Russell Ruffino on Growing Your Business with Facebook Ads
Facebook boasts an estimated 2.3 billion global users and is universally regarded as the most widely-used social media site. Free membership ensures that growth continues unabated. Facebook generates revenue through paid advertising. The massive global audience ensures that advertisers get tremendous bang for their buck. Companies routinely use Facebook to advertise their goods and services for maximum ROI within targeted demographics.
Facebook ads are effective means of generating increased engagement and activity for companies. This typically manifests in a higher number of likes, comments, and shares. The objective is to drive customers through the sales funnel and boost conversions. Repeat business is desirable, but not always attainable. Thanks to Facebook’s back-office features, companies can easily drill down into specific analytics to understand how metrics impact sales.
Russell Ruffino is a staunch proponent of growing your business through Facebook ads. He sat down with us and offered nuggets of marketing gold on this topic.
Why Facebook?
Russell Ruffino: Facebook has been the cornerstone of our advertising efforts for the past six years. Pretty much everything we do in the advertising arena is through Facebook. In fact, we’ve been able to consistently generate returns of $10 – $15 for every $1 that we have spent on Facebook advertising. This is pretty awesome. It is unusual; this type of ROI is the reason why Clients on Demand is so committed to Facebook advertising as the go-to medium. Here’s the thing that people need to understand about Facebook: pretty much everyone (your target audience) whether it’s B2B or B2C is reachable on Facebook. The only time I believe you wouldn’t want to use Facebook for advertising purposes is if you are looking to target say pizza owners within a 10-mile radius. Then maybe Facebook isn’t for you.
How can companies be successful on Facebook if so many companies are advertising on Facebook?
Russell Ruffino: This is a great question. There is no doubt that Facebook is the most popular advertising medium in the world. But here’s the thing: most people who are advertising on Facebook have absolutely no idea what they are doing. If you can come in with a great ad campaign and an understanding of how Facebook ads work, you can be successful too. By employing a proven strategy, you can gain a competitive edge over your competition. With Facebook ads, something interesting takes place: the more clicks you get the lower your advertising costs go. That’s why it benefits you to run a successful Facebook ad campaign. Success feeds success. The more engagement you get, the lower Facebook ad fees will be. Facebook rewards you for having engaging and compelling content. You can overcome that competition and get clicks at an affordable price.
What is necessary for getting the best deal with Facebook ads?
Russell Ruffino: With Facebook ads, you really need to narrow your focus to the right audience. That means you cannot have a broad approach to your advertising campaign. Find out who your target market is and then build a marketing strategy around that. Things like look-alikes of your fans and lists are a great place to start. Any asset that you have that is a group of people can be tracked. Once you upload these assets to Facebook, it will then find all the things that these people (or groups) have in common. Then Facebook will go out and find more people just like those people. So, there are similarities in groups of people and Facebook will target these groups in your ad campaign with lookalikes. You can then create an audience of lookalikes of 1 million, or 2 million people, for example. Then you go and run ads for these people. But you need a strong base. A big list of data is best for this.
What if you’re first starting out on Facebook? What do you need to do?
Russell Ruffino: As a newcomer to Facebook, you need to do some research. For example, it’s important to understand where your audience hangs out. What pages do these people follow? What companies do these people follow? Which people do these people follow? These are important questions. Once you have thoroughly researched your audience, you will have a much clearer picture of how to run your Facebook marketing campaign. In essence you should always be targeting the problem (the issue) and not the person in marketing campaigns. You don’t want to look at your audience and see irrelevant information they are interested in. You are solving a problem, so you need to know what issues people are looking to solve. You need to have the right copy in the ad too. What your ad says is so important. You need to talk about the problem in the same way that your audience would talk about the problem. You must be able to say things that are compelling. You don’t want to have the wrong people in your funnel. The copy must grab their attention and make them say this sounds like me.
