Note: Segmentation is changing depending on the third party tools Facebook is approving for use at any given moment. Facebook is constantly changing. Follow the Facebook Business Blog to stay informed of what’s new.
I’m a super, super big fan of Facebook marketing funnels for fashion businesses. I think as a small business, you can’t go wrong by starting to look at these. Please, please, please, if you’ve been spending $5 a day on just crappy marketing, meaning like, “I’m going to try this, and I’m going to try that, and maybe we’ll see what happens over here.” Please stop. When it comes to Facebook marketing, no matter how little your budget is, you’ve got to come into it with the strategy and looking at funnels is really going to be the best place to start.
We’re going to go over three main strategies that you can use to start to unpack and understand Facebook marketing funnels.
1. Acquiring New Audiences
Owners of small fashion businesses, chances are you may not have had an extensive newsletter, or you may not have a ton of e-commerce purchases. But it’s really important to start to ask yourself, “What are the lifestyles and the profiles and the demographics of an ideal new audience for me to acquire?” I’m a huge fan of the Facebook audience insights tool. It’s a fantastic tool that allows you to play with so many different components of developing a new audience. You can save those audiences. You can use them for campaigns, and you can really start to play with how deep and how wide those potential target markets are.
What is so fascinating about audience insights and that tool is, again, you’ll be able to look at competitive brands if they have a large enough following. You’ll also be able to start to index for lifestyle interests. Someone who has a particular net worth and they’re making a certain amount of money, they are single, in a marriage, newly pregnant, newly engaged… you can start to get really intricate with all of your targeting. Audience insights is going to be the primary way once you start to develop your new audience groups.
2. Retarget Marketing
Imagine this… you do a great ad, you target new audience groups and now, all of a sudden, they visit your site. What happens when they come to your site? Well, obviously, you guys have installed a Facebook Pixel and that Facebook Pixel is really designed to chase them all over the internet. We all know these ads, right? You go over to one website, you’re like, “Hey, I was just on that other website. How am I getting an app for that?” You go back onto Facebook or Instagram, and oh my gosh, you are being retargeted. That’s exactly what we want to be doing.
Once you’ve acquired the new audience, imagine they come to your site, maybe they browse there for a few minutes, go to a couple of pages, and then what happens? Well, you want to then have a Facebook advertisement that is specifically geared towards retargeting. These are going to be the exact ads that chase them all over the internet, specifically, I would say to focus on the Instagram Feed and Stories as well as Facebook’s mobile newsfeed. Those are really the three main channels that I would say it would be the best to start with.
Once you’ve retargeted them, let’s say they come back to your site again. Isn’t that amazing? They come back to your site and maybe now, again, this is their third touchpoint. By the time they get back to your site, maybe they purchase something. Amazing. Now all of a sudden, they’re in your bucket from a newsletter standpoint and from an e-commerce standpoint. Now you have all their shipping information, you know they’ve purchased from you, and they are officially subscribed to your brand, and they now have the potential to become brand loyal.
3. Lookalike Audiences
Next, this is where it becomes really fun and exciting. You can start to do a variety of different kinds of targeting in order to capture that customer again. Remember, we’re not just interested in first-time buyers. We’re interested in building longer-lasting customer relationships. Now, all of a sudden, you can create a lookalike audience. What is a lookalike audience? Once you get enough people on your newsletter list, enough people that have been purchasing, maybe lists of people from participating in markets or events, you can then go back into Facebook and say, “Hey, I want you to analyze all of these people on this list, and I want to start to create targets and groups that are based on the same characteristics of these particular lists.”
It’s fantastic because it allows you to really cross-reference and mine people’s profiles as to their characteristics. Those of you who are worried about privacy issues and who are worried about us going all Russia on advertising, don’t worry. This is not going to happen to you. This is the most basic way of engaging in advertising. Trust me, your customers really do want to be hearing from you because they’ve already given you their information. Don’t worry about that from a privacy standpoint. I’m sure some of you are thinking about that.
Once you get them into a lookalike audience, you can start to do these programs that really allow you to target them again on Facebook, on Instagram. You can say, “Hey, I actually want to be targeting 1% of people in California that fit these characteristics,” and then create a California-specific ad to go along with it. Or, “I want to create an advertisement that targets 2% of people on this audience list that are like this group in Germany, or in Sweden, or in London, or in Paris.” You can actually take your audience profiles and start to apply them not only on a hyper-targeted local scale, but on a global scale.
One more piece of advice to start this retargeting process. Don’t just look at retargeting audiences and do advertisements only on the larger scale, (people who have visited your site). Even though that’s the most basic way of looking at it, get a little bit more specific about how you’re looking at these retargeting groups.
These days, you can retarget people who have been engaged with your Instagram profile. You can retarget people who’ve been on your site, let’s say 180 days ago, 30 days ago, 14 days ago, 24 hours ago…. You want to get specific about the messaging that you’re delivering within certain timeframes. Fashion businesses, it’s important because you definitely don’t want to just send blanketed messages across to everyone all the time. The amount of frequency, the delivery of the ads that you have to be sending out in order to really gain the benefits of retargeting has to be frequent, and it also has to be time sensitive.
If any of this was confusing to you, and you need help launching and executing your Facebook marketing strategies, please shoot us an email at hello@scalingretail.com. We’ve run some amazing campaigns for fashion businesses and other retail companies and seen some fantastic results. In fact, just last month, one of our clients, had an investment of only $398 into AdWords, a totally separate topic, and we ended up seeing an ROI in sales for that month upwards of $6,000. The results are there, it’s up to you to take the time and initiative to be able to really want to execute on that.
If you want to read some more in-depth analyses, please check out our blog post, “5 Steps to Implementing Retarget Marketing on Facebook”, and make sure you check out our free 2019-20 marketing calendar download. There is nothing worse than asking someone, “Hey, would you follow yourself on Instagram?” Please don’t fall into that trap. Make sure you check out our download so you can avoid a lot of the missteps preventing you from having an amazing, strong and really grounded social media presence.