The Real Way To Get Facebook Fans For Next To Nothing

If you want to build a Facebook audience cheaply, you need a Facebook Advertising process that works. The process discussed here is simple focused on relevant interest targeting and creating ads that fit them.

An ad with $0.07 cost per fan is the best so far, and this post will to explain how it was done.

That initial title created some buzz, so lets clarify: in the first few hours, the best ad in one campaign was $0.07 CPF. But overall, the first day, it was $0.14 CPF. That entire campaign with three ads, over the course of a week, has been $0.32 CPF for about 332 fans. Keep in mind that not all ads perform this well, and that scaling to hundreds of thousands of fans can increase the cost per fan.

1. Understand what you’re promoting

This is a favorite step, because you get to find out whether your client or the agency you’re working with understands marketing fundamentals. Facebook marketing requires solid marketing fundamentals.

• What existing marketing materials can they show you?
• Who is their ideal prospect?
• Where are these prospects geographically?
• Can you look at their web analytics?

2. Identify logical prospect interest targets

• Most obvious: The brand, the category
• Less obvious: TV shows, music, books related to the service/product/customers
• Geeky: Go to quantcast and check out the demographic info on related websites.

Let’s take Harley Davidson as an example. They already have a bunch of fans, but it’s a fun brand to brainstorm on. The prospects would be people who like:

• Harley Davidson
• Motorcycles
• Riding
• Sons of Anarchy (TV show)
• Lynyrd Skynyrd? Sorta kidding here. But hey, test it.

If we Quantcast the Harley website, we get:

Quantcast says they’re rich middle-aged white guys who didn’t go to college and don’t have kids in the house. That’s not totally true, because there’s a subset of rich educated CEO’s who like to go on vacation wearing a tough biker persona. I only know that because bikers are big in Myrtle Beach. How would you know that? You could Google “harley demographics” and find out 90% of them are men. And that quantcast data was estimated, not “quantified”.

This means you are still going to have to test a lot of targets.

Also, check out forums to learn the lingo… Here’s an HD Forum where someone said

Stuck at work on a beautiful Saturday while all my rowdie friends are in Fayettenam at BBB. Can barely focus ’cause all I’m doing is dreaming of being on my night train ripping through the pigs and soaking up this sun. Then, heading down to Dixon for some frosty cold ones.

Night train, ripping through pigs, beer… here are some interest target ideas.

3. Create ads to test interest targets

For each interest target you need:

• An attention grabbing image
• Simple copy

These will change depending on your objective. If you want $0.07 fans, then create a No-Brainer Ad. The no-brainer ad has these characteristics:

• Destination: Advertise a page by choosing it from the drop-down. Do not enter a URL.
• Image: Appealing picture of the interest target (choose from at least 5-10 images and pick the one that you wanted to look at more closely, or the one you looked at the longest)
• Copy: Write copy like “Click Like if you like [interest target]“

Of course they like it. That’s what you targeted.

If  you add anything to this copy, you reduce the Action Rate (which really is the Like Rate). You can also go for clicks to another website or phone calls- your copy will reflect that. You won’t get as many Likes but that’s not your goal.

When choosing images, think about the prospect’s core desire. Yeah, they want to ride their hog (with their woman) in a big pack of their buddies. But what else? They want to be James Dean and they think their woman is hot even if you don’t. It’s tempting here to use a picture of Marissa Miller on a Harley… that may work- or maybe a picture of a bunch of bikers coming up a highway. Is it the bike? The group? The woman?

Maybe something as hot as this:

Or maybe not- most of these bikers are middle-aged. Do they want to think of themselves this way? Maybe. Probably. But we have to test it.

4. Optimize or pause ads

This is a lot like all other PPC. But you’re going to need a good CTR, and that means greater than 0.1%. Even better if they’re higher, like the ads in the chart to the right ->

• Know your key metric: is it CPC? CTR? CPF?
• Choose a threshold for your key metric. Maybe you want to achieve a $0.07 cost per fan, which may require a $0.03 CPC. But not all your ads will perform at this level. What is an acceptable average? $0.20 CPF? $0.30 CPF? Then definitely scrap ads that cost more than $0.45 CPF.
• Pause all ads that perform worse than your threshold
• Keep testing new ads

That’s all there is to it!

From an original post by Brian Carter