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The 10 Laws
Introduction
Every week I speak to countless businesses and no matter what they are selling, most businesses want to accomplish one thing: sell more. While they know that Facebook advertising can help their business, most don’t know where to get started. Another large percentage of businesses may have dabbled in advertising on the site but they haven’t been able to obtain the conversion ratios they are looking for. In this guide, I’ll walk you through 10 of the most important laws for businesses when advertising on Facebook.
Not all of the laws are strategies that should be implemented. Instead these are laws that define how Facebook
advertisements function and general perspectives that you should keep in mind when creating your advertisements.
Some laws will describe immediate actions you can take while others are more broad. All of these laws should help you
improve your overall Facebook advertising experience.
1. Facebook Is Least Effective At Direct Sales
If you’ve come to Facebook looking for instantaneous sales than you’ve come to the wrong place. Facebook presents
businesses with the opportunity to reach their target market throughout the entire marketing cycle. While a small per-
centage of users are ready to purchase while they’re browsing Facebook, a much larger percentage of users are going to
make a purchase in the future if not now.
Fortunately you have the opportunity to build an ongoing relationship with your customer and that’s what Facebook is
most useful for: building relationships. It’s a platform to build ongoing relationships and “remarket” to your customers, as
Facebook says in some of their own marketing copy. Understanding that these users are not ready to purchase is key to
success on Facebook.
As I outlined in the 5 phases of the Facebook sales funnel, Facebook is about relationship marketing. As Wikipedia de-
scribes, “Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value to the firm
of keeping customers, as opposed to direct or ‘Intrusion’ marketing, which focuses upon acquisition of new clients by
targeting majority demographics based upon prospective client lists.”
2. Create A Greater Volume Of Ads That Target Less People
Often times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test two ad versions against each other. On Facebook this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic ad that’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste a lot of money for the most part.
Facebook provides 11 targeting factors for advertisers. Below is an outline of each of those factors:
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The 10 Laws Of Advertising No Marketer Can Afford To Ignore
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1. Location - Facebook enables advertisers to target by country, state/province, city, and metropolitan areas. All
advertisements are required to have a location selected. This should be pretty straight-forward as to which location
you’d like to select.
2. Age - Age is a standard demographic factor. Most marketers that have a well defined target-market will be able to
select their age.
3. Birthday - This is one of Facebook’s latest advertising targeting filters. It should be pretty obvious what types of ads
should be presented to people who’s birthday it is. Try wishing the user a happy birthday and offer them a gift for
higher conversion rates.
4. Sex - Gender is another typical targeting filter for Facebook.
5. Keywords - Keywords are based on a user’s profile information including Activities, Favorite Books, TV Shows,
Movies, and more. I believe job titles are included in this field as well. Typically I spend the most time trying to
brainstorm effective keywords. What types of products do your customers like? What’s their job position within an
organization? Spend time on this field and you’ll be rewarded.
6. Education - While you can target based on their level of education, this is most effective for targeting ads based on the
schools that people went to. Want to announce a reunion for the University of Illinois class of 1996? This is a great
way to promote it.
7. Workplaces - This is another great targeting filter. Often times you will know the companies that your target market works at. If you are looking to get new clients or looking to spread awareness within specific organizations, this filter can be priceless.
8. Relationship - Want to target people that are about to get married? This is a great tool for that. If you are a bar or
club, you most likely want to go after those people that are single. While this filter can be useful, you also need to
keep in mind that selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their
profile.
9. Interested In - This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising. I tend to
skip this field for most of my ads.
10.Languages - If your ad is in English but the user speaks Chinese, it’s probably not a good idea to be displaying ads to
them.
11.Connections - The connections field were recently launched by Facebook and they enable you to include and exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users have joined and you happen to be the administrator of. If you’ve create a Page and don’t want the ads to display to people who have already joined, this is a great way to avoid duplicate clicks.
If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively. In
order to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make the
advertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad.
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