5 Strategies for Acquiring New Customers at Scale Using Facebook It's one thing to acquire new customers via Facebook. It's another to acquire them at scale. Could your brand stand to benefit from more of the latter?
By Eric 'ERock' Christopher Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
According to Statista, there are roughly 8 million businesses on Facebook that are defined as "active advertisers," meaning they invest in Facebook ads to market their products and services.
These days, simply having a Facebook profile for your business isn't enough — especially in light of the platform's every-decreasing organic reach. Yet the vast majority of businesses try to avoid spending money on the platform. While reducing advertising costs can be a good thing, it won't help you catch up to your competitors who have established a strong Facebook presence.
Making your mark on Facebook may require a bit of an investment, but there is no denying that it can be a powerful tool for acquiring new customers at scale. But not all Facebook advertising campaigns are created equal. The right strategies will make all the difference in your social media growth.
1. Leverage the power of Facebook's pixel
Facebook's pixel tool can create a powerful link between your Facebook profile and your website, helping you retarget users who are more likely to convert into paying customers. By activating the optional Auto Advanced Matching feature associated with the pixel, the tool can collect even more relevant information from your site, such as who has signed up for email or newsletter lists.
Related: What Are Loop Giveaways and How Can You Use Them to Gain Millions of Followers on Facebook?
This tool helps match relevant Facebook ads to the right users at the right time. This was a key part of a 2019 Yankee Candle ad campaign, which used pixel data to show relevant products to customers who had abandoned their shopping cart within the previous six months. Thanks in part to this strategy, the company increased its holiday revenue by 65 percent in comparison to the previous year.
2. Determine the right creative for each campaign
Not all Facebook campaigns will necessarily focus on the exact same subset of your target audience. And different campaigns could be more or less appealing to a particular group simply based on the creative mix selected for your Facebook ads.
As Lomit Patel explains in a blog post for Liftoff, "In our efforts, video performed much better than static images for new user acquisition. But the opposite turned out to be true for our retargeting campaigns, where static images far outperformed video. […] using jargon or acronyms relevant to our audience in the copy helped improve click-through rates."
Related: Facebook Fails Its Own Audit Over Civil Rights and Hate Speech Decisions
The right creative mix will likely vary based on your target audience and campaign. Doing your research to optimize this mix will ensure that future campaigns are even more successful at customer acquisition.
Related: The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Facebook Ads
3. Simplify your Facebook marketing campaign structure
Facebook campaigns have long emphasized hyper-focused targeting to reach extremely specific subgroups. But today, many brands are finding success by shifting in the opposite direction — running fewer campaigns and ad sets to improve Facebook optimization and better scale customer acquisition.
In a case study for growth marketing firm KlientBoost, Matt Nelson notes that after onboarding a new client, one of their first steps was to reduce "… their account from six campaigns and 24 ad sets to four campaigns and nine ad sets." The result? "By simplifying and going broader (with essentially the same spend), we were able to generate 20 percent more clicks, leading to 18 percent more purchases [and] almost 40 percent more revenue."
Quite often, less is more. Simplifying your campaigns will make it easier for Facebook's algorithms to optimize them for you, ensuring that they get in front of the right people.
4. Take advantage of automatic placements
Automatic placements are a key part of Facebook's optimization algorithm. This doesn't just help you scale customer growth on Facebook — it also maximizes your exposure on Instagram. Facebook's algorithms spread your placements across these platforms based on its own data to display ads to users who are most likely to convert into paying customers.
While you don't have to opt into automatic placements, using this system ensures that you are essentially playing by Facebook's "rules" with each campaign. Manual placements involve a lot more trial and error, and require a lot more time and research on your end. Turning the work over to the algorithm will get you better results, faster.
Related: 6 Hacks to Improve Your Facebook Ad Conversions
5. Don't be afraid to give away something for free
Contests and giveaways continue to be a popular customer acquisition tool on Facebook, and for good reason. Many of these campaigns are able to leverage a mix of paid advertising that is fueled by word of mouth audience participation that gets their products and services in front of even more people.
Related: How to Spy on Your Competitors Using the Facebook Ad Library
In an interview with Business Collective, Andy Leff of Electricity Labs/Warp Speed Labs noted that giving away small prizes (like gift cards) for relatively easy challenges helped their website traffic increase 10 times in a single month.
The most successful contests prominently feature user-generated content. Many users will get excited about the possibility of appearing on your official page as part of the contest, which in turn will help you reach their friends and family who likely have similar interests. In this blog post on UpViral, a popular contest giveaway software, Wilco de Kreij outlines how to collect user-generated content and tips to successfully run contests and giveaways.
Maximizing your Facebook presence
Advertising on Facebook can make a big difference in your customer acquisition efforts. But to get the results you want, you have to implement the right strategies. By utilizing these options to improve your Facebook marketing, you will be able to get the customer acquisition boost that your business needs to thrive.
