How to sell on Facebook: tips to advertise and make your sales skyrocket

Facebook is one of the most powerful tools to make online sales. Through it you can promote your launches, deliver content to your client, provide customer support to buyers, and even make the sale.

If you work selling products, whether they’re physical or digital ones (like online courses), you’ll need to know how to sell on Facebook, provided you wish to increase the reach of your brand online thus upping your revenue.

To learn more about the subject, keep on reading today’s post, because we’ll teach you all you need to know to learn how to sell on Facebook, from creating adds to making the sale!

Why should you advertise on Facebook?

Facebook still is the social media with the with the largest number of active users in the world. There are more than 1.2 billion users interacting every month. Or rather, 1.2 billion potential buyers.

It’s obvious that you will not get to all these people because of culture limitations, market niche, language, and even the Facebook algorithm. But even 0.0001% of these users may bring significant results to your business.

Your challenge is to segment qualified audience to your online course, attracting only people who are interested on the topic you’re approaching and who are prepared to make the purchase.

In order to do that you’ll need two things: know your buyer persona very well and use

Facebook Ads tools.

What you need to advertise your online course?

The average Cost per Click on Facebook has competitive prices if compared to different ad networks, such as Adwords.

Besides a relative low CPC, Facebook offers many segmentation options that allow showing your ad to a targeted audience, increasing the chances of followers engaging with your offer.

To use Facebook’s ad tool you will need an active page on the social networking site. If you don’t have a page you can advertise on the sidebar, just follow this tutorial.

But it’s ideal that you create a Fan page to sell your online course. Then, your ads will be a part of the user’s timeline.

The importance of a buyer persona for your strategy

A buyer persona is the representation of the ideal consumer of your product or service. This profile is based on online research and real-life interaction with your buyers.

But we’re not talking only about demographics such as age, gender, and social status but knowing in-depth who the person looking for your online brand is, her interests, how she consumes information, and especially what the problems she faces every day are.

Getting to know your consumer’s profile is essential in order to be more assertive with your content strategy and deliver a product that is more aligned with your audience’s interests.

If you don’t have any idea where to start this research, don’t worry because as the Internet advances, it’s getting easier and easier to find out information about these people, since most of them share their interests on social media.

After your user likes your page, it’s possible to get demographic information and behavior from this client by using Facebook Audience Insights, which is an analytic tool available for any entrepreneur with a Facebook page.

To learn more ways of finding your ideal buyer profile, read our complete post on buyer personas.

Types of ads on Facebook

Facebooks Ads allows you to choose five different channels to place your ads:

• Desktop News Feed;
• Mobile News Feed;
• Right-hand Column;
• Audience Network (your ads show on other devices and even mobile games);
• Instagram.

The good news is that you can use all these placements in your promotion strategy. That is even  Facebook’s recommendation when you’re creating an ad. 

If you don’t want to feature ads on all these channels, just select the option edit positioning and tick the ones you prefer.

How to announce on Facebook: a quick step-by-step guide

How to create an account

1. Access Facebook and click the button Create page. The option will be available on the last menu on the left of the screen.
2. Choose in which category your company fits: Local business or place; Company, Organization or Institution; Brand or Product; Artist, Band or Public Figure; Entertainment; Cause or Community.
3. Choose a Subcategory and enter the name of your Company.
4. Accept the terms of use and click Start.
5. Fill in the information, enter the website (if you have one) and a brief description about your company.
6. Choose a cover image and your personal profile. All set! Your page has been created and you can already publish content there.
7. To advertise, you’ll need to register on Facebook for Business and the process is quite intuitive and takes no further than 5 minutes.

How to create ads

1. On the arrow on the top right corner of your profile select the option “Create Ads”.
2. You will be redirected to a page, where you need to decide your campaign objective and where it fits in the sales funnel: Awareness (Brand awareness and Reach), Consideration (Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video views, Lead generation, Messages) or Conversion (Conversions, Catalog sales, Store visits).  
3. The next step is segmenting your audience. Here you have two options:

• Sync information of people who have already accessed your site or are part of your lead base. (Use a saved audience)
• Segment your audience according to your persona’s interests and information such as language, age, gender, and location.

4- Select the placement where your ad will show: desktop News Feed, mobile News Feed, Right-hand column, Audience Network.

As I mentioned above, Facebook recommends showing your ad on every placement. In this way, you make sure your content will reach leads when they need it, regardless of where they are.

If you prefer, there’s also the option of editing placements.

Do most of your audience come from mobile devices? You may choose to promote your ad on mobile News Feed and Audience Network.

