How to Make the Most of Facebook Ads with Susan Wenograd @SusanEDub #VCBuzz

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How to Make the Most of Facebook Ads with Susan Wenograd @SusanEDub #VCBuzzFacebook has one of the most effective and affordable advertising platforms out there. Are you making the most of it? Let’s find out!

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About Susan

Susan Wenograd @SusanEDub is a nationally recognized strategist and practitioner in the paid media space, including Facebook Ads, AdWords, Bing Ads, and others.

Susan works with clients to not only reach the right potential customers, but also deliver the right message with retention tactics such as remarketing, chatbots and more.

Questions we discussed

Q1 I know you recently started your own consulting business (congrats!) Please share your challenges and how you are handling them!

Thanks for the congrats! Wow, the challenges are many, but it’s also been fun to solve them. It boils down a few things.

The demand isn’t where I assumed it would be. Having mostly worked in the agency side the past few years, I was used to demand for account management. I’m finding there’s equal demand for consulting when there’s an in-house team.

So, I’ve had to figure out how to package things in a way that can be passed off or taught to an internal team with varying levels of experience. It’s been a really fun challenge though, and really forces me to examine how I do things.

The other is classic entrepreneurial problems around time management. I get a lot of requests to hop on the phone for advice, lots of one-off emails asking for help, and I’ve had to turn a lot of that down nowadays.

It’s been hard for me, because I really enjoy helping people, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to do it for every person that asks. Plus, you have to prioritize your clients above all else, so the time for them always comes first.

And if I’m being honest, I tend to undersell myself….even to myself! I was shocked at the demand when I went out on my own, so in some ways I think I’m still getting used to that. 🙂

Q2 Does Facebook advertising work for any niche or are there some types of sites where it won’t make sense?

There are a lot of instances where it will work if expectations are correct. There are certainly some situations where it’s not going to work well – especially with low-price items. It can be hard to make it work in e-comm when there isn’t enough margin.

Usually what I find, though, is that it’s not a question of it flat-out not working….it’s more so that the expectations aren’t aligned to begin with. I’ve worked with coaches trying to sell a $3k mastermind and they sell 0, claiming FB doesn’t work.

It works great if you understand you’re dealing with cold traffic that you need to develop a relationship with. $3k mastermind course out of the gate? Not likely. But…leads for under $10 each who you then sell to later? Entirely doable.

So it’s usually expectation issues that cause the “Facebook Ads don’t work” thing. In general, B2C can get figured out as long as you know your numbers and what you can pay for a lead/sale.

B2B is also tougher, and tends to take a lot more experimentation. Longer sales cycles, less engage audience (they want cat memes, not a whitepaper) and email lists that don’t work well for custome audiences are all a factor.

I do not recommend paying for likes for a page. The quality is terrible. Paying for engagement on a post can be absolutely fantastic, though!

Q3 What’s your favorite Facebook audience setting that’s easy enough for us to play with?

There are a couple! If you’re in ecomm and have something that causes a lot of interest/interaction with comments and stuff, create a Custom Audience of people who have engaged with your ads/posts.

Then remarket to them. I get amazing results when I run an engagement campaign and then run a remarketing efforts to users who engaged with a post/ad. Very cheap CPMs and high propensity to buy. I haven’t found the same success in lead gen with that, tho.

A lot of people automatically remove placements for Messenger and Marketplace listings, but you should test them. I’ve had some amazing lead gen results come from Messenger placement and great ecomm sales from Marketplace!

Q4 What’s a great Facebook marketing tactic that businesses usually don’t get right?

Great question. There are quite a few, but I think the biggest killer is relying totally on Conversion campaigns. It’s usually where I see them hit a dead end, for a few reasons.

Two things usually happen: 1. It does great, but then at a certain point, they can’t scale the spend any higher b/c the results start to suck, or 2. It does horrible from the start because they are trying to optimize to a conversion that doesn’t happen often enough

So the businesses in the first camp give up and go elsewhere, and never explore remarketing tactics that don’t rely on site visits….like the engagement audience tactic I just mentioned. Or doing that same method for folks who watch a video for a certain amt of time.

They push right for the conversion, max those out, and seem to assume that means there are no more buyers. There are usually tons, they just don’t get picked up on as “likely to convert right now” by the Facebook algo.

At that point, you go back to good ol’ marketing 101: create awareness, engage interest, educate, and THEN focus on conversions. And routinely, those tactics are a cheaper CPA than trying to go right for conversion. They also scale much better.

So I guess the short answer is: the best tactic is to not rely solely on Conversion campaigns to drive how thorough your success is.

That’s a great question. They aren’t easy to convince, and a lot of them is walking them through it WHY of what didn’t work, or WHY they have to adjust their expectations and focus on micro-conversions first. That part is time-intense.

Girl, “exhausting” is the correct term. LOL. Yes, I handle sales right now – I wouldn’t mind passing it off, but finding the right person is almost impossible. I did pass off bookeeping to my husband, though! 😉

Q5 What are your favorite Facebook marketing tips?

One of the first things I tell clients, especially if we’re starting a new strategy from scratch is, “You need to treat the next 60 days or so as us just buying data.” Yes, they’ll get results, but they won’t be what they want right away.

But the data we get in those first 60 days are what will give us the knowledge to really forge ahead and hit the goals. Things like what ages or genders work best, what creative, what landing pages, etc. It’s a boatload of experimenting at first.

If an advertiser can go into that and think “I’m totally ok losing some of this money” they will be fine. It takes patience, because the FB algorithm, has to learn what works best, and that can take a bit of time and sweating.

Other that than, I say to have fun with the other campaign types. The focus is always on conversions and traffic, and you really do yourself a disservice only doing that.

I have Engagement campaigns firing off conversions for the same or less than I pay on conversion-focused campaigns. The algorithm is smart, but it can’t anticipate if every human will buy or not.

Conversion campaign types are the most expensive, so if you’re experimenting, sometimes the cheaper ones like video views or engagement will take your efforts further and get you a lot of data much faster!

And finally, don’t follow blueprints that don’t work for your business type. I see so many ecommerce clients trying to implement funnels they read about for affiliates or coaching people!

Yes, take note on the general themes or ideas that work, but don’t get caught up chasing shiny objects. I manage a lot of money for clients and NONE of their accounts behave the same way.

Our previous Facebook marketing chats:

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