The Four Phases Of Message Mastery For Successful Facebook Ads

What should you write in your Facebook Ads?

Like many pieces of your marketing…that depends on which phase you’re creating.

So many business owners jump into Facebook advertising without doing any strategic planning first on who they’re targeting, what level of awareness those people have, and where they are in your funnel.

But missing out this vital step means your ad campaigns for lead generation and selling are much less likely to succeed.

It’s important to realise there are different seasons within the overall cycle of your campaigns, and together they make up the whole picture.

Experienced marketer Neil Patel states

“Facebook is one of the top platforms for bringing exposure to your brand and can be incredibly effective for increasing your sales. But in order to do this, you must first understand the psychology behind reaching the average Facebook user….that getting someone to the point of buying is very much a process that takes time.”

The way to increase your chances of success with Facebook Ads is to create a four-phase plan for your advertising. This allows you to tailor your message and content to take account of the different stages your audience is at, from cold, to warm, to hot.

Let me run through an example to show you what I mean, and how you can apply these same principles to your own marketing campaigns…

Phase One: Promote your best content to your warm audience

This could be a blogpost, or a video, both work well, although a video typically costs less per view. Let’s take a video for this example. Your warm audience would be website visitors, email subscribers, Facebook fans i.e. people who are already interested in you and your business.

Once you’ve promoted your video you have the option to build a custom audience of people who have viewed a certain percentage of each video.

So if for example you’ve done a series of 5 videos about tips your audience would be interested in, you can select everyone who watched 50% of each video and create an audience of just those people.

It might be a relatively small audience but you know that they are actually interested enough to give you their time and attention for 50% + of each video so they’re interested in the information you’re sharing.

Phase Two: Target a larger cold audience with your best content

BUT make it a cold audience based on your most engaged warm audience. How do you do this? It’s simple. You just create a Lookalike Audience (one of Facebook’s custom audience options) based on the people in your initial warm audience who watched 50% of your video.

The goal here is to make more people aware of who you are and what you do (through value-based content).

Once again you can segment your video viewers in Facebook to create a warmer audience of people who have watched 50% or more of your video.

Phase Three: Start your remarketing, promoting your lead magnet

At this point your warm audience is aware of you and interested in the solutions you’ve been talking about. This is where you can now run ads to offer them a lead magnet which they have to optin to get. For example, if your first round of content was ‘3 Tips To Create a Compelling Optin Page’, your lead magnet could be a ‘Cheat Sheet To Create A Compelling Optin Page in 1 Hour Or Less’

As you can see, the lead magnet you offer should be the next logical helpful step for your warm audience, based on the content you’ve already shown them.

Phase Four: Remarketing round two, helping to close the sale

Once people have opted in for your lead magnet they are now a much warmer/hot audience AND they’re on your email list. At this point they are much more receptive to you offering something they can buy from you. In this example it could be a ‘Strategy Session To Write and Launch Your Optin Page in a Day’  or a simple ‘Optin Page Review.’ (Again you’ll notice it’s the next logical step for your new leads to take, based on the lead magnet they got from you).

You can use remarketing ads to promote your paid offer, and also to retarget those who don’t initially convert the first time around (eg with a down-sell option.)

As you can see, rather than running a sales ad straight to cold traffic on Facebook, which many businesses attempt and wonder why it fails, this four-phase approach allow you to carefully tailor your marketing message to match exactly which phase each person is in.

• With a cold audience you can share useful content to introduce yourself and start positioning your authority in the niche.
• With a warm audience you can share more ‘insider’s tips’ and offer them the next step – a useful lead magnet which will help them get results faster.
• With a warmer/hot audience you can tap into the fact that they’re part of your inner circle, and invite them to buy from you.

So, when you’re using Facebook ads to help you build your audience, generate more leads and make more sales, be sure to map out and use these four phases for better results. Not only will your marketing be more on point at each stage, your cost per action will be cheaper too because you’re being more relevant, which is a key factor in whether Facebook decides to show your ads.

If you want help nailing your own Facebook Ad copy and funnel to get better results get in touch today to see how I can help you with that!