But with a $300 monthly budget set aside for Facebook ads, it would be difficult to pay an ad agency to manage your campaigns.
This could be a case of being between a rock and a hard place. You need to move your business forward with targeted ads but you lack the funds or you’re just not ready to invest more at this time.
The good news is that I wrote this post with you in mind.
In this post, you’ll discover proven tips to maximize your $300 budget on Facebook advertising.
What’s the Minimum Facebook Advertising Budget?
You may be wondering: how much is the minimum amount you need to advertise your business on Facebook?
Well, it depends on your aim of advertising and your currency.
For currencies like the US dollars, Euros, and Great Britain Pounds, the following are the minimum daily budget for a campaign or ad set on Facebook:
- If you’re advertising for impressions, you must have a daily budget of at least $1.
- If you’re advertising to get clicks, likes, video views, or post engagement, you must have a daily budget of at least $5.
- If you’re advertising for low-frequency events such as offer claims or app installs, you must have a daily budget of at least $40.
Having said this, whatever goal you have for advertising on Facebook, you’ll probably run your ads for many days. That means you’ll spend more than the values above.
With your budget of $300 per month for Facebook ads, here are proven ways to get the best conversion rates from your ads:
1. Be Clear About Your Advertising Goal
What is your aim of advertising on Facebook? This is the first question you need to answer before you can have a chance of high conversions. Because if there’s no goal, it means you’re only donating money to Mark Zuckerberg.
It may sound funny, but some businesses do this with your budget.
Are you trying to increase brand awareness or you want to gain more leads for your business? Some common advertising goals for your business are:
- Brand Awareness
- Acquiring leads
- Gaining more sales
- App Installs
There are many more goals for advertising. In fact, your advertising goal is so important that Facebook will ask you to indicate it before you can create an ad.
When you have a clear advertising goal, it’s easier to know whether you have succeeded or failed with your ads.
2. Retarget Your Store Visitors
Effective retargeting (or remarketing) is an essential part of creating and running Facebook ads. If you sell female products but advertise them to men, you would only be wasting your ad budget.
Retargeting is basically the practice of re-engaging your website visitors and prospects who showed interest in your offer (by either visiting your landing page, downloading your report, trying your offer, etc.) but didn’t complete the purchase or the exact end goal you had in mind.
With retargeting, you can dramatically increase your revenue. But don’t take my word for it: In just two days after setting up its retargeting campaign, AliDropship spent only $18 and generated 10 new sales which accounted for $467 in total.
If you do the math, it means they spent $1.82 to acquire a customer and earned $46 from a single customer.
One opportunity you need to exploit is your store visits.
In most cases, someone who has visited your store is probably interested in a product.
You can then retarget them based on the pages they visited or the actions they performed.
Facebook allows you to retarget visitors to your website based on whether they’ve visited your website, or viewed a page, or submitted a form, or added a product to cart.
There are many more options you can use.
In this case, you can send relevant offers to these people to take them back to your website to make the sale.
However, to do this, you’ll first have to install Facebook pixel on your website to help track visitors.
3. Build a Campaign Around Your Deal
Why should a Facebook user click your ad? You need to give them a good reason. Because most people visit Facebook to interact with their friends and family and not to click an ad.
In a way, your ad is a distraction. But you can make it a desirable distraction for your audience if you give them a great deal. Are you going to give your audience a discount when they click your ad?
“What’s in it for me?” is the question users’ want you to answer. You need to clearly state the benefits in your ad to motivate them to click. For example, look at this Facebook ad by Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo.
The campaign is built about the deal -- which is a course that will help a Facebook user build a $1,000 a month business.
4. Calculate Your Ideal Audience Size
If you’re advertising on Facebook, you need to have an audience size in mind. You can’t show your ads to everybody around the world. Especially when you have $300 to spend.
Even when you have millions, it’s still a wrong strategy as you’ll be targeting many people who aren’t interested in your ads. To get more conversions at lower costs, you need to target the right audience.
When you do this, Facebook increases your ad relevance score and you pay less for your ads. As you increase your targeting options your audience size will reduce.
Fortunately, Facebook gives you an estimate of your audience size in the form of potential reach as you increase your targeting options. You can see when your audience size is right.
5. Calculate Your Target Impression Count
The reality is that not everybody who sees your ad will click on it.
No matter how great your ad may be. Having said that, only people who see your ad have a chance of clicking it. That’s a mouthful. I think it’s worth repeating:
“Only people who see your ad have a chance of clicking it.”
Therefore, to boost conversions, you need impressions on your ad. You should have a target number of times you want your ads to be viewed.
