Being a business owner you know how important it is to maximize your marketing efforts to make your money back as fast as possible. The sad part is that so many businesses often try Facebook Ads and never make a return at all and so they quit. 

If you have a great offer that has people willing to buy it, you should be getting at least a 300% return on ad spend (ROAS).

That means for every $1 you spend on ads, you get $3 back in revenue. 

The most important part of having success (at least a 300% ROAS) with Facebook ads is creating and utilizing audiences within the platform.

What are the audiences?

Audiences are like buckets catching water from a flowing waterfall. It all starts with cold traffic…you know, the people that have never heard of your product or service.

Once that cold traffic has reached your site or engages with your content they become warmer. The engaged users should then be captured into another audience to distinguish them from the cold traffic.

As you can see the further these users get down your waterfall (aka sales funnel), the more we can then distinguish them and retarget them with different messages to eventually get them to make a purchase.

What do we do with them after they make a purchase?

We stay in front of them and send more offers their way that add value to what they just purchased or something else that is of relevance to their interests.

As you can see this becomes very cyclical and can get very granular as it is built out.

Many business owners, and frankly many marketers, don’t necessarily get this process.

The image below shows how your most profitable audiences will be from your warm and hot audiences.

Cold Audiences

Now that we have an overall understanding of the process lets go over cold audiences and the different types or ways we can put those together.

Interest-Based

Interest-based audiences are just that. Finding and targeting people based on what they are interested in such as outdoor recreation or find people who follow certain influencers such as Tony Robbins. 

There are really a ton of different interests and also behaviors that Facebook allows you to use when putting together these types of audiences. 

One of my favorite behaviors for e-commerce is targeting people that have a behavior of being an engaged shopper. 

That’s right I can target as many interests as I want and then require that those people must be an engaged shopper. These can be extremely powerful and Facebook has already done some of the work in filtering people who would be more likely to buy than not.

Building an interest based audience is a good idea for a cold traffic campaign. 

Look-a-Like Audiences

The look-a-like audiences are definitely a smart way to get new people to your website or offers. To get these though you already need data or a customer list. 

The way these work is you use the data that your pixel has built up over time. It’s best practice to have at least 2500 in your audience pool before creating a look-a-like. Facebook will take that data and then find people who closely match the pool you are creating the look-a-like from.

If it’s a customer list it will also take purchase values to rank so that it finds those closer to the people who have a higher purchase value from your list. 

In the past these are some of the best cold audiences I have run. If you give Facebook really good data it will find those who are more likely to convert. 

Cold Audience Exclusions

When I am running a cold campaign I like to keep them separate from my warm and hot traffic audiences. To do this I will exclude anyone who has engaged with a post or ad on my Facebook and Instagram pages in the last 90 days,  and anyone who has been to my website in the last 30 days. 

The reason I do this is because as soon as someone engages or shows some kind of interest I want to target them differently so I can continue to move them down my funnel. 

Warm Audiences

As you might already guess these are the people who have maybe engaged with us on an ad or organic social post or have been to our website. 

Other pools will even include those who have viewed a product page or added something to the cart but haven’t made a purchase. 

If you are a service based business could be people who went to a lead capture page but never submitted a request for contact or clicked to make a phone call. 

These audiences are generally the audiences where you will make a profit from your cold traffic efforts. 

We want to run a few different ad sets with the proper exclusions. 

Doing this will keep everything segmented and that way we can set up the proper ad to go with the appropriate level of engagement someone has done with us. 

Your budget may make this difficult to do it all at once, but is certainly something you can build over time and add more as the campaigns become more profitable. This may also be different depending on your business and the type of funnel you have set up. 

The three ad sets I like to use. 

1. Page or post engagement but hasn’t gone to the website

This campaign will be focused solely on getting users to click over to the website. Using blog posts are a great way to keep the cost low and to offer value up front. Here is an example of on where we were focusing on getting people to click because of their belief and connection to an industry.

2. Visited the website but haven’t converted

Ads in this type of ad set will include testimonials, deeper dive into product, or just a straight call to action to buy.

3. Added to cart but didn’t purchase

These types of ads are focused solely on getting people to finish their purchase. I like to incentivise these users with a discount, free shipping, or something that will increase the value of the original offer. I like to offer something that is time sensitive as well to get them to take action now.

Hot Audiences

These audiences are similar to what you would serve for an ad, but they are different because these are those who have made a purchase. 

The purpose of these ads are to ascend current customers to buy additional products and services or to cross sell them on products that are complementary to what they already bought. 

But all in all we want to introduce them to new products and services and get them to make more purchases. 

Tying it all together

As you can probably pull together the goal here is to have a constant flow of cold traffic coming into your offers. If we are targeting the right audience and they are engaging with the offer by at least going to the website. From here we can retarget them with additional information and social proof to guide the user to make a purchase or take the next step (whatever that may be).

Once they make a purchase, the goal is to continue to stay in front of them with additional offers that either ascend them or cross-sells on additional products that compliments what they just bought. 

Facebook offers some great automation with this through their catalog sales campaigns. 

But as you can imagine as we start with cold traffic on the top of our waterfall we gain interest and those fish then fall to certain pools or buckets. These pools tend to be a little bit easier as the waters can be warmer. The fish are not as skittish and more likely to bite. 

Wrapping it Up

As you can see, this system is one that takes work and can be pretty involved. The secret to getting this to work really well is to “always be testing”. The types of ads that will really make your audience take action depends on your business.. The key is to always be testing and trying new things. 

This strategy is just one of many and doesn’t cover all the different campaign types or ways to be successful with Facebook ads. This is just the way we have found to be successful consistently with our clients. 

If you are struggling with your ads or need some with experience to help guide you through this process schedule a free strategy session today. 

I hope you find this helpful. If you have any questions leave them in the comments below.