Don’t know how to organize your ads into proper campaigns or find yourself boosting posts sporadically with uneven results?
Or wanting to generate leads and sales, but not getting conversions on Facebook?
You need to implement the 3 campaign system, layered into Awareness, Engagement, and Conversion.
Word of mouth, whether on Facebook or in the real world, is much like the courtship process. Prospective customers hear about you from your existing customers, they learn about your business over time in little tidbits, and eventually buy, when the time is right.
To use the dating analogy, you move from first encounter to first date to first kiss, until you have your conversion event, your wedding day.
Just like in marketing automation or the AIDA funnel (or take your pick among other engagement models), you need to move your customers down progressively increasing levels of relationships.
And you can do this nurturing automatically if you set up these 3 campaigns in exactly the method we outline. Each campaign feeds one another so that they’re tied together.
Awareness
The chicken and egg of Facebook marketing is that if you don’t have a loyal fan base of existing customers, there is no word of mouth to amplify. You need social proof to let prospective customers see what your existing customers are doing.
It’s not about “buying” fans, since we’re talking about real customers who love you, but might not be on Facebook yet. So let them know by importing your email list or phone list into Facebook as a custom audience, asking them to become a fan.
You run a page like a sponsored story with a custom audience, a page like a regular ad targeting the custom audience, and a page like a regular ad targeting people who you think are likely to be fans. If you’re pro, run a page post ad with media workplace targets.
Engagement
This is where you’re putting in the bulk of your efforts. The longer your sales cycle (such as in B2B or high-dollar transactions), the more content you need to load here. Your primary goal is to make sure the audience you built in the first campaign is seeing your messages in their newsfeed.
Facebook says that fans see only 16% of page status updates, though the number is often much lower, due to increased competition. So you do have to pay to get proper reach.
You’ll use a combination of onion targeting to get your audience size correct.
You run a page post ad, choosing the most recent post checkbox, and targeting your fans. Duplicate this ad, removing the fan targeting and selecting other combinations or literal, lateral, and competitive targets.
Duplicate this ad again and select just your custom audience or multiple custom audiences. If you’re pro, you’ll run page post-like stories to amplify to friends of users who are engaging with the page– “Alex commented on this post”. If you have a fan base over 10,000, then you can create variants of the above with FOF (friend of fan) filters, so you have an even tighter audience, too.
Conversion
Now that you have the first two campaigns running in concert- to drive initial awareness of your business and get ongoing engagement.
It’s taboo to sell-sell-sell on Facebook, so we’re going to use a number of dark posts. You can get away with one promotional message out of every 4 posts, so long as your other 3 are engaging/interesting.
But we recommend dark posts here, since you may have different things to say to different segments of your audience base. You wouldn’t want to natively post 20 different things to Facebook, which would inundate fans with content not relevant to them. Rather, you’d set up dark posts (also called unpublished posts) to designate exactly who needs to see what post. But, you have to pay for it.
For your dark posts, run primarily page post link ads. Choose an interesting image. Include an offer or discount if you can. If your brand doesn’t support this, then you can send them to a guide or other meatier piece of content that requires registration.
For agencies and those interested in lead gen, you’d push your various landing pages, which can be within a Facebook tab or not.
These dark posts hit your fans and custom audiences, so you’re not hitting people not already interested in what you offer.
You should test combinations of newsfeed only as well as RHS (Right Hand Side) to see what converts better. If your site is not mobile-friendly, do a desktop newsfeed only.
You run 3 dark posts to your fan base. Duplicate these ads to your custom audiences. Set website remarketing with different offers/messages. Change out your dark post content every couple of weeks, playing “winner stays on”, whatever is converting best or is your latest special. You can determine this by following the Metrics-Analysis-Action (MAA) framework.
There you have it, the 3 campaign layered strategy that will drive your users from awareness to interactions to conversions. Users move automatically through the campaign levels because their friend is a fan, they became a fan, they engaged with you, or they have given you an email/cookie.
