Facebook

With well over 2.6 billion monthly active users (users who have logged in to Facebook within the last 30 days), Facebook allows you to reach almost any market. The Facebook Ads Manager is user friendly and offers a multitude of targeting options, so you can get really specific when targeting your market, thereby making your ads more personal and effective. Because Facebook is easy to use and fairly inexpensive to buy traffic on, it’s a good place to start if you’re new to paid traffic or are testing a new strategy. Plus, you can apply many strategies used in Facebook on other advertising platforms.

Ads on Facebook are like hyper-targeted billboards: You’re displaying your message in front of your audiences, and hopefully interrupting those audiences from endlessly scrolling. So you need to make sure to put your ads in front of the right people and to give your audiences a reason to stop scrolling and look. Headspace, a meditation app, attempts to do this with a video ad, shown in Figure 10-2.

Facebook provides many objectives for marketers to select from. Choosing your objective is the most important part when setting up your campaign because it’s your way of telling Facebook exactly what you want your campaign to accomplish. Therefore, before you launch your campaign, know your end goal (such as to send people to your website, promote your company Facebook page, increase conversions on your website, get video views, or any of many more possibilities), and align that goal with your Facebook objective. To determine your objective, ask yourself: Who am I targeting and where do I want to send them?

After you complete the first step of setting up your campaign (choosing your objective), you move on to setting up the audience you intend to reach. There are a few different ways you can manage this step; you can hyper-target your audience yourself, or you can let Facebook’s algorithm choose for you. If you choose the wrong audience, your Facebook ad is likely to fail or, at the very least, not reach its full potential. To ensure that you reach the right audience, your own targeting needs to be fairly specific.To improve your campaign’s specificity, answer the following questions about your target market for every ad you plan to run on Facebook:

• Who are the figures, thought leaders, or big brands in your niche? Chances are, members of your audience follow these influencers on Facebook.
• What books, magazines, newspapers do your ideal customers read?
• What events do they attend?
• What websites do they frequent?
• Where do they live?
• What tools do they use? These tools can range from programs such as Photoshop or Evernote to physical tools such as fishing rods or lawn care equipment.
• What’s specifically unique about this audience?

Although hyper-targeting can be enticing, Facebook’s machine-learning algoritm is incredibly sophisticated nowadays. And, the more you exclude people from your target audience, the smaller your pool of potential leads is. With that said, you should still pay attention to the size of your audience, but trying to manually hyper-target a specific person using interests and exclusions may not always be the best idea. Instead, open up your targeting and let Facebook’s AI find the right people.

At our company, we have found the most success, in terms of conversions and high Relevance Scores (the algorithm that Facebook uses to judge the quality of your ad; similar to Google’s Quality Score) with our Facebook ads when the audience size is made up of 500,000–1,000,000 people (plus or minus several thousand — it doesn’t have to be exactly 500,000, for instance; there’s wiggle room). This way, you’re showing your ad to not only a large enough audience but also a specific one that will find your ad relevant.

If your business is local (as opposed to a national or international company) and you’re targeting a specific town, city, state, or region, you don’t have to worry about the size of your audience. Local businesses don’t need to worry about audience size but instead should be concerned with how you’re targeting that audience. All other businesses that aren’t local should focus on how you’re targeting your audience and the size of your audience.

The next step is to create your ad copy. When writing your ad’s copy, speak to your audience based on the pain point you’re targeting and where you are in the relationship. For instance, you don’t talk to someone you’ve just met the way you speak to someone you’ve known for ten years, and the same goes for your copy writing. Think of your ads in the context of where you are in the relationship with your lead or customer.

Next, follow these tips when writing your ad’s copy:

• Grab your target audience’s attention by calling out to it. For instance, you might call out to your target city, such as, “Hey, Seattle!” or use what residents call themselves, such as, “Hey, Austinites!” or even call to people by their interests, such as “Hey, amateur wrestling fans!”
• Within the copy, hit upon a pain point your target audience deals with and then give people a solution (your offer, of course).
• If you have the room, add a sentence to eliminate doubt and overcome a reason the customer may have for choosing not to buy.
• Finally, consider what you want people to do after they’ve finished reading your ad. Include a strong call to action to help move them to the next level.

