So you have a business that you need to start marketing, you may not know where to start. Facebook released a new feature where you can create an ad that will appear on Facebook Messenger, one of their most popular apps. This new market means plenty of new customers you can drive towards your business. So how to do you get started?
You don’t want to just wing it and hope you’re successful when it comes to marketing. They’re certain tactics and rules you can follow to make sure that your marketing plan works. This guide will help you easily use Facebook messenger ads.
Figure Out What You Want
First you need to know what kind of ad you want, because Facebook offers two options. There’s destination ads and sponsored messages. What you choose will be determined entirely on how popular your business is and what kind of following you have. If you are extremely new to Facebook or have a small business, you are going to start with destination ads, which can be seen by everything. Let’s take a closer look at the differences between the two ad campaigns.
Destination Ads
Destination ads are the ones you see appearing in your newsfeed as you’re scrolling down. They look very similar to other posts made by friends and others. When someone clicks on one of these destination ads, they are taken to Facebook message, not your business website. It looks like any normal ad, and can include a picture, video, slideshow, etc.
The great thing about destination ads is that it allows you to target anyone. You can even specifically re-target people who have already visited your sales ad, but didn’t purchase anything. You can even set the ads to specifically target people who have never seen your ad before. This makes your brand name more wide known, and can get a greater instance of clicks. Overall, more people are going to see your ad, which means better exposure. Again, the better option for a small business with little to no online following.
Sponsored Messages
Sponsored messages are an ad that appears right in the recipients inbox on Facebook. It’s just like someone getting a Facebook message from a friend, but it’s from your business instead.
This option is offered when creating an ad campaign in Ads Manager. In this type of ad you can include links and images. In this instance, you would be able to link directly to your business’s website, instead of a non-url. With sponsored messages you can only target people who have previously messaged your page in the past. Remember, with this option you are charged by impressions, which means you will be charged whether the other user opens the message or not.
These ads are best for businesses that already have a larger following, or are more widely known. Because you can only target such a smaller, niche audience, you need to have that audience as large as possible.
Build Up Subscribers
The great thing about sponsored messages is that they look more legitimate and less like spam to other users. This means that your company will look more trustworthy in the long run. Unfortunately, it’s hard to effectively use sponsored messages unless you have a lot of subscribers. That means first you need to build them up.
Destination ads are actually a great way to build up your initial subscribers. You can even use a special link that can be clicked on with a message from your business/brand. Not only does this way help you build up your subscriber list, but you also could make sales. Best of all ,these ads show up to the people that prefer to use messenger on a mobile device.
Building up subscribers is perhaps one of the most important parts to using Facebook messenger ads. This determines the amount of people that are interested in your business or brand. You can also get a good calculation of how quickly your business is growing and progressing.
Use Software
You can enhance the way your ads work by using outside software that helps keep track of your ad. You can integrate a software like Shopify right with Facebook, where you can build your subscriber list and people start making purchases. Then, you send follow-up messages to confirm the order and even send out shipping information. This will improve user experience, which means more customers will keep coming back.
How to Start
Start small. Don’t get carried away with too many ads and make your business look like spam. Use destination ads to re-target people and use the tagging system on Facebook messenger to keep organized. It’s best to start out with the help of a bot, such as ManyChat, which can basically automate the sales process from the welcome message to the sale confirmation.
Next you should start to integrate your customer service and sales platforms with Facebook messenger. This way you can use messenger while still having customer information. This means that your customer service as well as user experience will go up, which is guaranteed to bring back repeat customers.
After you build up your subscriber list, it’s all about testing out your ads. You can easily track how your ads are doing and see what works best and what doesn’t work at all. Make sure to only make a couple changes at a time. It could be something as simple as the colors you use to create your ad or the font size.
Continue Your Research
Since using ads on Facebook Messenger is still a relatively new future, there is no perfect solution to getting each ad to work and drive customers to your business. People just like you are still learning the ropes and figuring it all out. That means you need to stay up to date with what’s current.
While you’ll be doing your own research with your tests, you should always be looking up what other people are doing and how they’re ads are doing.