Planning new campaigns for any advertising platform can be stressful, especially for beginners and small business owners. Facebook business manager, for instance, comes with endless online marketing tools that can be difficult to navigate when you’re just getting started, making it harder to meet your short and long-term campaign objectives. That’s why using campaign planning tools is a crucial part of any marketing strategy.
What Is A Campaign Planner?
Simply put, a campaign planner is a formula we use to guarantee that all of our campaign objectives are being met. Unlike Google Ads, Meta has its own Facebook campaign planning tool that you can use before you launch a new ad campaign. This standalone feature gives you a number of advantages during the run of your campaign, including allowing you to save reach and frequency forecasts, create multiple campaign plans, and share your media plan with members of your team.
Most importantly, using a campaign planner can help your next batch of ads run more smoothly, so you can spend more time focusing on the strategic and creative elements of your marketing campaigns. In this blog, we’ll show you our signature process for using campaign planning tools to our advantage for all our eCommerce clients.
Step 1: Planning When To Launch Your Facebook Ad Campaign
- Marketing Moment #1: Holidays & Cultural Moments
- Marketing Moment #2: Product Launches
- How To Overlap Projections
Step 2: Planning The Campaign Strategy
- Email Campaigns
- Website Strategies
- How To Use Facebook Campaign Planner To Create Messages
Step 3: Picking The Right Campaign Type
- Option A: Manual Facebook Ad Campaigns
- CBO
- Ad Sets
- Ad Levels
- Option B: DPAs
- New Product Launches
- Exclusive Discounts
- Option C: ASC
- Who Should Use It
- Who Shouldn’t Use It
Step 1: Planning When To Launch Your Facebook Ad Campaign
The first step in the campaign planning process is understanding the best times to launch a particular ad campaign. Of course, for brand awareness purposes, it’s a good idea to have some type of ad campaign running all the time. But if you really want to optimize the way you spend your ad budget, you need to be strategic about when you launch your biggest campaigns.
We do this by using a spreadsheet that highlights all of the major marketing moments for the upcoming year. Basically, marketing moments can be broken down into two primary categories for advertisers.
Marketing Moment #1: Holidays & Cultural Moments
For most brands, holidays and cultural moments include all of the big retail peaks during the year, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, you can also make these moments more specific to your brand by focusing on the cultural moments that are most relevant to your target audience.
Let’s say you’re an eCommerce brand that sells women’s wellness products, and you notice that you always see a spike in sales around Mother’s Day. Having this data in your campaign calendar can help you plan strategic ad campaigns around this major marketing moment, maximizing your results.
Marketing Moment #2: Product Launches
The second type of marketing moment refers to product launches and other special deals that are unique to your brand. If you know you have an exciting launch coming up during the year, you’ll want to make sure this information is in your campaign calendar so that you can plan your ad budget effectively.
Now, once you’ve had a chance to look at all of the potential marketing moments in a year, you can decide which Facebook ad campaigns you want to focus on the most. For example, you can choose to stick to just social media marketing or spend more of your ad budget on things like email marketing and SMS. We make this step easy for our clients by using an interactive calendar that allows them to make these specifications.
How To Overlap Projections
After we’ve put all of our peak marketing moments in the campaign planning calendar, we can overlap our projections to see if there are any places where our marketing moments coincide. This helps us determine which months during the year we’ll need to push more of our marketing dollars into specific campaigns.
Step 2: Planning The Campaign Strategy
Essentially, planning the strategy for a new campaign starts with determining which advertising channels you want to focus on and how you plan to target those specific customers.
Email Campaigns
With email and SMS campaigns, we start by deciding whether you plan to focus on acquisition or retention. In other words, marketing towards new customers or existing customers. Having a campaign calendar helps with this because it allows you to see when your loyal customers are most likely to spend money with you during the year.
For example, if you have a VIP or loyalty program and you have a marketing moment that results in a lot of revenue for these customers, your strategy could be to run a 24 – 48 hour flash sale directed at just this portion of your email list. Once you know who your audience is, you can start putting together a strong offer and messaging strategy.
“What is the offer?”
The offer is the deal that inspires the customer to complete their purchase. This can be anything from exclusive discounts to bundle deals and limited edition items. Whatever you decide to use, having the right offer for your campaign is essential to driving your conversion rates.
“What is the message?”
Messaging is the creative aspect of your marketing campaign. Whether you’re advertising on TikTok, LinkedIn, Google, or Facebook, the message you put out in your ads needs to speak to the unique needs and pain points of your customers. For instance, campaigns that are focused on lead generation will have very different messaging than retargeting campaigns.
If you need some help picking a strong creative strategy for your next campaign, check out our blog on producing ad creatives at scale here:
Website Strategies
Ultimately, your email, SMS, and social media campaigns will lead potential customers to your website to complete their purchases. So, having a strategy in place for optimizing your website content is a must. We do this by using merchandising principles to highlight the offer and ad creatives that we picked during the strategy planning process.