Next, make sure that the image accompanying your copy portrays and backs up your marketing message. The image ties the ad together and makes the ad feel congruent. You don’t want an image that feels as though it came out of left field and has nothing to do with the copy or the offer. The image should stand out and be eye catching but not spammy-looking, so avoid too many arrows or obnoxious colors. Ultimately, you want the image to resonate with your market. If making images isn’t your strong suit, or you don’t have a graphic designer, consider using tools such as Canva (https://www.canva.com/) or outsourcing your graphics with services such as Fiverr (https://www.fiverr.com/) or Upwork (https://www.upwork.com/) to create professional images for your ads.

To make sure your ads are approved by Facebook, they need to fit within the spec guidelines. You can find information on the different types, placements, and dimensions of ads by looking at the Facebook Ads Guide (https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/image/facebook-feed/traffic).

Figure 10-3 depicts the elements that make up a Facebook ad and what to include.

For cold audiences in particular, you don’t want your Facebook ad to “scream” that it’s an ad; rather, you want the ad to be informative and provide value. Remember that you’re building credibility with your audiences. Ad copy that targets cold audiences is often longer than ads for warm or hot audiences. It also contains more information about the offer and what happens when people click the ad. In contrast, your language can be a little more informal and your copy shorter with warm and hot audiences.

You can find more details and how-to guides from Facebook Blueprint (www.facebook.com/blueprint), an educational resource created by Facebook that offers free online courses to help people take their Facebook campaigns to the next level.

Twitter

With Twitter, you can reach almost any market, and targeting on Twitter is very similar to Facebook. People use Twitter to consume content and expect to find content in their Twitter feed, which makes this a great platform to run traffic to cold audiences. Use your tweets to introduce yourself and drive people to content, such as your blog, that provides value, establishes your brand as an authority, and starts building a relationship with your audiences.

You can create many different paid ads on Twitter, whether you seek to gain more Twitter followers or to generate website clicks and conversions. As with your efforts on Facebook, your Twitter campaign objectives should align with your overall campaign objective or end goal. Figure 10-3 depicts a promoted tweet from Liberty Mutual that clearly states its benefit and includes a call to action. Notice how the image the company uses is congruent with the copy of the tweet.

To encourage engagement with your tweets (that is, to cause retweets and likes), link to something of value and don’t make your tweets super “salesy.” The most effective sponsored tweets are the ones with the same look and feel of a regular tweet. They don’t mention a product or sell anything. These tweets are less invasive and are known as native ads. Native ads follow the form and function of the medium in which they are placed. A native ad is not exclusive to Twitter and can be found on other paid traffic platforms. Native Twitter ads look like any other tweet and consist of good copy that piques interest and links to informative content that drives traffic off the Twitter platform to your predetermined landing page (see Chapter 7 for more on landing pages).

With Twitter, you typically target cold traffic with content to drive awareness for your brands, products and services. Therefore, rather than drive traffic to a traditional sales landing page for your product, drive traffic to informative blog articles that provide value and build credibility. Then, in your article, weave calls to action to a relevant offer that lead people to the next traffic temperature. Return to Chapters 5 and 6 for blogging strategies to use for your Twitter landing pages.

To be effective, each landing page article needs to have standalone value. In other words, readers derive value from the landing page regardless of whether they take your offer. To avoid having a negative impact on your relationship with a prospect and harming your chances of gaining a customer, be sure that your landing page delivers on the promise you made within your tweet. For instance, if you tweet about bridal shower ideas and the link you provide doesn’t deliver, people will view you as less trustworthy and associate your content with negative click bait.

When using Twitter, look for tweets that perform exceptionally well. If one of your tweets results in high engagement, the tweet will likely do well as an advertisement. Consider investing money in that tweet and promoting it to your cold audiences.

Google

Google Ads is a great traffic platform because you can present ads to people when they are actively looking for a solution. Google’ Ads program shows ads to people based on the keywords they type into the Google search engine. For example, if a searcher types “buy dog treats” into Google, a company that sells dog treats can place a bid to show an ad on the results page, as shown in Figure 10-4. People use Google to research products and services, and the search queries they type in offer insight into the pain points they face and the solutions and benefits they are looking for.

In comparison to other platforms, Google ads are seen as less interruptive and invasive, and they require less of an introduction to your prospects because people are actively searching for a solution. Although Ads is generally more expensive than other traffic stores, it is very effective at generating high-quality leads and customers: Even though they may never have heard of you, these potential customers actively seek solutions and are often more open to becoming leads and customers.

Here are some aspects to note about Google Ads:

• You need a goal: Ads isn’t a platform you just get on to run some traffic and test your market. Deciding on a goal before you begin your campaign is imperative. If you’re new to this, you may want to start with another traffic store that is cheaper, such as Facebook, to test the market before you graduate to Ads.
• You pay based on clicks: You pay only when someone actually clicks your ad (which helps to control your budget).
• You can target by location: There’s a big opportunity for geo-targeting for local businesses, so you can specifically “speak” to local markets. This feature works well for both local businesses and larger companies looking to segment a national or international campaign.

You should begin with researching the keywords that you intend to bid on for your ad. When conducting keyword research, remember these tips:

• Use tools to help you find keyword ideas and estimate how the keywords may perform. Google Keyword Planner (https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/) is a free tool provided by Google Ads.
• Run a search on Google of keywords and keyword phrases related to your business and see what are some of the first Ads to appear.
• Use spy tools such as iSpionage (https://www.ispionage.com/), SEMrush (https://www.semrush.com/) or SpyFu (https://www.spyfu.com/) to research your competitors or other companies in your niche to gain insight on the keywords they’re targeting.

As you conduct your keyword research, be aware that you can set four types of parameters on your keywords within Ads. These are known as keyword match types. You use them to set and control which searchers trigger your ad to appear after they’ve typed in a search query. Here are the keyword match types, along with examples for each:

• Exact match: This match type means that someone has to type your keyword or keyword phrase exactly as it appears in your campaign in order for your ad to be displayed. You designate exact match by putting square brackets around a keyword. For example:

  [lawn service]

  If you have the exact-match keyword [lawn service] in your Ads campaign, the only time your ad appears is when someone types the search query lawn service into Google.

• Phrase match: Your keyword must appear in the same order as it appears in your campaign to trigger your ad. Phrase match is designated by quotation marks around the keyword, as in the following:

  "lawn service"

• If you have the phrase “lawn service” in your Ads campaign, your ad could be triggered for the following search queries:

  • best lawn service
  • lawn service Austin
  • Dan’s lawn service and landscaping

  The preceding terms trigger your phrase match ad because the words lawn and service appear next to each other in the search query. However, with phrase match, your ad would not be triggered by the following search queries:

  • lawn mowing service
  • lawn and landscaping service

  Your ad would not be triggered by those search queries because the words lawn and service do not appear in the same order as they do in the campaign.

• Broad match: With broad match, Google shows your ad for similar phrases to and relevant variations from the keyword. This includes plurals, synonyms, misspellings, and related searched and relevant variations. In contrast to the other keyword match types, broad match has no symbol designation.

  If your broad match keyword is lawn service, Google may trigger your ad for search queries that include

  • lawn mowing service prices
  • lawn services near me
  • lawn service name ideas
  • creative lawn service names

  While this can place your ad in front of a large audience, it may not place it in front of the right audience. Because broad match can trigger so much, we don’t recommend it for someone just starting out in Ads.

• Broad match modifier (BMM): This keyword type triggers your ad for close variations, such as misspellings (but not synonyms), in any order. BMM falls between broad match and phrase match in that you have more control than broad match, but it’s not quite as restrictive as phrase match. You designate a BMM with a plus sign (+) in front of your keywords:

  +lawn +service

  Google knows keywords with the plus sign in front of them must appear somewhere within the search query, but not necessarily in the order they appear in the campaign. Search queries that may trigger this ad include the following:

  • lawn mowing service
  • lawn and landscaping service
  • professional lawn care services

  After you research your keywords and decide on the keyword match type to use in your campaign, you select how much to bid for your keywords. Remember these tips when choosing your bidding strategy in Ads:

  • Select the Manually Set My Bid For Clicks option, which allows you to be in control of your budget. Otherwise, your budget is automated by Google Ads.
  • When first starting a campaign, use a default bid of $2– $3 until you can see how competitive your keywords are.
  • Set a daily budget, again to keep your budget under your control.

When you’re finally ready to write your ad, follow these tips and tricks to create copy for Google ads:

• Include a call to action. What is the ultimate action you want your target audience to take after people have read your ad? Tell them what you want them to do in your ad. Calls to action can include “call now,” “download your free report,” and “order today,” among other possibilities.
• Use your keywords. Include the keywords you are bidding on within the ad’s copy. Not only does this help with your Quality Score (the algorithm that Google uses to determine how much you ultimately pay for a click), it also bolds the keywords that match a person’s search query, which makes your ad stand out more.
• Ask a question. Consider using questions to call out to your audience. Questions often capture people’s attention more than a statement does. For instance, instead of the copy “Get rid of termites” try “Termite infestation?” Or instead of “Experienced and insured plumber in St. Louis” try “Looking for a reliable St. Louis plumber?”
• Reference holidays or local events. When your ad mentions upcoming events or holidays, it seems more timely and relevant to searchers.
• Focus on benefits and speak to your prospects’ pain points. Don’t include your product’s specifications, such as size, color, or even what the product does, within your ad. That doesn’t entice people to click; rather, people want to know how your product can make their lives better. Within your ad, focus on the emotional outcomes your product provides, not the technical specs. (You include tech specs within the product description on your sales landing page, as we describe in great detail in Chapter 7.)

