Bertha's Blog: How to run a Facebook ad and build your list for $10 a day (Part I)

Are you interested in building your email list with Facebook ads? Yes? You are in for a treat today. I have created this two-part article series for you to walk you through the entire process. I’m going to give you the step-by-step so you are able to dive into the world of Facebook ads with confidence.

If you are already using Facebook ads as part of your overall marketing strategy, you might feel tempted to skip over this article – don’t.

If you are like most people who are using Facebook ads, your goal might be to reduce your cost per lead (and I’ll explain the commonly used terms in a minute for the complete newbies, so stay with me here) or you might be actively looking to find insights that will help you get a better ROI on your ads. So check out these two posts anyway.

Let’s get stuck into it.

Your budget

The number one question that people ask when it comes to Facebook advertising is how much money do you need? Do you need thousands of dollars to start with or can you start with really low amounts?

You may even wonder if you should consider Facebook ads because you don’t have a big budget to assign to Facebook ads.

So this is the thing: you can run Facebook ads for as low as $5 per day. You can stop your ad any time you time. So for example, you may start an ad on $10 per day and run it for a week, just to test the water. You will end up spending $70 (and no more, you can rest assured that Facebook will only spend the amount you allocated). You could do less, you could more. It just depends on you budget and comfort level. Clear? Good.

The second most frequently asked question is how much should you be paying per lead (or for someone to join your list).

Well, nobody can tell you this, however there are industry guidelines. On average, you can pay between $1- $5 for every person opting in to your list.

Usually, you pay less for somebody opting in to a quick lead magnet (your opt-in offer) and more for a webinar registrant or to get somebody to get on a sales call with you. So if you do a quick calculation, you can work out that you can get 5 high quality leads daily on a $10 budget assuming you cost per lead is $2.

Another thing to consider while assigning determining your Facebook budget is to think about whether you would like to hire somebody to run your ads for you. In that case, it will be your ad spend plus their fee on top of it.

In this post though, we are trying to eliminate the ‘outsourcing’ option so you can do this yourself until such time you are ready to invest in an ad expert.

Your purpose

When it comes to running Facebook ads, you can choose a couple of things to shoot for. You can run ads to build brand awareness and increase the number of likes on your Facebook page. You can promote your Facebook posts to do the same.

You can also run ads and send people straight to a sales page or an ecommerce store. While this can work for some people, I don’t recommend this approach. You have got to understand that Facebook is primarily a social platform. People don’t open their Facebook with their wallets in their hand, which they may do when they are going on Amazon, Ebay or even Google because they have a buying intention. On Facebook, somebody might buy something as a low-dollar impulse-buy like a T-shirt, but its very unlikely they will make a bigger investment especially when they don’t know you.

You can run ads specially for the purposes of lead generation. So your goal would be to build your email list. This is what we will be focusing on this post.

You can also run ads to retarget people. This means you run ads specifically to whose who are either on your email list already, who have visited your website recently or those who clicked on an old. These strategies work like gangbusters, however, for those who are new the world of Facebook ads, they are not totally relevant right this minute.

Your list is super small so I’d rather have you focus on lead generation than retargeting. As you move forward and gain confidence as well as people on your list, you can then start looking into retargeting.

The testing phase

Before I move any further and begin teaching you the process, I must make one thing super clear. This is one of those things that nobody is telling you and might lead to tears, frustration and disappointment.

Firstly, people say that you can run Facebook ads for $5 or $10 a day, they are telling the truth. But what they are not saying is that you may NOT see any results from this ad spend. At least initially.

So what do I mean by that? When you are new to Facebook ads, or a seasoned pro for that matter, any time you start a new Facebook campaign, you are not going to see the results right off the bat. Meaning, when you start running ads, you may or may not get the leads at the price you are willing to pay for them.

This phase is often called ‘testing’. Here you are essentially playing with your targeting, your ad creative (copy, image, call to action, etc.) and the landing page you are sending traffic to. You might be running many different variations of the same ad targeting a different audience, or a same audience with a different copy or ad or what not. There are a million different ways to do this.

