How to Market a Product on Facebook

Let me start by asking you this, do you sell a product or service?

This is an important question. Selling a product is much easier than selling a service. People like to buy something they can touch, take home, and enjoy immediately. So when marketing a product, it is all about the “thing”, what it does, and most importantly how the customer can benefit from the product.

So your marketing message should be all about how the product can positively impact the customer’s life. This can be done very nicely through video, showing the product, how it works, what it does, and some happy customers telling their stories.

My favorite method for marketing a product is to use video and promote it on Social Media using a defined targeted audience and geographic area. By creating this initial engagement piece on social, you have the ability to capture interested potential customers. Specifically, when marketing on Facebook, you can create a remarketing audience for anyone that has viewed/clicked on the video. You can even choose between several metrics from Facebook like ThruPlays (they have to watch a certain length of the video) before you are charged. So for a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) model, this provides a great Return on Investment (ROI). ThruPlays are only available when you choose Video Views as your marketing objective.

My 10 Step Guide to Marketing a Product on Facebook

1. Shoot a 15-60 second video. Keep it engaging, light-hearted and showing the product being used by happy people. Find a good local and reputable company to shoot the video and be sure they have experience creating short videos. This is not a docu-series or major motion picture so you will need help to keep the video short and impactful. For reference 50 words is roughly 30 seconds of video dialogue at a normal cadence. If you are local to Melbourne, FL, one of my favorite video agencies is Ideal Impact Media.
2. Create a Facebook ad, and use the video as the centerpiece, while using the Text portion of the ad to show off the benefits to the customer and how it will improve their lives. This ad is not about selling the product. This is about getting engagement to build a remarketing audience.
3. Include a Call To Action (CTA) button in the Facebook ad and have a quality landing page built to drive them to. Be sure to have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website or landing page that you are sending people to. In my experience, a landing page is better than a home page. This landing page should have a similar message to the ad. It is not necessary for people to go to the page just yet, so the CTA should be more about information at this point, rather than ‘Buy Now”. It also helps to have a special offer in the ad, only available for people that view the ad. And they can get the special offer by clicking the CTA.  Remember this is about engagement, not sales, at least right now…
4. For the audience, you should have a good feel for the gender, age and behavioral targeting for the ad. Don’t be too specific at this point, because you want to get some statistics to see if your feel for the audience is on target.
5. For the ad spend on this ad, you should aim high. You want to get the most engagement on this ad in the shortest amount of time, so I recommend spending at a minimum $50-$100 a day if you are marketing locally and $1,000-$2,500 a day if you are marketing nationally. And don’t have the ad run for a week, have it run for 2-3 days. The reason you have a high daily ad spend for only a few days is that you want people to see the ad multiple times in just a few days, but not get annoyed by it, or not be engaged by it because they have seen it too many times.
6. Run the ad on both the Facebook and Instagram platforms. Since they are both owned by Facebook, as long as you keep the video 60 seconds or less, you can run it on both platforms using the same single ad.
7. Once the ad ends, you will have a few metrics that are very helpful.
   1. Gender – what gender has the most engagement
   2. Location – what location has the most engagement
   3. Age – what age range has the most engagement
   4. Placement – what placement has the most engagement
8. With this data, you now create an ad to market directly to the audience that had the most engagement, i.e. this gender, this age range, in this location, and this placement… This ad should run for (1 to 2 weeks) and can have a smaller daily budget like $25-$50 a day if you are marketing locally and a minimum of $250-$500 a day for national. The ad should still be somewhat general non-sales content. The point is to continually grow your remarketing audience for the 2 weeks. For this ad, you want to be sure to choose to not market to those that have already engaged with your ad. You can select this when creating the ad set on Facebook.
9. Now comes the remarketing ad. For this ad, you will create a targeted sales-focused ad, and you choose to create a custom audience, known as an Engagement Custom Audience. This is all about selling. These people have already shown interest in your other ad, so it is ok to hit them with a sales ad and drive them to the conversion funnel. This ad should run for 1 to 2 weeks as well. And you can be a little less on the ad spend because you are remarketing which, in general, has a better Cost per Click rate.  Don’t get me wrong, you still need to spend some money and you need to track the user’s activity. That is why it is essential to have the Facebook Pixel installed on your sales/conversion landing page or website.
10. Finally, you should split test – A/B test all of these ads.  Create two different ads, so that you can see which performs better. Run the same ad experiment and see which ones get more engagement. Once you see which performs better, you know what type of content to create moving forward. It is my recommendation that you change up your ad content monthly every month going forward. Nobody likes to see the same ad over and over again, it becomes white noise.

Conclusion

Marketing is not easy, it is a science, and is heavily influenced by data.  So if you are not tracking and testing, then you are most likely wasting money.

Be sure to join me next week when I breakdown how to market a service using Social Media.