In the brick-and-mortar retail world, merchandising means having the products you want to sell the most on display at the front of the store and the items you don’t want to push in the back. For eCommerce brands, you can apply this same strategy to your online store.
Here’s a good example of what this looks like…
Imagine that you’ve decided to put together an exclusive Mother’s Day bundle of your best-selling products. You would merchandise your store by making a “hero” banner using something like a Canva featuring the offer and the message at the top of the page, as well as moving any items you don’t want to focus on further down to the bottom.
Next, you can drive the conversion rate for these bundles by creating an email and SMS campaign that announces this offer at least 24 hours in advance, creating a sales push for these specific items.
No matter what your offer is, merchandising your eCommerce site accordingly is a major marketing hack that can yield massive results for your revenue.
How To Use Facebook Campaign Planner To Create Messages
Now that you have a better idea of how this process works let’s take a look at how using this Facebook campaign planner can impact your creative process.
If you know there is a cultural moment coming up that is important to the demographics you’re targeting; you can plan your most elaborate ad creatives well in advance, allowing you to create powerful, memorable messages that boost your brand awareness.
For example, if you’re a brand whose customers care about the environment and live an eco-friendly lifestyle, having a campaign based around Earth Day would be a strong creative strategy. In this case, you could have your CEO take a pledge to stop using mass transportation for one day and deliver all of your orders in person. In this scenario, the brand is using what’s known as CSV (Consumer Shared Value) to showcase how they understand the concerns of their audience. This makes for a powerful ad creative that can really make your brand stand out from the competition.
Step 3: Picking The Right Campaign Type
Finally, you’ll need to pick the right type of campaign for your ads. These types of campaigns are all specific to Facebook marketing, but it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with their principles regardless of any other digital marketing platforms you might be using.
Typically, there are three main types of campaigns you can use for Facebook ads.
Option A: Manual Facebook Advertising Campaigns
The first and most commonly used option is a manual campaign in Facebook ads manager. We like to use manual campaigns because it gives us a lot of freedom to customize the way that we let Facebook spend our ad dollars based on our metrics. Plus, manual campaigns are extremely versatile and can be used for any marketing moment you want to take advantage of.
To use manual campaigns effectively, there are three main components you’ll want to focus on.
CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)
Facebook advertising campaigns are all about bidding and using your ad budget strategically. Unfortunately, if you use automation for all of our marketing campaigns, you lose control over how Facebook ads allocate your ad dollars.
That’s where CBO comes in.
Rather than setting budgets for each individual ad set, this exclusive feature in Facebook ads manager allows you to set an overarching budget for all of your ad sets, giving you the flexibility to move money away from campaigns with the least opportunities and into those that have the ability to earn more.
You can also customize these even further by setting either a daily campaign budget goal or a lifetime campaign budget goal. This way, if your goal is to get 50 sales per week, Facebook can shift your spending into the campaigns that are most likely to produce this result.
Ad Sets
Next, you’ll need to look at the types of ad sets you’re running based on your target audience. We typically focus our efforts on two main types of ad sets; broad audience and lookalike audience.
Broad audience refers to the most generic type of ad set and is most often used for lead generation purposes. Even though this is the more universal advertising option, it should still be tailored to the demographics your brand is trying to reach on your Facebook page.
Alternatively, lookalike stacks are a custom audience category that allows you to reach users who are more likely to interact with your ads because they share certain characteristics with your existing customers. Lookalike audiences are a good way to expand your customer base without spending too much of your budget on acquisition strategies.
Ad Levels
Finally, ad levels are another way to look at the creatives you use in your ad campaigns. Since Facebook business is a bidding-based platform, having a high volume of ad creatives helps you determine which creatives will most likely stand out in the algorithm. In other words, the more versions of ads you have to work with, the better results you’ll have.
Thankfully, you don’t need to produce brand-new ad campaigns whenever you want to run A/B testing on your creatives. Instead, we take advantage of ad iterations to maximize our conversion rates. With ad iterations, you can start by changing just one element of your ad and seeing which option performs best with your target audience. For instance, you can test different CTAs for your offer or different headlines on your ads, allowing you to keep your ad campaigns fresh and engaging.
Once you’ve set your CBO goals, ad sets, and ad levels, we highly suggest utilizing cost caps to ensure that Facebook spends your ad dollars in a strategic way. Cost caps are a feature in your Facebook ads planner account that lets you dictate how the platform can allocate your spending based on certain parameters. In most cases, ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) is the best metric to use for setting cost caps, as it prevents you from wasting money on ads that aren’t producing the strongest results.
Option B: Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)
Source:- https://newsfeed.org/how-to-get-started-with-facebooks-dynamic-ads/
You’re probably already familiar with carousel ads, a type of ad style that appears as a slideshow in the customer’s Facebook feed. DPAs are similar to this type of ad, but they focus on a specific product or offer as opposed to multiple products at a time. We like using DPAs because they’re so versatile and are highly effective for retargeting campaigns.
