The best Facebook marketing strategies are always changing, and our role is to bring you the latest strategies that have been researched, practiced, and proven to be successful by top-performing media buyers. In this article, we are going over a low-budget Facebook ad launch strategy by Brandon Nguyen, an e-commerce entrepreneur, media buyer, and co-founder of Ecom Incubator. This strategy is going to be pretty new to most media buyers, and it's based on the current automation that Facebook has introduced.
Within his Facebook ad launch strategy, Brandon explains how to launch your initial ads in a way that you can get useful data that guides you in a certain direction that's going to be useful to you. Brandon explains how to actually run ads like the way the top media buyers have come to agree in secret mastermind groups that he is in.
"It's honestly just the way media buyers should be running ads right now. It's quite meta right now, and this is exactly how top people in the space that know how to market and media buy run their ads.
Dropshipping gurus and other marketing gurus haven’t known about this, and by the time they know, they will be extremely late to the party. So probably in like a year or two from now, everyone is going to be teaching ads like this, but I'm going to show you guys now.", — says Brandon Nguyen.
Brandon Nguyen believes that the actual thing that differentiates media buyers these days is just their skills and the ability to market products. Facebook is already doing a big job by introducing new strong features they refer to as the Facebook Ads Power 5. These automated solutions by Facebook ads aim to simplify the work of marketers and media buyers while running Facebook ads.
The Facebook Ads Power 5 are:
- Automatic advanced matching
- Campaign budget optimization
- Simplified account setup
- Automatic placements
- Dynamic ads
After introducing these, what Facebook does these days is push you as the media buyer to just leverage more of your marketing efforts, and they handle the rest with their automation algorithms.
So Brandon views Facebook as a tool for testing ideas a marketer or media buyers have in their minds instead of it being a place for testing interests and audiences like before, and like many people still teach. Facebook already has data on the kind of interests and audiences that work well and they just need to leverage your marketing angles into their audiences so that they can bring out the results for you.
"We're using Facebook to test ideas and try to structure them in a way that allows us to leverage Facebook the most effectively. This is because when we're running any sort of campaign optimizing for whatever objective it is, whether it's purchases, traffic, or whatever. Facebook is always going to try to find the optimization for the lowest cost or the highest volume.
And when we're doing a bunch of these tests, I'm not looking at CPC or CTR, I'm looking at where they are allocating the spend to. I might already have a good baseline for how I'm creating my ads, so all these other metrics are vanity metrics again. I'm looking at where Facebook is guiding me. Where are they spending my money based on the idea I planned out and based on the hypothesis I want to test? Is it profitable? Is it consistent? Is it hitting the KPIs I wanted to hit?"
Facebook in essence is just a tool at the end of the day. As a marketer or media buyer, you're just leveraging that tool, and the tool is only going to be as good as the user.
Visualization of the Current Facebook Algorithm
Before getting into the strategy by Brandon, we must look into the current Facebook algorithm. We are going to look at how the algorithm calculates your position in the auction and how it optimizes the traffic it delivers to your campaign’s ad sets and ads.
How Facebook Calculates Your Position in the Auction
With Facebook, the higher your place in the auction, the cheaper the cost will be relative to your target audience. Your target audience is going to be based on your ad, not your interests. So your targeting will be done at the ad level.
Facebook ads are based on an auction system and Facebook tends to push the advertiser that gives their users the best experience.
Depending on your target audience the cheapest spot in the auction could be from $0.5 to $2 per click. It depends on who you're targeting and the niche.
Facebook Uses this Formula to Determine Your Position in the Auction:
Advertiser Bid x Estimated Action Rates + User Value = Total Value
The Cost per Result and Budget
With Facebook ads, the more you spend, the higher the cost will be. so when you're spending more money, your costs are going to rise up.
Facebook will always optimize for whatever will drive the highest volume.
Facebook will break down your campaign targeting, demographics, and ad creatives into specific combinations, and then optimize for the specific combination that brings the highest volume at the lowest cost for your budget and your bid.
How to Test Facebook Ads in 2022
Brandon says that the best way to test campaigns with Facebook ads in 2022 is very simple but a bit non-conventional as the majority of people are used to. Conventionally, marketers and media buyers are used to running campaigns that are set up and optimized for audience interests.
The "Outdated" Conventional Way of Testing Facebook Ads
Before we get into the way Brandon recommends setting up Facebook ads, first, we are going to look at the conventional way that marketers use to run ads. This conventional way is the one you are probably familiar with and you still use. You may be running a CBO campaign or ABO campaign at whatever budget per day. People will suggest you test at $50-$100 and this is how they tell you the test or you may be testing:
So you could have adsets A and B with interest A and interest B. These could be your audience interests for whatever product you are promoting. Let's assume you are selling a Chinese Mascara product. (Brandon has personally scaled up to $300 000 per month in revenue by selling Chinese mascaras on his Shopify store.)
