Applying The Customer Buying Cycle to Facebook Advertising: Part 1 – Awareness
When utilizing a sales funnel approach to Facebook there are four steps to the full funnel process. Awareness, Consideration, Intent, and Decision. In part one of this four-part series we will be covering arguably the most important aspect of any sales funnel: brand awareness.When selecting your objective for your Facebook campaign, conveniently there is a brand awareness option. When brand awareness is selected as your objective, Facebook will optimize content for brand awareness to the people who have been defined in your target audience. However, Facebook may not feed your ad to people within your target audience if their algorithm doesn’t believe people will pay attention to your ad. This is because Facebook is trying to optimize your budget and audience as much as possible.Brand awareness is best measured in reach, impression, frequency and estimated ad recall lift. Below is Facebook’s definition of the measurements above: Reach – The number of people who saw your ads at least once.Impressions – The number of times your ads were on screenFrequency – The average number of times each person saw your adEstimated Ad Recall Lift – The estimated number of people who would remember seeing your ad if asked within 2 days. These metrics are how you will determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. For example, if you are a new brewery opening in Santa Rosa or you are creating a sub brand for your current winery; getting the word out about your brand or product is crucial. You need to reach people. Reach is largely determined by your budget – the more you spend, the more your content will be seen. Impressions are largely the same when it comes to the number of times the content will appear on screen. Frequency is a big one when running a brand awareness campaign. How much is too much? We don’t want to beat people over the head with our ads, but we do want them to remember us. I shoot for a frequency of 1.5-2. Meaning, there should be 1.5-2 impressions per person reached... just enough for people to see our content enough times for it to stick in their mind.Estimated Ad Recall Lift is a tricky one – this is based purely on the Facebook algorithm and who they believe will remember your content. We’ll never know what determines this number, but it is good to know that not all people remember seeing your content the first, second or even the third time seeing an ad.After running your ads for the first time, it is important to take the data and adjust where needed. Measure who saw your content, where they saw it, and how they interacted with it. Once you have a sufficient amount of data take the information and use it to your advantage, adjust your ads and targeting to further optimize your brand awareness campaigns! Now, we have an audience that is aware of your brand or product. Next step is to use this audience in the next step of the customer buying cycle: Consideration.