Must-Use Facebook Ad Strategies to Drive eCommerce

Now is a great time to be in eCommerce. In February 2019, eCommerce sales topped brick-and-mortar retail sales for the first time. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, as 2022 saw a 7.7% increase in eCommerce sales in 2022. Your business should be well-positioned to capitalize on this forward momentum. One of the best ways to do that is your social media marketing. Particularly Facebook ads for eCommerce have proven to be effective. Despite its recent ups and downs, Facebook remains the social media platform of choice for many consumers. According to HubSpot, 78% of American consumers have found retail products on Facebook that they wanted to buy, and click-through rates for Facebook ads for e-commerce have tripled in the last two years.Creating effective Facebook ads for eCommerce comes down to a few main factors: storytelling, targeting, and tracking. Pacific54 is here to walk you through best strategies for harnessing these three factors, and how you can create campaigns that will increase your sales.

Tell a Story With Your Facebook Ads For eCommerce

In marketing, it's important to sell story and not a product, as Seth Godin described in his book "All Marketers are Liars". People will believe your story if it fits their worldview, biases and is framed correctly. It should be of no surprise that users go to social media looking for authenticity and stories, not to view ads. Harness the power of storytelling, rather than just promoting a product, with these strategies:.

• Use customer testimonials. Since 92% of customers trust “earned media” such word-of-mouth recommendations, social media mentions, press coverage, and other forms of organic promotion more than any other type of media, showing quotes, images, and video of customer satisfaction is a way to communicate success.
• Using testimonials as earned media in Facebook ads can help boost ecommerce sales by providing social proof to potential customers, building trust and credibility, highlighting unique selling points, and increasing brand awareness through user-generated content. This sponsored ad by eCommerce platform Yotpo gives a brief snapshot of how one customer benefited from the company.

• In his aforementioned book, Seth Godin emphasizes that telling the story behind your brand is a powerful way to connect with customers on an emotional level and create a tribe of loyal followers, and using Facebook ads to amplify that story can help drive sales by targeting audiences who resonate with your brand values and narrative, creating a sense of community and belonging, and fostering long-term customer relationships built on shared beliefs and experiences.
• Talk about the story behind your brand, especially if it’s mission-driven like Toms Shoes, lifestyle-driven like YETI, or fun and relatable like pet-loving brand Chewy.com. You might also give a behind-the-scenes tour of your business, like in this Facebook video from Chewy.com.

• Showcasing your product in action on Facebook ads can help boost sales by demonstrating its features and benefits, highlighting its unique selling points, and giving potential customers a better understanding of how it can solve their problems or meet their needs, which can increase their confidence in making a purchase decision. Additionally, visually engaging content showing the product in use can help capture attention, generate interest, and encourage engagement with the ad.
• This Facebook ad from Birchbox shows customers how to use hair mousse, a popular product in their online store.

Regardless of what strategy you choose, use compelling visuals, such as photos or videos, to communicate with your potential customers. [code name="newsletter-form"]

Target the Right Audience

There are currently 2.93 billion users on Facebook, and it’s impossible to serve ads to all of them at once (without seriously blowing your budget on such a broad audience). That said, not everyone is suitable for your business. you want to put relevant products in front of the right people. That’s why targeting is the cornerstone of every Facebook ads strategy. Here are a few ways to narrow in on that niche and select the right target audience. Before getting started, you might want to familiarize yourself with Facebook Ads campaign objectives and which is right for you!

Build A Custom Audience

You want to show ads to people more likely to buy your products. Part of your digital marketing strategy should be audience customization. Finding the perfect customer may seem daunting, but we assure you that it's easier than you think to reach your target customers. Use Facebook ads manager to select the proper demographics for your ideal customer base. Let's say for example that you are an ecommerce business that specializes in hair care products. You should target women who have an active interest in a larger brand like L'oreal and an interest in hair care. This is just one example of targeting you should use in your advertising strategy.