Most of the time, you would choose a DPA campaign for two main reasons.
New Product Launches
If you have a new product or collection dropping soon, DPAs are a great way to target existing customers who have already interacted with your ads in the past. On the other hand, you can also use DPAs to display your upcoming launches to lookalike audiences, allowing you to tackle your new customer acquisition goals without spending a fortune on a separate ad campaign.
Either way, DPAs are relatively affordable to produce and have a low CPM (Cost Per Mille), which makes them a great option for smaller eCommerce brands.
Exclusive Discounts
Another way to take advantage of DPAs is by using them to advertise exclusive discounts or offers to returning customers. The easiest way to do this is to connect your Shopify and Facebook ad accounts so that the platform can see which customers have added certain products to their carts but haven’t completed the checkout process.
From there, you can create ad creatives directly targeted to these customers. In their newsfeed, this might look something like…
“Hey! We noticed you checking out [specific product]. Here’s an extra XX% off your order.”
That’s part of what makes DPAs such a strong choice for retargeting campaigns.
Most importantly, using the automation features that Facebook marketing offers takes much of the stress and workload off your plate. Like we mentioned in the above example, linking your Facebook ads and Shopify accounts allows Facebook to determine which products to show to customers based on how they’ve interacted with your online store. This creates personalized ad creatives for your customers without you needing to spend your ad budget on separate ad campaigns.
Option C: Advantage Shopping Campaigns (ASC)
source:-https://www.akvertise.com/how-to-take-advantage-of-meta-advantage-shopping-campaigns/
It’s no secret that Meta is always developing new innovations for their advertising clients, and ASC ads are just the latest example of this. ASC ads are relatively new to the Facebook advertising platform but have already generated a lot of buzz in the eCommerce space because they’re powered mostly by AI.
Essentially, ASC uses machine-learning tools to help clients target more high-value audiences in less time. Unlike manual campaigns, ASC uses fewer inputs, like audiences, creatives, and other elements, while focusing on targeting your campaigns in a more effective way. Whereas manual campaigns might include dozens of different ad sets, ASC ads might include as few as eight at a time. This is designed to simplify the campaign’s creative process for its users.
But just like with anything new, ASC comes with some major disadvantages. As of right now, ASC does not allow users to set cost caps for their campaigns, taking away a lot of control from business owners who want to leverage their ad budget efficiently.
Who SHOULD Use ASC:
Now, if you’re an established eCommerce brand that can comfortably spend your advertising dollars without worrying about cost caps, then testing ASC might be a good option for you. Since this is still a fairly new tool, we suggest running a few ASC ads along with your manual campaigns and DPAs. This gives you the freedom to determine how ASC performs with your target audience, so you can decide whether you want to invest more ad dollars into these types of ads in the future.
Who SHOULDN’T Use ASC:
However, if you’re a small eCommerce brand or you don’t have a ton of flexibility in your ad budget, ASC is probably not a good choice for you. Without the option to set cost caps, you could be risking your precious ad dollars on campaigns that don’t produce the results you’re looking for, leaving you at a serious disadvantage for your other campaign options.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that it might not be the case for much longer. Facebook is said to address the cost caps issues in their ASC ads within the next few months. Hopefully, it will give business owners more freedom to utilize these machine-learning tools without sacrificing control over their ad spend.
Until these updates hit the platform, ASC remains a risky option for any brand that doesn’t have room in its budget for experimental spending.
How To Start Planning Your Next Facebook Campaign
Even though it’s tempting to jump straight into launching a new campaign on Facebook, following a set template for campaign planning ensures that you get the best results possible, no matter who you’re targeting.
So, before you launch your next ad campaign, make sure you check out all the features in your Facebook campaign planner and ask yourself the three following questions:
“Is my campaign launching at the best time?”
Consumer trends are relatively easy to follow if you know where to look. Tracking major holidays, cultural moments, and peak spending times can help you launch your campaign at a time that yields maximum returns for your business.
“Do I have a powerful creative strategy that converts?”
Ultimately, having a strong offer and message for your campaign turns clicks into conversions. Ad iterations and other strategic testing practices are a good way to keep your creatives ahead of the game.
“Am I using the right type of ad campaign?”
Finally, picking the right type of ad for your campaign matters. Whether your goal is to acquire new customers or improve customer retention, manual ads, DPAs, and ASC ads can all be beneficial when used strategically.
If you want support in planning your next Facebook ad campaign, connect with a member of our team to get started today.
“Which of these metrics needs the most work?”
Tracking eCommerce metrics doesn’t have to be complicated and shouldn’t leave you going around in circles trying to figure out where the problems lie. With our flowchart approach, you can start making better strategic decisions for your brand and maximizing your profitability faster than ever. For more insight on how to use this process to your advantage, connect with our team today.