So this is how people conventionally test their campaigns with interests. The interests could be any targeting that’s related to the audience that could buy the mascaras. This could be audiences interested in beauty, mascara lashes, or whatever using the Facebook audience tool can provide.
After setting up adsets based on interests, marketers then ad their ad creatives and then go ahead to test.
This is the setup that people normally use. Sometimes they even run the same ad for each interest. However, Brandon says this method is getting wiped out by Facebook’s ad tech.
"The Facebook ad tech is currently really smart enough to figure out who your target audience is. So why would we be testing interests? Why would we be testing for audiences when we don't even know if our marketing angles or our ads even work in the first place?
People are spending $100 per day right off the bat to test only to get $50 a day in revenue. That’s pretty much burning all that money. Let's say you do get some sales, it's probably going to fall off or you might have gotten lucky. You probably got lucky because Facebook is really smart at finding people that are in a predisposed mindset to buy.
It doesn't make sense. Once you do spend money, what are you going to do? People always get stuck here and start asking questions like "Okay, I've got an interest adset that works, so what should I do next?" What should I do now? Should I increase my budget or should I pursue my interests a bit more? "That's going to do nothing for you because, again, Facebook is really smart, so this isn't the way you want to test."
The Right Way to Test Facebook Campaigns in 2022
The way Brandon recommends testing is by splitting up your adsets’s target audience by every single marketing angle you have. So if we're selling a mascara product, the adset targetings are going to be based on the marketing angles.
One of the target audiences is going to be people with very short lashes. Another one will be people in the market for mascara, and the last one could be a totally experimental angle, like old women that want some kind of mascara. So these are 3 massively different marketing angles.
You can do 10 or more angles depending on your campaign requirements, budget, and ad management skills. Take a look at Pepsi and Coca-cola, they use over 10 different angles that in turn make their brands feel new and compelling to people even though they have been there for years.
"The difference in angles is what you need to scale something to millions. I sold mascara and scaled to $300 000 per month and the angle that I took was a luxury mascara that's affordable. That was my whole message in my creatives."
You're going to have the same interest targeting based on angles in each adset. Some people might go completely broad, but Brandon prefers to narrow it down at the start while keeping the audience number at quite a big size.
Ad Level
At the ad level, you're going to be testing different kinds of creatives. Maybe you're going to try to present an offer, an idea, or a message you have through an image ad, a video ad, and maybe even a looping gif or a carousel. You're going to test all these creative angles because you don't know what works until you see some results. There are things that work these days for sure. Video ads are still the best. So you can go for video ads created in trending formats like Instagram reels and Tiktok video formats.
When creating ads, you're going to have to think about the biggest impact-based variation that you can create to test that marketing angle. So you might even have 4 different videos instead of any images.
So with those 4 different videos, you need to break them down to the biggest thing that you can test. With videos, it can be probably your video hook. Your hook is a small part of the video, but it has the biggest impact. So you can test the videos with different hooks just to keep it really simple. Next, you are going to launch your CBO campaign at a $10 to $20 per day daily budget and see where the spending guides you on a low budget.
You can let the campaigns run for 3 to 7 days, depending on your KPIs, and the results will show you the way to advance with optimizations. The results will tell you what Facebook is thinking based on your funnel, offer, ads, angle, and the message in the ads.
Final Optimizations and Scaling
The Facebook algorithm will now show you what they think is going to drive the highest volume for you at the lowest cost. So you can go ahead and optimize everything according to those results. You can scale what's working and trim out all the things that don't work. For those that don't work, you can always try to create better variations of them to improve them or lower the cost to become profitable through that.
"So through this test, I actually know that this is the angle I want to take, and this is how I should create my ads. If you're testing a single interest, you're like, "Man, I don't know what to do after this." With this, we actually have an idea of the next direction we have to move, and that's how you run ads now in 2022. This is just how the Facebook algorithm is teaching us to run ads profitably and hopefully, I've simplified it for you guys."
Conclusion
Brandon makes it clear that from 2022 to the future, advertising on Facebook will not really require you to make adset audiences based on interest targetings. Adsets should be made based on the marketing angle you are using and then you should let the advanced Facebook ads machine to do its work in telling you what interests will work and which ones will not.
Facebook’s ad tech is now so advanced that it can sort out its audiences and serve your ads to the users it believes will be interested to purchase your products. All you have to do is let it run and then you can then make campaign optimizations based on the results it brings afterwards.