YouTube

YouTube is great traffic platform for building relationships with customers and prospects. Because of the different kinds of ads you can create with this traffic platform, you can build relationships and move people from cold prospects to hot repeat buyers, all within the YouTube platform. For instance, you can use YouTube to establish yourself as an authority and give value to your market, and then send people to more content to learn from, such as another video or a blog post, after which you retarget them (we detail retargeting in the latter half of this chapter) with video ads to make an entry point offer. See Chapter 3 for more information about entry point offers.

Note that people are conditioned to skip YouTube ads. With the advertisements that play before someone else’s video, like the one from GoPro camera company pictured in Figure 10-5, you have only five seconds to grab your audience’s attention before people click the Skip button.

After the five-second threshold, people often have the chance to skip your ad, and if you haven’t given them a reason to stay, your audiences will likely skip your ad to view the content they originally came to watch. To keep them from skipping, do one or more of the following within the first five seconds:

• Call out to your audience to grab people’s attention. For instance, you can call out to your market based on where people live (city or state) or address one of their interests.
• Ask them a question they can relate to and identify with. For example, a home improvement company might place an advertisement on a video about replacing a bathroom sink and open that video ad with the question, “Are you updating your bathroom?”
• Speak to a pain point they are facing or a benefit they are seeking.
• Entertain them.
• Give your target audience a reason to stay by immediately providing value so that people want to visit your channel or website to learn more.

Other ways to ensure that your ad grabs your target audience’s attention is to include an enticing thumbnail image (the static image overlaying your video before someone plays it) and a strong video title, also called a headline. The title and the thumbnail explain and demonstrate what your video is about. Your thumbnail image is one of the first things people see, so you want to make sure that your first impression is appealing and eye catching. If creating professional-looking images is outside your skill set, use services such as Fiverr or tools such as Canva to make high-quality thumbnail images. Then back up your image with an engaging title or headline. Include your targeted keywords within the headline (and within the video’s description) to improve your targeting.

Pinterest

This social network has more than 367 million monthly active users, with nearly one-third of those users living in the United States. It’s therefore an ideal traffic store for those advertising in America. Pinterest users are heavily female: Women make up about 71 percent of Pinterest users. Although Pinterest is an ideal platform to target women living in America, Pinterest is growing both internationally and among adult male users.

Pinterest users are in an open-to-buy mindset. In fact, 93 percent of Pinterest users plan purchases by using Pinterest. Studies have also found that when Pinterest traffic was referred to Shopify, it resulted in an average purchase of $50 from Shopify. As a traffic store, Pinterest has a lot of potential, to say the least.

To advertise on Pinterest, you create what is known as a promoted pin (you can learn about the different types here: https://business.pinterest.com/en/pinterest-ad-formats) which is an advertisement that allows you to target your market based on demographics, locations, and devices used, as well as people’s interests and the search queries that people type in. Pinterest, like Google, is run on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis with a budget that you can specify, and you pay only when someone clicks through the pin to your website. Similar to Twitter, Pinterest is a native advertising system; create advertisements that blend in with the platform so that the ad follows the form and function of any other piece of content on the platform. Figure 10-6 depicts a promoted pin from Kraft, in the right half of the figure, for its recipes board.

Before you create your promoted pin, research the keywords you intend to target. You can do your keyword research right on the Pinterest platform. Start by typing in the main keyword for your market in the Pinterest search bar. As you type, Pinterest gives you suggested searches, which are the most commonly searched queries that include your keyword on Pinterest. This technique helps you focus in on the keywords to target on Pinterest. You can also use online tools, such as SpinKeywords, to research keywords for your promoted pin campaign.

Each promoted pin is allowed only up to 20 keywords, so when selecting the keywords you want to target, choose the most relevant keywords. If you choose to target more than 20 keywords, your promoted pin may be denied by Pinterest. Therefore, aim for 15 to 20 keywords per promoted pin.

