Facebook advertising is taking the world by storm.

Despite the growing prevalence of other social media channels like Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook is still the unrivaled king of the social networks.

And it isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

While Facebook advertising in and of itself is a rather simple task, truly mastering this niche is an admittedly difficult feat.

With its “Pay to Play” model, the barrier to entry for new entrepreneurs looking to become Facebook advertising experts is rather high.

Luckily, there are a few advanced strategies that will help you turn pro in no time.

Here are the 6 most effective Facebook advertising tactics that I have found to help you generate massive amounts of revenue and engagement in record time.

1. Target Lookalike Audiences

If you already have a basic grasp of Facebook targeting, then odds are you have already become proficient in marketing to warm leads (or people who are already familiar with your brand).

But what if there was a way to target individuals with strong similarities to your existing audience?

There is.

It’s called lookalike audience targeting.

The Types of Lookalike Audiences

The first thing that you need to keep in mind before you begin this process is the different types of lookalike audiences.

Within the ads manager, there are three basic types of lookalike audiences.

1. Client Lookalikes: By far the best option. These are lookalikes who strongly resemble existing customers.
2. Lead Lookalikes: These lookalikes will resemble individuals who you have already captured as leads
3. Fan Lookalikes: The least relevant of the three (but still powerful if used properly) this audience will target individuals resembling people who already like your fan page.

How It’s Done

Go to Ads Manager, Select Tools > Audience > Create Audience > Lookalike Audience.

Now it’s time to select an audience that you want to replicate and market to.

This is where you can choose to market to lookalikes of your customers, leads, or fans.

Next, select a percentage of the lookalike population in your country to whom you want to show your ads.

This selection ranges from 1-10%.

The lower the percentage that you select, the closer this audience will mimic their parent audience.

(To market to fan lookalikes input your page as the audience)

2. Combine Interest and User Behavior to Hyper Target Lead

Facebook’s greatest strength lies in its ability to hyper-target individuals with ultra-specific parameters.

And this is where most marketers get it wrong.

They assume that just because someone has exhibited an interest in a related topic or service that they are therefore a good lead to target for their company.

This leads many entrepreneurs and even Facebook advertising agencies to target audiences that are far too wide.

The secret is to combine interest and behavioral targeting to run ultra specific ads that will target only the best leads.

For example, if you are running an online personal training service specializing in helping men gain muscle for physique competitions, simply targeting men interested in “Fitness” will lead to poor results at best.

Instead, you can now target more narrow audiences by combining their interest in Men’s Physique Competition, IFBB (a bodybuilding organization), and the behavior of attending or competing in physique competitions.

Here’s How It’s Done

This is actually a relatively simple process.

Go to Ads Manager > Create New Ad > Set an Objective > Audience

From the audience menu select detailed targeting > Browse

From here you can select interests and behaviors.

So for our example, if you are targeting a B2B company in the finance industry with an interest in digital marketing, you would simply take the following steps.

Type in “Digital Marketing” into the search bar and select it as an interest.

Next Browse > Behaviors > B2B

Now simply select “Finances” and boom! You now have your hyper-targeted audience.

3. Optimize Your Forms to Target Better Leads

Even if you are using the current best practices for ad targeting, odds are good that you are wasting valuable ad dollars on visitors who are unlikely to convert on your offers.

Luckily, with a simple trick, you can implement a Facebook pixel that will help Facebook “learn” what kind of audience members are the most valuable to your company.

Basically, this pixel will fire any time that an audience member inputs a certain parameter into your information capture box.

So for example, if you are selling a high-performance coaching package and you know that your most valuable leads will be individuals spending 10% or more of their take-home income on personal growth, then you can setup the Facebook pixel to fire whenever a lead inputs 10% or greater into the box.

This will tell Facebook that this lead is highly qualified.

Once you have been using this tactic for a few months, Facebook will have aggregated enough data to start targeting only the most qualified leads.

4. Sequence Your Messages

This powerful tactic will allow you to build brand recognition and increase the odds of leads converting on Facebook.

By following the below steps you will be able to target follow-up messages to audience members based on how they have interacted with your content in the past.

First, create your ad sequence in Ad manager.

Then, schedule your ads so that they will go to the same audience, but you then create a custom audience to ensure that the ads are targeted to individuals who have seen previous messages but not converted.

By retargeting your ads to focus on people who have visited your websites or seen a previous video you will massively increase your odds of a conversion and sale.

 

For example, Andrea Vahl from Copy Hacker uses the following sequence to continually contact potential leads and increase conversions.

She created three free video mini courses that would be retargeted to leads who had seen the previous message.

Here’s what the ads manager breakdown looked like.

As the ads became more targeted, the price obviously increased however that is the price that you pay for an increase in conversion rate (which you will see in a second)

On the final day, she ran two ads that retargeted people who had seen her previous ad or visited her website.

The results? Over 350% more sales than her last Facebook video ad campaign!

5. Use Breakdown Reports to Find Your Weak Spots

One of the biggest keys to online advertising success is constantly analyzing and reviewing the data from past campaigns to identify weak spots and improve performance.

By reviewing the breakdown report, you can find the highest performing segments and only target those individuals who are converting on your ads.

6. Use Life Events to Target Relevant Audience Members

Depending on the product or service that you are selling, you can use life events to determine the most relevant customers to market to.

For example, let’s say that you own a wedding photography service.

It would be pointless to market your ads to people who like “Marriage” and “Weddings” on Facebook because quite frankly every teenage girl and hopeless romantic falls under that umbrella.

However, you can target audience members who have recently been engaged in your area to ensure that only leads who are actually qualified will be targeted by your ads.

Conclusion

So there you have it.

6 advanced tactics that will help you level up your Facebook advertising so that you can target the most qualified leads and maximize every ad dollar spent.

So pick one of these strategies and implement it in your next campaign and let me know what results you are able to generate!

DO you have any advanced Facebook marketing questions that you need help with? Do you have any strategies that you have used before you want to share? Let me know in the comments below!