5- Next stage is setting the period your ad will show and your budget.

Your investment’s amount will vary according to your campaign’s objective. We’ve talked more about this subject in the article How to invest in paid advertising without wasting money.

6- Choose your ad format

Carousel: Ad with two or more scrollable images or videos.

Single image: Create up to six ads with one image each at no extra charge.

Single video: Ad with only one video.

Slideshow: Looping video ad with up to ten images.

Canvas: tell a more immersive story by combining images and videos.

7- Structure the ad with image and text. This is when you structure your ad and decide elements such as text, images, and CTA (buy, subscribe, like the page, etc).

Facebook has a policy concerning the usage of text in images. Read this document beforehand to avoid that your ad is disapproved or have its reach decreased.

Here you can also use the preview to make sure your ad will have a good visualization on different devices. Your focus is offering the best user experience, remember?

8- By tracking the metrics provided by Facebook, it will be possible to perform some tests and optimize your campaigns without spending more money than you had predicted.

Ads Manager x Power Editor

On Facebook Ads, you have two options to manage your ads. Ads Manager is the standard model with basic features so you can track your campaign’s performance.

Through it you control the number of people who have access to your ad account; organize the pages you manage; view information of your active and inactive ads, including the number of clicks, Cost per Click (CPC), and budget of each campaign.

Unlike the standard manager, Power Editor offers more options to customize your campaigns simultaneously. Let’s talk more about some of them below:

Lookalike audiences:

With this option, Facebook makes a complete analysis of the advertiser’s clients and create lists with similar profiles, people to whom you can direct your advertising.

Saved Target Groups:

When creating the ideal audience for your ad you need to to match location, age, gender, languages, interests, behavior, workplace, education, and connexions.

Power Editor saves these preferences to use it in future campaigns. Save different target audiences to alternate, whenever the ad isn’t performing well.

Location targeting:

It allows you to customize where you want your ad to run. The advantage of this tool is that you can alter your ad’s location while it is still running.

Invest in your ad’s looks

Regardless of the quality of your online course, you will need to invest in attractive ads to convince leads to visit your website or sales page.

We’ve selected some tips to help you create an attractive ad to your audience.

Choose good images

• Prefer images you have produced or that are in public domain.
• Never use a picture or animation created by someone else without negotiating with the author first or assigning credits.
• Images must be in high resolution, bright and click-inducing.
• If you record a video to promote your online course, make sure the audio is clear. People will watch a low-quality video but if they can’t understand the audio it’s impossible to know what your product is about.
• Your image or video must be related to the ad. There’s no point in having a nice image if it doesn’t relate to your offer.
• Don’t use shocking or overwhelming elements to the audience. It might backfire.  
• Respect Facebook’s Advertising policies. After all, you want your ad to be approved.

You can read more tips like these in the post How to choose the best image option for your ad.

Use copywriting techniques

Copywriting is the art of persuading visitors to perform a certain action. This action may be to make a purchase, download some content, or like your page.

A good copy is one which convinces the audience to do what you expect from them but, at the same time, is in sync with the product being offered.

Some mental triggers help to handle users’ objections and convince her of the advantages of your offer. We’ve talked more about them in 5 steps to make your first sale as an Affiliate.

Other elements that have an influence in the performance of your ad

Just like on Adwords, the bid isn’t the only factor that influences how your ad is featured on Facebook. Other elements are also assessed: 1) quality and relevance of the ad and 2)

When many people flag the content as useful, its quality and relevance rate go up but if the ad gets lots of negative comments, its rating is also influenced.

However, the estimated action rate is an analysis made by Facebook, which calculates the probability of the user performing the action you suggested in the ad.

Tips to generate engagement

A common mistake among entrepreneurs is to run ads before they’ve “educated” their audience. Think of your experience as a user: Don’t you get annoyed when you see many ads and little quality content?

Just like you, your target audience will only keep on following your page if you offer quality content which adds value to their lives.

Remember that your posts on social media “compete” with posts from friends and family, therefore, you should establish a trusting relationship with this person before you propose the purchase.

When in question, split your posts by following this simple guideline: 80% relevant content and 20% ads.

Within the 80%, you have a range of products you can offer for free to keep your follower engaged and set yourself apart from your competition, such as ebooks, podcasts, videos, and webinars.

It’s a simple equation: the more value you add to your follower, the easier it will be to convince them to buy your product.

Run Contests

Contests and sweepstakes on Facebook are great ways to keep your users engaged, besides being a strategy that takes little investment in marketing.

You can ask participants to vote on a photo, thus increasing engagement on your page. Be sure to comprise with Facebook’s Promotion guidelines.   

Mas não se preocupe em seguir à risca este modelo, pois o formato da promoção pode variar bastante, de acordo com as preferências do seu público.

Outra sugestão é fazer ações específicas para aniversariantes ou atrelada à datas comemorativas como Natal e Dia das Mães (leia o nosso post completo sobre marketing sazonal e aprenda a incrementar suas vendas nessas datas).

But don’t worry about following this model because the promotion format can change a lot according to your audience’s preference.

Another suggestion is to have specific actions for birthdays or festive dates, like Christmas or Mother’s Day (read our complete post on Seasonal Marketing and learn to increase your sales on these dates).  

It’s important to comply with any other regulation from your country concerning contests, so, don’t forget about this detail, otherwise it can have consequences for your page and your business.

How to use your clients’ information to sell a product  

So, you have already noticed that with Facebook Ads you can adjust who sees your ad by setting up filters such as location, interests, age, among other information.

What you might not know yet is that it is possible to create an even more custom audience for your online course using information from the users of your website.

Do you want to know how? I’ll tell you!

On websites developed with WordPress, you can capture leads in your blog’s comment box by activating the comment plugin included in the platform.

WordPress also has a plugin to capture emails of users who have got in touch with you through contact forms.

When you import these lists to Facebook Ads, it automatically identifies the profiles that were created using the emails you provided and starts showing your ads to those users.

In the case of emails that aren’t associated with an active account on Facebook, you can use the resource “Lookalike Audiences” to find profiles that share the same interests of people who have already converted on your website.

To summarize: you can export all the emails from users who have already interacted on your website and create a targeted public to your ad, and you can also use profiles similar to these users to create another option of a custom audience.

This way, your ads will run to thousands of people who are not in your base yet but could be interested on the product you’re selling. The higher the campaign reach, the bigger the possibility of converting.  

Subscription form

Another way to make your leads base grow is to put a subscription form on your Facebook Fan page.

To do that you just have to access your page, click the option “Add a Button”, below your cover picture and add a link to a contact form on your website.

Then, users who were interested in your product can also subscribe to get similar offers.

You can also create subscription forms inside your Fan page in case you have programming skills. Although more complex, once it involves creating a form from scratch, this option is better for user experience because it does not send them to another page.

Remarketing   

Remarketing is a resource that allows content and ads to show to people who have already had contact with your website or landing page.

You know when you search for a product and ads related to it start showing on your social networking sites and pages you visit? That’s remarketing!

It’s a useful tool to make sales because you can program it to reach people who have already searched for your offer before and, for some reason, didn’t finish the purchase.

Creating a remarketing campaign on Facebook is a relatively simple process: you just need to have an email list and an Internet page. It might be a blog, a landing page or a website. The biggest advantage is that you can do that either on Ads Manager or Power Editor.

>> Check out the complete step to create remarketing campaigns.

How to create an e-commerce within your page

This resource is very good for companies who wish to sell their products without creating an e-commerce to do so. Or for people who aren’t interested in creating content to direct their users to another page.

To add a tab Shop to your Page:

• Click the tab Shop on the Page. If you don’t see the tab Shop click Settings, on the top left corner of the Page and click Edit Page on the left-side menu.
• Then, click Add a Tab.
• Agree with Facebook’s Sellers Terms and Policies and click Continue. For safety reasons, you might be asked to re-enter your Facebook password.
• Select Message to buy to let your clients send you messages about the products they are interested in, or Checkout on another website to send your clients to another website to complete their purchase. Then, click Continue.
• Select the currency you wish to use. This currency will apply to all your products and cannot be altered unless you delete your tab Shop and create a new one.
• Click Save.

All set. You have set up your shop and you can start adding products.

Now, let’s talk about the main advantages of choosing this e-commerce model to boost your sales.

Zero cost

You don’t need to pay Facebook to add and market your products, which is a great advantage for the Producer and Affiliate who are just starting out now.  

Questions from users

Your users can send questions about the product straight to your page, without the need to fill out forms.

Performance Report

Another advantage of Facebook’s online shop is that it offers a complete report with every metric you need to assess your business performance. Through it, you can follow how many views your product has got, how many messages were sent, and, of course, the number of sales were made.

With this information in hand, you can calculate your online course conversion rate and assess if your promotion is working.

Now that you have better understood the countless features Facebook Ads has to offer, how about putting out tips into practice to boost the sales of your online course? If you’re just starting out in this market, learn how to make your first online sale here.