from paid ads. However, be careful. Simply sending traffic to a page that isn’t converting well won’t do any good.

Check out this article for more tips on optimizing your landing page for ad traffic.

# 7 When the Lifetime Value of A Customer Is Higher Than Advertising Costs- It's Time To Try Facebook ads

When deciding if paid ads will work for you or not, the bottom line is… is this good for business?

To answer that, it’s important to consider the lifetime value of a customer.

Calculate the profit on the initial sale, but also consider future sales.

Because you experience an acquisition cost every time you acquire a new customer, but pay significantly less (or virtually nothing) to sell to the repeat customers, it makes more sense to try Facebook ads when you can continue to sell to that same customer for a long time to come.

If the expected lifetime value is higher than what you’ll pay to turn that prospect into a customer, it’s worth it!

So… are you ready to try Facebook ads? If any of these 7 signs resonated with you, it’s worth taking a look!

In the meantime, why not find out what the “7 biggest mistakes you’re making with your Facebook Ads are”, and how to fix them:

3 Ways to Target Your Ideal Audience via Facebook Ads

Welcome to Facebook, a marketer’s paradise for finding your ideal audience!

Facebook has created a space for sharing. Users willingly hand over personal details daily. This includes major life events (babies, weddings, moves, job changes), family and relationship status, location, likes, demographics, and more.

This means there is a wealth of information about Facebook users, and it’s all available for advertisers to use.

Compared to other paid media, Facebook ads comes with a significant advantage: the ability to target your ideal audience and show them hyper-relevant ads.

The key is knowing who to target.

Without utilizing targeting, you might as well slap a billboard up on the highway. You’ll get the same amount of traffic. Neither audience will be qualified.

Mastering targeting means having the ability to reach a more qualified cold audience at any time.

In a previous post, we talked about the importance of creating and nurturing a warm, ideal audience. It’s true, warm audiences typically convert at a lower cost.

But knowing how to target a cold audience means you’re always able to keep your funnel full by turning a cold audience into warm, and warm into red hot buyers.

Today’s post is about creating these cold audiences inside your Facebook Ad account.

We’ll discuss 3 options for building a targeted, cold audience.

Ideal Audience Type 1: Lookalikes

If you’re already in business and you have sold your product or service, creating this first cold audience is easy.

All you’ll need is a list of email addresses for your current and past customers or clients.

An existing buyers list is the hottest list you have (they’ve already bought)! Essentially, we want to “clone” this list and create more people who are willing and able to purchase.

To do this, we need to head into Power Editor.

Jump up to the top menu. You’ll click to reveal a dropdown menu. Inside, find “Audiences.”

There, you’ll see a big blue button prompting you to “Create Audience.”

That button will give you some options for creating different types of ideal audiences. For this step, choose to create a custom audience.

Then, choose Customer File.

Here’s where you can upload your list of buyers. Make sure to name your audience something that makes sense to you so you know which list this is. Choose something like, “Buyers - Jan 2018.”

Now that you have your list of buyers ready to go, it’s time to create the lookalike ideal audience.

Head back into Audiences and select “Create Audience.”

This time, choose to create a lookalike audience.

Here’s what you’ll see.

If you click on “Source,” you’ll see options drop down. Find the audience that you just uploaded and select it.

This will now become the “source” for creating an entire ideal audience of Facebook users who are similar to your buyers.

You can now narrow by location and select the percentage of a population that you’d like to match. We tend to keep it at 1% (where 1% is most similar to your buyers list and 10% is least similar).

Give your ideal audience a name that makes sense to you, something like “Buyers Jan 2018 - Lookalike.”

If you’d like, you can repeat this process with other audiences such as your email list.

Ideal Audience Type 2: The Interest Bundle

When we work with a client, we take into account a few factors:

The geographical area the client serves (don’t target Asia if you only ship to North America, for example).
The client’s avatar (who the client intends to attract).
The client’s actual buyers (who the client actually attracts).

Using these factors, we create a set of rules that Facebook uses to target users who have the highest chance of converting into paying customers.

Before we get started, make sure you’ve created a list of your current and past buyers and named that audience. See above for details if you haven’t done that yet.

Next, head into “Audience Insights.”

Here, you’ll find information on all Facebook users!

It’s also a good place to find out who is connected to your page, and who makes up your saved and custom ideal audiences.

When you jump in, Facebook will immediately ask who you’re interested in learning about. For this case, select, “A Custom Audience.”

The screen will prompt you to add your custom audience. Choose the buyers list (it should be saved already if you’ve uploaded it).

Now, you can see insights into this audience.

Explore a little to find out the age, gender, location, household status, other page likes, the devices they use, and other information.

Some clients are surprised to see who their actual audience is. It isn’t always who a business intends to attract!

Take note on the composition of this ideal audience. This will be the basis of our interest bundle.

*Note: If you don’t have a buyer list to look at, just use the information about who you think your ideal customers are. It’s ok to start here. You can always modify as you collect more data.

Either way, it’s time to grab your notes and head back over to “Audiences.”

Again, select “Create Audience.”

This time, choose “Saved Audience.” Use your notes to create an audience of your choosing. Consider targeting age, gender, location, and other interests that your buyers have in common.

Ideal Audience Type 3: Video Views

If you’ve run ads for any length of time, you may already have a group of people who have seen videos from your page.

This is a great place to pull both warm and cold audiences from.

We consider a “warm” audience a user who has watched a larger percentage of a video, usually 50% - 75%.

However, Facebook also tracks users who’ve only watched 3 or 10 seconds. We consider these cold audiences because they probably haven’t watched enough of the video to know, like, or trust your brand at this point.

Here’s how to create your cold video view audience.

Again, jump into “Audiences,” like before.

Now, when you create a new audience, choose to create a custom audience again.

Choose to create an audience based on engagement, and then select Video as the type of engagement.

Now, you get to choose the videos to add to the list. Whichever videos you choose, Facebook will create an audience of people who watch part of that video. You get to decide how much they need to watch to be added to your cold audience.

Follow the prompts and answer the questions to complete the audience set up.

That’s it! These audiences are all ready to use inside your campaigns.

Now that you have 3 cold audiences to target, you can continue to add people to your funnel and move them closer to a conversion!

In the meantime, why not find out what the “7 biggest mistakes you’re making with your Facebook Ads are”, and how to fix them: