This Smart Facebook Ad Strategy Transforms Brand Awareness into Sales, Fast.

Modern social media is a multi-channel affair.

Years ago, people kind of stuck primarily to one site.

Platforms like Myspace and Facebook offered tons of features under one virtual “roof”: photo sharing, text-based blog content, link sharing, instant messaging, and more.

And, they were using one type of device.

Specifically, laptops and desktops.

Sure, there were early web-capable phones like old-school Blackberries and the T-Mobile Sidekick, but their functionality was limited.

Today, these different social media features and communication channels have fragmented.

People follow friends on Facebook, but post photos over on Instagram and Snapchat instead. We've got Twitter for microblogging, Pinterest for sharing and saving images, and a bunch of different messaging apps.

And, we're always constantly switching between devices.

You probably have a smartphone, and you might have a tablet, too.

This presents a challenge for marketers.

What you don't want to do is send the right message at the wrong time.

In a recent blog post, AdEspresso explains how you can create a seamless flow between mobile Facebook ads, and ads aimed at desktop users.

This smart strategy primes consumers with brand awareness, then retargets them on desktop, where they're likely to make a purchase.

First, Target On Mobile For Awareness

Mobile ads are the right hook of the hybrid Facebook ads strategy.

They’re how you set people up, engage them, and acquire an audience to retarget later on in the desktop targeting portion of the strategy.

The goal of this phase is to build awareness.

Awareness is how you get people to eventually buy from you.

And it’s easier, on mobile, to build awareness with your potential customers than it is to get them to actually convert.

Video ads that tell a story about your brand are one of the most effective ways to get increased awareness of your product.

[image source: AdEspresso]

Part of this is simply how we use our phones.

Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research did a study and found that 62% of people waiting (for things like buses or coffees) used their smartphones to pass the time.

People who are “waiting,” whether they’re waiting for their morning commute to end or their morning coffee to arrive, are trying to fill an empty space in their day.

There are all kinds of interruptions and distractions that can disrupt a session—witness the fact that bounce rates on mobile are 40% higher, across the web, than they are on desktop.

And yet engagement, when it’s there, is high.

Video-watching on mobile is especially popular. Facebook estimates that about 75% of all mobile traffic will be video by 2020.

[image source: AdEspresso]

On mobile, video ads—the kind that draw people in while telling them something about who you are—are particularly effective for increasing awareness of your product.

Selling and converting can be quite tricky.

You can’t show off as many of your products or create as great of a deal, partially because you’re simply limited by the screen real estate available and partially because people are easily distracted on mobile.

That’s why you should focus on the top of funnel on mobile.

You don’t want to be shooting for conversions, and then lose people in the funnel due to that high bounce rate.

You’ll handle that part later.

Then, Use Retargeting On Desktop For Sales

Use Facebook retargeting on desktop to close the deal. This is the uppercut of the hybrid Facebook marketing strategy.

” There comes a time when your prospect is actually ready to buy. The nurturing stops. And the closing begins. ” — Joanna Wiebe

The key to mobile awareness targeting is that you’re getting cheap clicks.

You shouldn’t be optimizing for actions taken on your site here—you should be looking to get your ad in front of as many people in your target market as possible.

Those people who click have then done two things:

They’ve given some indication that they’re interested in your brand

They’ve put themselves in a custom audience that you can now retarget

As the people that clicked on your mobile ad travel to work, or back home, and open up their laptops or desktops, they should see a slightly different kind of ad from you—one designed to leverage the awareness they’ve created into sales.

You shouldn’t be trying to tell people your story or convince them they have a problem or even explain that you’re the solution to the problem.

You should be taking those people that clicked on your mobile ads and giving them precisely what they need to get through the last mile and actually buy: like a discount code:

[image source: AdEspresso]

By this point in the funnel, UrbanStems is sure you know who they are and what they do—that’s why the goal of this multi-product carousel ad is to expose as many potential buying opportunities to the customer as possible.

That’s in contrast to an ad like this one from Pistol Lake:

[image source: AdEspresso]

The Shop Now CTA is fine, but doesn’t necessarily have the desired effect if the person it’s reaching isn’t yet aware of what they’re going to see on the other side.

And why no product-specific CTAs or pictures?

On desktop, with the wide amount of real estate that you get compared to mobile, it makes sense to expand and show people the different kinds of products you have.

Yet so many marketers get reticent here.

Even at the virtual point of sale (what Facebook can be nowadays) with people that are ready to buy, too many advertisements are still trying to educate, to tell a story, to enchant. As Joanna Wiebe writes: