Growing your Facebook audience

How to use Facebook ads to grow your audience on Facebook (without breaking the bank!)

We all know that Facebook ads are effective, and as entrepreneurs we are always hearing stories about how X brand made thousands with ads… what they probably aren’t telling you is the money it cost them to get there in testing, learning and making mistakes!

Facebook ads work, and they can work really, really well, but the key is effectively taking your customer through the sales funnel from awareness (where they just find out about your product/ service) to conversion (where they buy your product/ service).

With 2.3 BILLION monthly active users, you can bet your customers are on Facebook, but how do we find them and bring them to our page?

In this article I want to give you some practical, actionable tips to building your audience ready to sell to - without breaking the bank in the process.

How to build your audience

The first step to selling anything online is to create an audience. Often people make the mistake of thinking running ads means you don’t have to post regularly or engage on your channels, but this really isn’t true - especially if you want those cheap sales!

If you can build an engaged audience it will help your content reach more people, and any budget you do spend on ads will go much further. Think of the engagement on your page as rocket fuel for your ads; the more ‘buzz’ (or fuel) you create, the more ‘juice’(or thrust) Facebook with give your ads as a result.

First things first… be active

Print on demand works well when you are serving a niche interest - an interest which evokes passion in people, and they want to identify with it (ie: wear it on a T-shirt!).

Chances are, you share that passion, and so your niche is very clear. However, if you haven’t yet picked a niche, here are some things to consider:

• Who is buying on Facebook?
  (50+ are the fastest growing age group on the platform and we are seeing some really great results from that demographic!).

• What do you love and know a lot about?
  If you try selling something you know nothing about it will come across as inauthentic and you will find it hard to get your content bang on.

• What are the key trends in that industry that you can tap into?
  It’s really important to be original, and print on demand means you can move fast and be ahead of the game.

Once you have chosen your niche, you want to start building an audience. A great way to do this is to find some relevant content - memes are PERFECT for this.

Find or create some memes which speak directly to your audience, and if you can’t find any then make some!

For example, here is one I recently used on our SOUP Social agency page to speak directly to people trying to DIY their ads in their own business.

Post them to your page and put a small amount of ad spend behind each one.

How to grow your audience using ads

1. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager.
   To find your ads manager, head to your Facebook home page, click on the arrow on the far right of the header banner and go to ‘manage ads’.

2. Create your ad.
   To do this, select ‘create ad’, ’engagement’ then ‘post engagement’.

3. Target your ad.
   In targeting, add in a few interests that apply to your niche (ie: if you are doing music related products, choose a few bands that your audience would be into), but keep the audience broad - around 10 million is a great number for this purpose.

4. Add your budget.
   In ‘budget’ add in around £5 a day - this will get some results quickly for you.

5. Select your post.
   Go to creative and select content you have created by using ‘select post’ - this is really similar to boosting posts, but gives you a lot more options in terms of targeting and reporting.

   

Your ad is now ready to go live! Set it live and wait for the results to come in. When you start getting people liking and commenting on the post, you know you have a winner.

Make sure you are responding to comments to build engagement and the trust factor, but the key is getting them to react with a ❤️ and then inviting them to like your page.

By inviting people who have reacted to your post in some way, you are building your audience with the right kind of people.

How to invite people to like your page

Head to the list of people who have reacted to your post, and click invite - simple! They will get an invitation to like your page which they can then respond to.

 

Some people are afraid that doing this is creepy or too forward... but people are used to being invited to like pages on Facebook, so don’t let being too polite put you off!

TIP: there is a Google Chrome plugin called ‘Invite All’ which will invite everyone who reacted to your post to like your page - it does come with caution though so if you do use it, just run it once a day.

Recap: how to build your audience

1. Pick a niche - find something you love and are knowledgeable about. If you don’t love it, you’ll struggle to sell it!

2. Find or create content that will speak to your audience. Think of this as ‘people collecting’; you want to attract them to your page with content they will relate to.

3. Run a page post engagement ad using a small budget (£5 a day is enough).

4. Once people start ‘reacting’ to your content, invite them to like your page.

5. Repeat this with a few different types of content - memes, quotes, images etc until you’ve build an audience that you can use for future advertising.

Once you have your audience, you are ready to sell to them! Post to your page regularly using a mixture of creative styles and copy to get across your passion for your niche.

Having an audience is the key to making your print on demand store work through Facebook Ads. With this audience you have a group of RELEVANT people who are interested in your niche, and you now have a solid foundation to build your custom audiences from when you are ready to start running conversion ads!

Join the conversation about Facebook Ads

Have you given these tips a go? Have you had some success/failres that you'd like to discuss? The conversation is taking off in our Facebook Group, Inkthreadable Hub, so why not join and find or offer some more help and advice? 

About the author: Amanda Perry