Retargeting Campaigns

Suppose a customer is already aware of your brand or your competitor’s. Maybe they’re only in the discovery phase of the customer journey and aren’t ready to make a purchase yet. Or maybe they’ve gone a step further and visited your website, put an item into the cart, but then closed the browser and forgot about it. Since only 2% of first-time website visitors convert, sometimes it helps to give current customers a little nudge to remind them of what you have to offer. That’s what retargeting campaigns are for.The way it works is that when someone visits your eCommerce store, their browser stores a ”cookie,” which can keep a record of their activities on a website (such as creating a login, adding an item to a cart, and keeping track of website preferences). Cookies also enable advertisers to show highly relevant displays ads on other sites, usually through Google or social media platforms like Facebook.To set up a retargeting campaign, create a new audience in Facebook Ad Manager by choosing “Website Traffic” and adding the specific website URLs and actions that you want to target. An example is users who visited your product listing page or put an item in the cart, but didn’t purchase. Set the parameters for how long the campaign should run, upload your creative, and publish.

Here are a few ad strategies for engaging with a retargeted audience.

• Offer special discounts and incentives. For example, after visiting the website for the meal kit delivery service Plated, an ad like the one below might pop up in your News Feed offering $20 off the first four orders.

• Use a product catalog, abandoned cart notification, or link to a product listing page to show previous website visitors exactly what they were seeing before they left the site. This Facebook ad from Australian online retailer RedBalloon combines a discount offer and an abandoned cart notification.

For a more in-depth look, you can also learn how Pacific54 helped Traffic Shoe improve their Facebook retargeting strategy.

Custom Audiences from Customer Files

Facebook Custom Audience from Customer Files is a means of targeted advertising that occurs when a business imports user email addresses for retargeting. This method is best for engaging existing customers. For customers who may have lapsed or not patronized your business for a certain period of time, you might want to serve them an ad with a special deal. In Facebook Ads Manager, create a new audience, choose the “Customer Data” option, and upload the information.

Lookalike Audiences

Perhaps you’ve already exhausted your resources with your existing customer data or data collected from cookies. When you’re looking to expand your customer base or increase general brand awareness, lookalike audiences are your best bet.You can create a Lookalike Audience based on pixel data, mobile app data or people who have Liked your Page. Facebook will identify common characteristics of the people in this audience, such as location, demographics, and interests. and then curate a new audience based on this profile. It’s a bit like the Facebook algorithm recreating your marketing personas. You can choose how large or small you would like your Lookalike audience to be, though Facebook usually recommends between 1,000 and 50,000 people.A few suggested lookalike audiences that can be used as a strategy include:

• A lookalike based on audiences that made a purchase
• A lookalike based on audiences that added a product to the cart
• A lookalike based on a customer list that you upload

Test, Measure, Adapt Your Ads

You need to have a plan for measuring your campaign’s success. It doesn’t matter how good your ad is if you aren’t tracking conversions. It might take a few tries to learn which Facebook ads for eCommerce work best for you, whether you need to change the target audience or A/B test with different visuals to see which drives more conversions. Here are a few tools you can use for analytics.

Meta Pixel

By installing Meta Pixels, you can track the activity of each ad and see how much traffic is driving to your site from Facebook. Although not necessarily a strategy, adding a pixel is something that you should always do to analyze how well your campaign is working.

Use Facebook Insights

Facebook has its own built-in analytics platform, Facebook Insights, for you to track engagement on your page. With Facebook Insights, you can view the effectiveness of your organic posts as well as your Facebook advertising.

Use Google Analytics and Google Data Studio

Since you also want to measure web traffic and conversions as well as clicks and engagement on Facebook, use tools like Google Analytics and Google Data Studio. While Google Analytics can provide the raw data for web analytics (source/medium, pageviews, bounce rate, goal completions, etc.), Google Data Studio uses data visualization to help you get a more holistic view of how customers are interacting with your eCommerce site.

Let Pacific54 Create Your Facebook Ads For eCommerce

Marketing is about evolution, and having the right agency on your side can help you navigate the ever-changing landscape. If you’re looking to grow your Facebook strategy for your eCommerce business, contact Pacific54 today for a consultation.