If your aim is to capture 500 leads, how many impressions do you think you’ll need to achieve this? Is it 4,000, 10,000, 15,000, 25,000, etc.?
By choosing the right audience size, you can increase your ad frequency and ensure that you increase your chances of acquiring more leads. There’s no exact way to calculate this as it will differ for different people.
But you can have an estimate. The only way to get the best estimation is to use daily unique reach.
For instance, you can target 5,000 impressions to gain 500 leads.
6. Calculate the Cost Per Ad Set
For a particular campaign, you’ll have to set your budget at the campaign level. Likewise, you can set your budget for an ad set.
However, if at the campaign level you activate budget optimization, Facebook will allocate more of your budget to ad sets that are performing well and less to poorly performing ad sets.
Depending on the number of ad sets in your campaign, you should be able to know your cost per ad set.
Another way to calculate your cost per ad set is to multiply your target ad impressions by cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and divide by 1,000.
7. Aim for Sales Results, Not Just Impressions, and Clicks
Even though Facebook gets you impressions and clicks, the ultimate aim is still to make more sales. While getting impressions and clicks are essential, you should still be asking if they’re leading to sales.
If impressions and clicks on your ads give you poor leads and little or no sales, then you need to examine your advertising strategy and make changes. In most cases, the biggest culprit is usually your target audience.
The first place to check is your target audience. You could be targeting the wrong audience.
8. Don’t Try to A/B Test Too Many Elements
There’s no perfect ad. And this makes A/B tests a necessity for your ads. With A/B tests, you can change different elements of your ad to see how it affects clicks and conversions.
Some elements of your ad you can change are:
- Images or videos
- Ad copy
- Audience
- Placement
Having said that, you shouldn’t just change all these elements at once. Because it will be difficult to know which specific change brought you results.
You should only change a single element at a time and track the effect of that change over a period of time.
Another point to note is that you should have these ads in different ad sets. If you have both in a single ad set, Facebook will pick one without allowing your test to run for a considerable period of time.
With an A/B test of different images, AdEspresso achieved a 50% reduction in cost per conversion.
9. Run an Email Collecting Campaign (and Follow-up Via Your Autoresponder)
You can take Facebook users who click-through your ad to a landing page or use Facebook lead ads to capture leads. But your work isn’t done after collecting their email addresses.
You need to follow up with these people to pull them further into your sales funnel. To make the process effective, you should set up an automated email sequence for the email addresses you receive through your Facebook ads.
This way, you don’t need to do it manually every time you get a new lead.
10. Use a Daily Budget
A lifetime budget can eat through your money in a short period of time. If you’re advertising on a budget, then you need to set a daily budget for your ad.
With this, you can spread your budget over days and track your ads’ performance on a daily basis. If you find an ad that’s not performing you can easily switch it off and make necessary changes.
With a lifetime budget, you may be unable to do this as you might have finished your budget. To set a daily budget, go to your ad set and click on “Budget & Schedule.”
11. Set Up Facebook Pixel to Track Your Campaign’s Results
With the use of Facebook Pixel, you can track visitors who visit a particular page. If you’re trying to gain leads, what page would a lead visit immediately after becoming a lead?
It could be a thank you page after signing up. This means every visit to this page means a captured lead. The same could apply to make a sale.
When you set up Facebook Pixel, you can track your campaign results through the pages people visit on your website.
To install Facebook Pixel on your website, go to “Tools” in your ads manager and click on “Facebook pixel.” This page will show you the steps to take to install pixel on your site.
12. Use Bold Ad Design and Write Compelling Ad Copy
Your ad has to be visible and attractive to Facebook users. Likewise, you should avoid being too ‘salesy’ as people don’t go to Facebook with the aim of buying things.
Even though your image dominates a larger part of your ad, a compelling ad copy would determine whether people click your ad or scroll past it. With Facebook ads, you only have a few words to attract the viewer.
Your ad copy should be able to show benefits to a potential lead. For instance, check out this ad:
There’s no flowery language here but you can see that the ad copy has provided benefits that could attract the ideal audience to click-through.
Conclusion
Running high-converting Facebook ads is a complex task. It’s even more so when you have to carry out this task with a $300 monthly advertising budget. But it’s achievable.
When you follow the tips stated here, then you can get the right results for your business without spending an arm and a leg.
If you have any questions about Facebook ads and how to grow your revenue, contact Bloominari, we’re a digital advertising and digital marketing agency based in San Diego, California. We’ll be more than happy to listen to you and assist you.
