Best Instagram/Facebook Ads Strategy For POD In 2023
Instagram & Facebook ads are probably the quickest way you can scale print on demand products...
"What does it mean to scale?"
To scale an ad just means to show it to more people because it's making sales.
And if you show it to more people - the hope is you will make even more sales!
But... before you can scale - you need a solid foundation.
That's what this blog post is about - your foundation with print on demand Facebook ads.
What's in this blog post guide?
- What do Facebook ads do?
- What is a strategy?
- Your ad audience
- Your testing ads
- Your conversion ads
Part One: What do Facebook ads do?
To put it simply, Facebook ads promote your products. On Facebook we can use their advertising services to show our products to highly targeted groups of people that we think will like them.
For me, Facebook ads have been responsible for about 75% of my total sales I would say.
In my opinion if youre not using Facebook ads to promote your products you're letting a major opportunity pass you by.
Facebook ads won't work forever.
Why? Well because they're continuing to rise in costs and once they get to high they just won't work anymore for us.
But hopefully, that won't be for a few years.
Part Two: What is a strategy?
When I first started using Facebook ads to promote my print on demand products I wanted to have a way that I could not only launch successful ads, but something that was easy to manage and maintain.
I needed a system.
I wanted a strategy.
To me a strategy means that you have a system, and that system has goals.
By using these goals you are able to measure how your ads are performing against your goals.
By having something like this, I was able to save money, and time because I could manage launching lots of ads but was able to simplify things because of the goals I had set.
People without a system, or a strategy - typically spend way more money on their ads and get less results.
This is because they don't have goals for their ads relative to how much they're spending or how long the ad has been running for.
Part Three: Your Audience
Your audience is just who is seeing the ad.
To run Facebook ads you need to create audiences.
When we build audiences we hope that the people in it are going to be interested in buying our products!
An audience can contain people of a specific gender, age & country. However, the most important thing about our audience is what interests we are targetting.
An interest is something we select inside of Facebook.
On Facebook's platform there are billions of users.
To make things easier for us, Facebook has placed people into these interest groups based on pages they follow, pictures they like and websites they visit.
This means if we're trying to target a certain niche, and we choose an interest that relates to it, odds are the audience is going to contain the types of people we're trying to target!
An no, we're not talking about that type of Target...
To target on Facebook means to create an audience that contains high value interests in our niche.
A high value interest is one that ONLY people who are the most passionate about our niche would be interested in.
For example, if you're targeting people who like to play golf - using the interest Tiger Woods probably isn't a good idea.
This is because almost anyone who is interested in sports has probably interacted with a Tiger Woods post, or visited a webpage related to Tiger Woods.
By targeting an interest like that, we wouldn't be finding the most passionate golfers. We would just be targeted sports fans.
A better thing to do would be to find a list of the top 100 golfers and build an audience with the bottom 10 golfers names in it.
This way, the only people in the audience would be those that really know the sport.
Most casual golfers and sports fans likely wouldn't even know who these golfers are, but the ones that are the most passionate about the sport would.
Part Four: Your Testing Ad
Before you can actually begin to spend real money on ads you need to test.
What does it mean to test and what are we testing?
For me when I test I am doing two things.
The first thing is making sure that the people in the audience I have created are actually the types of people I want to target.
The second, is that the audience has at least a little interest in buying my product.
I spend a lot of time testing because I have a cheap way to do it.
I can effectively test my print on demand products for only $1 a day.
Sometimes less.
By doing this I am able to save money.
Facebook ads are expensive and by testing, I make sure that I make smart decisions with my money.
To test, I use what's called a PPE ad.
Inside Facebook this just means using the engagement objective when setting up the ad.
When you select this as your objective Facebook will only show the ad to people in your audience who are most likely to engage with content.
I then measure only 3 metrics.
Remember when I told you about the importance of a strategy that has goals?
My goals with PPE are to have 2/3 of these metrics meet certain criteria.
- Cost per engagement - I want my ads to get engagements on them for $.05 or less
- Unique CTR (ALL) - This is a ratio of how many people saw the ad compared to how many interacted with it. I want this metric to be 20% or higher.
- Link clicks - getting link clicks on a PPE is a bonus for me, but it means there is interest.
Wanna know the best part?
When I set this up I use only a $1 daily budget.
That's all you need.
And if you have a successful test, that means you can confidently launch new ads with the conversion objective!
Part Five: Your Conversion Campaign
What is a conversion campaign?
This is when you launch an ad using the conversion objective inside of Facebook.
By using this objective you are telling Facebook you want them to show the ad to people who are most likely to make purchases online when clicking Facebook ads.
These ads are more expensive than PPE ads.
That's why having a strategy is important.
For me, I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads and if I didn't do PPE first, I bet I would have spent way more (and lost a lot of money)
So with a conversion campaign, you want to set it up almost exactly like a PPE campaign except you can now use a video ad if you want.
The most important thing about a conversion Facebook ad is how cheap the traffic is that's coming to your store.
This just means how much money it costs you to bring one person to your store.
Part of my strategy is to launch conversion campaigns with a $5 daily budget.
After one day, and the ad has spent $5 I make an assessment.
What I am looking for is a $2 cost per link click.
This means I want my link clicks on the ad, and visitors to my store to cost less than $2 each on the first day.
If it's higher than that, I turn the ad off and try and figure out what went wrong.
If it's lower than that - then the ad is working.
Remember, ads have one job - to bring people to our store cheaply.
If people are clicking the ad for cheap, and i'm not making sales there are a few things I look at.
- How is my targeting? Am I targeting high value interests?
- How is my video ad? Or my image? Does it look good?
- How does my store look? Do people trust it?
Obviously - there are lots of reasons why Facebook ads may fail but those are usually the first things I assess to figure out what's going wrong.
So what should you do if you're trying to get into Facebook ads?
Start slow.
Learn as much as you can.
And try to develop a process for yourself to follow.
A strategy, and stick to it!
Sometimes it's very easy to fall in love with products but by doing that, you risk spending way more than you have to with Facebook ads.