Next, when creating your promoted pin, select your image with care. The Pinterest platform is all about big, beautiful images, and for your promoted pin to stand out, you must use an image that is both eye catching and of high quality. Within your image, consider adding a simple, clear text overlay to your image that can serve as a headline and provide context to the image. The size and shape of your image matters on Pinterest; this platform is vertically oriented, so although horizontal images can work for promoted pins, strive to use vertical images whenever possible. An image size of 600 pixels by 900 pixels is a good place to start for your pin image.

You want your promoted pin to be helpful, beautiful, and actionable. After you select an image that helps you create such a pin, write a detailed description that gives value to your market, addresses a pain point, and demonstrates the benefit of the product you’re featuring in your promoted pin. Remember that people don’t care about the product’s unique selling points (USP) at this point; rather, they care about what the product does for them and how it can make their life better. Address these concerns within your promoted pin’s description.

Within the first 75–100 characters of your pin’s description, include the link to the product’s landing page (see Chapter 7 for more on landing pages). Including this link early in your text ensures that your link appears above the fold, allowing your landing page to be one click away from the Pinterest platform.

Don’t use more than four individual images per pin. You want the images to be big and beautiful so that your promoted pin stands out, and having more than four images creates a busy pin with small images. If you decide to have more than one image in a promoted pin, be sure that each image has a clear focus and a theme. You don’t want to sell an assortment of random products in a pin; instead, the products should complement each other.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn stands out from other traffic stores because it’s geared toward a specific market. LinkedIn is professionally focused and business-to-business (B2B) centric. It’s a powerful resource to employ for lead generation and running ads to cold traffic, though, just as Twitter and Facebook are.

You can choose among a multitude of ways to target your audience within LinkedIn, from demographics, such as age and gender, to job title, to skills that users have listed in their profiles, such as “customer service” or “social media marketing.” And with more than 700 million users and counting, LinkedIn offers a large market to reach.

How large should your audience size be when running traffic on LinkedIn? Some marketers argue that 300,000 is the sweet spot. However, in contrast to your Facebook audience, your audience size on LinkedIn doesn’t need to be an issue. The market is smaller and more specified on the LinkedIn platform, and the target is business professionals. Other traffic stores, such as Facebook and Twitter, encompass a much broader audience. When you advertise on LinkedIn, the size of the audience is less important. The main concern, just as with all traffic stores, is putting the right message in front of the right audience. For instance, if you want to target CEOs, don’t worry about the audience size, but focus instead on creating an ad and an offer that CEOs will find relevant.

As with the other traffic stores, your LinkedIn ad needs the following:

• Specific copy that calls out to your audience and is relevant to it
• A professional, captivating image
• A call to action that moves the audience to the next step

LinkedIn has come a long way, and they now offer a wide variety of campaign types. One way to drive traffic on LinkedIn is to sponsor content and send people to your content, such as your blog posts. To be effective, the content you’re sending traffic to should educate and give value to your audience. Then, within the blog, provide calls to action or banner ads for an offer that your LinkedIn audience finds relevant. This strategy is one way for you to obtain a return on investment (ROI) from your LinkedIn campaigns.

You can also use inMail to send sponsored messages directly to the inbox of people you are targeting. They also have programmatic display ads, which display custom content for the viewer, such as their profile photo and name in the ad.

Although LinkedIn is one of the more expensive platforms, the specific nature of this traffic store makes it generate high-quality leads that are open to your message.

Choosing the right traffic platform

You have many traffic stores to choose from, and each one has its strengths. In summary, here are the scenarios in which to consider using one or more of the Big Six:

• Facebook: This platform can work in almost any market, unless the market isn’t approved by the Facebook TOS (terms of service), such as the vaping industry (visit Facebook’s advertising policies for more details on its TOS at https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/). With Facebook, you want to utilize a process known as retargeting, which we define and explain in the next section.
• Twitter: Advertise on Twitter when you want to target a younger market or one that is highly tech savvy. Twitter is a large platform with a lot of users, so it can work in almost any market.
• Google: Use Google if you have a proven offer that has performed well on other traffic sources, or an offer that is difficult to target in terms of prospects’ interests or demographics and thus requires keyword targeting. With Google, you want to engage in retargeting.
• YouTube: This traffic store can work in almost any market, especially if you have an offer that requires demonstration or keyword targeting. Again, with this platform, you want to engage in retargeting.
• Pinterest: Think about using promoted pins when you’re selling physical products, particularly to women, or if you’re creating content with lots of original or curated images.
• LinkedIn: Go to LinkedIn when you’re selling high-dollar B2B products or services. Consider also advertising on this platform when you’re promoting a webinar to a B2B audience or want to reach people by their job title.