Usually you need to set aside a couple of hundred dollars just to test your ad/audience. When you know what’s working then you can do your $10 per day ad and get $2 leads (opt-ins). You won’t get $2 leads from day 1 but you will.

So when people complain that ads don’t work, or that they lost hundreds of dollars in ads, they are basically stuck in the testing phase. They are stuck and they can’t get out because they don’t know what they are doing.

We are going to fix them by teaching you exactly when you need to focus on and what you can safely ignore.

Choose your lead magnet

If you can, I’d like you to begin creating your Facebook ad using a lead magnet this is already working for you. I want you to choose something that is PROVEN.

This way you can start on the right foot. You can be confident knowing that you get a conversion on your lead magnet so you don’t need to worry about whether it is your opt-in itself that needs to be changed hence reducing one variable.

If you don’t have a lead magnet, what I can tell you that on Facebook, freebies that can be consumed quickly work REALLY well.

Think about it for a second. What was the last time you downloaded an ebook after clicking somebody’s ad and then sat and read it? I’m guessing, never. Most people don’t read large documents they download. They save it for some day and as we all know, that day doesn’t exist.

You want to attract your perfect audience with the right lead magnet but you also want them to consume it. Sure, a percentage of people will never ever download your thing but that’s a very small percentage.

Lead magnets that work really well are:

Cheat sheets
Checklist
List of tools
List of resources
A short case study

Other magnets that work but cost more

Webinar registrations
One on one discovery calls

And more opt-ins that work also depending upon your niche and target audience

Daily challenge
Video series
Webinar replay
PDF report
Email course
Ebook
White paper
Free trial

If you have something that is working, use that. If you want to create something, try creating a quick cheat sheet or a checklist. They have a high desire and high perceived value. People know they don’t need to sit through a long piece of document or a 50-min long video to get a few nuggets.

It’s worth saying that a quality lead magnet is specific, addresses ONE thing that your ideal audience finds challenging and gives them a quick win. Keep that in mind when you are creating it.

Nail your landing page

The second most important piece of the puzzle you want to nail is your landing page. When you are getting clicks on your ad but people are not opting in, your landing page is the culprit.

Your landing page should convert 20% at MINIMUM for your Facebook ads to work. Anything above that you should be happy with. When you become pro at getting clicks on your landing page, you can play with your landing page to increase your conversions for 20% is what you must be getting.

Assuming you are sending traffic to a page prompting people to hand over their email address in exchange for a cheat sheet. Your landing page must:

Call your audience out. Somebody is your ideal target audience must identify with your copy and feel like they are in the right place.
Clearly spell out the benefits of signing up. The easiest way to accomplish that is to list them as bullet points and tease out those benefits.
Clear call to action. Give them a place to put their name and email in. Make sure you don’t say things like ‘instant download’. Tell people the cheat sheet will be sent to the email they provide to discourage freebie seekers and those who put fake email addresses. If they are serious, they need to give you an email they check often.

Another thing that is super important to note is that your landing page should be congruent to your Facebook ad. Meaning, it should match the colours, fonts and the copy you used in the ad.

For example, if you use primarily red in your ad, use the same colour on your landing page as well. If you call it a ‘cheat sheet’, don’t refer to it as a ‘checklist’. Make people confident that they have landed on a right page and not on something completely different. This tip will do wonders for your conversion rate.

There are many different tools to create these landing pages. You can use the page provided by your email service, GetResponse landing pages, for example, or you can use third party tools such as Leadpages, Instapage, Thrive or Click Funnels. Some tools have additional functionality such as creating WordPress websites or sales funnels.

Alright, when you have your lead magnet, your landing page ready, you are in a good place to actually start working on your Facebook ad.

From this point onwards, things will become a bit technical so I’ll be sure to include screenshots to guide you through the process, however know that when you are clear on your goal, have the perfect opt-in offer and a highly congruent, high converting landing page, you are already in a very good place.

In part-two of this Facebook ad series, I’ll teach you how to use power editor to create your ad, how to do some basic testing, how to choose the right image (super important), put the right words in your ad (copy) and get as many clicks as you can to drive the cost down.

Can’t wait to teach this!