What is a Facebook ad?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A Facebook ad looks something like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The various components of the ad are as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This email is going to offer a very swift overview of how to use these various elements \u2013 but, again, please think of this as a quick orientation only.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What you\u2019re aiming to create<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A good ad is sexy, spare, focused \u2013 and repellent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s sexy<\/strong>, in that it should attract the eye, and arouse reader-lust in the right group of readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It needs to be spare<\/strong>, because you don\u2019t have a lot of text to play with and you need to make sure that you give the essential messages fast and unmistakably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It has to be focused<\/strong>, because your ad needs to tell people what<\/em> it\u2019s advertising. In the example I\u2019ve given, it should be clear that I\u2019m offering (a) a crime series, (b) it\u2019s on sale [except, it\u2019s not \u2013 this is just an example], and (c) what I\u2019m offering is ebooks on Amazon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is also why the ad also has to be repellent<\/strong>. I actively don\u2019t want ad-clicks from people who want to watch TV crime, or only buy print, or only use Apple as their bookstore. Those clicks will cost money and destroy returns. To those people, the ad has to say, very clearly, \u201cthis ad is not for you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n How to build a persuasive creative<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of primary text<\/strong>, the basic rule is that you need your tagline followed by an explicit statement of what you want the user to do next. In my example, the tagline spends two lines pitching Fiona\u2019s unique quality and reader reactions, followed by half a line which tells the user what to do next. (And you\u2019ll note, I\u2019m explicit about \u201cdownload on Amazon\u201d: I don\u2019t want clicks from non-Kindle users.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t use more than 125 characters for all this, or your text will be cut off. It\u2019s best to come up with several (three?) variants for primary text. One variant might emphasise a price discount, another might emphasise social proof (\u201cX number of 5-star reviews!\u201d), a third might pick out some key property of the book. Facebook will be able to test which variant works best for you, so give it some options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your ad image<\/strong> matters immensely. The basic rule here is that you use the cover art (without text) as a background and overlay a book cover on that art. You might think that sticking a book cover on top of the artwork is not exactly a way to make the artwork look its best, and it\u2019s not. But again, your ad has to say: \u201cI am selling books<\/span><\/em><\/u>, nothing else.\u201d You can get cheaper clicks if you don\u2019t include a book cover\u2026 but your conversions are likely to suffer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s also tempting to overcrowd your image. You\u2019ve got some great reader quotes! You\u2019ve got how many 5-star reviews? And wouldn\u2019t it be nice to cram a bit of your blurb on there as well?<\/p>\n\n\n\n But radical minimalism tends to work best. A few words to convey whatever it is you want a reader to hear and retain. And a price alert. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The colours you choose to do all this should, almost always, be either black text on yellow (like wasps) or white text on red (like danger signs). Using other combinations steps away from the tools used by generations of marketers. That\u2019s probably not a good idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One positive in all this: you don\u2019t need a designer or any fancy software to create these images for you. I made this image on the free version of Canva in well under an hour. The image above is 1080×1080 pixels. A letterbox format is also possible but tends to work less well. You can try both, but make sure you\u2019re working to the standard FB formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your headline<\/strong> is the only other element that truly matters. You have 45 characters to play with here, but shorter is often better. Pick the thing you want to emphasise (\u201cSale, now 50% off\u201d, for example) and keep it short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your call-to-action<\/strong> button won\u2019t make a huge difference, but on the whole you want to tell users what you\u2019re expecting: so \u201cShop now\u201d rather than \u201cLearn more\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No, but really: how to build a persuasive creative<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What I\u2019ve just told you is not the law; it\u2019s a set of guidelines that works for most ads and most authors most times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But you need to test. Testing is the only route to excellence. You need to generate multiple bits of text. You need to generate multiple images. You need to refine those, by eye, the very best you can. Then you feed them to FB and let it test what works. And that, in the end, is how you perfect the ads. You build several great variants, then test. Then you do it again. And then again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where do you want to show your ads?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Facebook will offer you a million different placement options, across its whole sprawl of websites. Many of those placements will offer much lower cost clicks than the Facebook Feed placement, but they tend to come with lower conversion rates too. So you need to test. Try (a) letting Facebook do its stuff, and (b) restricting placement to the FB Feed only. Remember, you\u2019re not looking to see which option delivers a better cost per click. You\u2019re only concerned about sales. There are good indie authors who favour approach (a) and others who favour (b). All that matters to you is what works for your<\/em> readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who do you want to show your ads to?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A big question, this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few years back, I\u2019d have been encouraging you to go and ferret out your audience by targeting the readerships of comparable authors, and TV shows that chime with your work, and figuring out the demographic niche that works best for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These days, Facebook\u2019s AI can essentially figure this all out by itself. On the whole, I think you need to tell FB:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are highly successful marketers who don\u2019t even restrict by Kindle usage, which somewhat puzzles me, but again: you can test with and without that restriction. And remember, Facebook\u2019s AI is very effective, but it needs data. You can\u2019t spend $20 and hope to have found your optimal targeting. It doesn\u2019t work like that!<\/p>\n\n\n\n What results are you looking for?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When you\u2019re setting up your ad, Facebook will ask you what you want to achieve. Do you want engagement (clicks and likes and so on)? Or website traffic? Or sales?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, of course you want sales \u2013 but you have a problem, because the sales are being made on Amazon, a website you probably don\u2019t own. Since Amazon won\u2019t tell Facebook which user has or has not bought your book, that route is simply closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You therefore have to ask Facebook to optimise for \u201cwebsite traffic\u201d, and Facebook will duly oblige. It will report its success or failure in terms of CPC, or cost-per-click. And yes, this metric is important. But in practice what matters most is cost-per-sale, and Facebook can\u2019t tell you, because it doesn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can solve this problem in one of two ways, and they\u2019re both fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One is: you just average out your baseline sales before you start advertising. Then you advertise and see how much above baseline you achieve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second (and my preferred) approach is to use the Amazon Ads attribution tool to figure out precisely what sales come from what campaigns. I\u2019ve put a link in the PSes to some useful resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But whichever way you approach this, the arithmetic is little muddy. What counts as success?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The obvious way to think about things is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Except \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n Directly boosting the sales of Title #1 by advertising will also increase its sales indirectly by lifting its visibility on Amazon and thereby attracting more organic sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that visibility lift will have some afterlife \u2013 if you engage in an intense promo, you may feel the effects of it some 30 days after a promo ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you\u2019re writing a series (as you kind of need to be for this kind of approach to work), then you should in principle be happy to pay, say, $0.10 to get a reader into #1 of your series, if you have a high degree of confidence that a sufficient proportion of readers will go on to buy #2, #3, #4 and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the benefit of a sale is very likely worth more than that one sale\u2026 you just don\u2019t know how much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result, it\u2019s hard to say what an adequate cost-per-sale is. It genuinely does depend on your objectives and what you have to sell. You need to figure this out for yourself, based on the data you have in front of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How much do you want to spend?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve told you to generate multiple versions of your text, and multiple images, and to test them all. I\u2019ve said to test placements and audiences. I\u2019ve said that estimation of actual success is somewhat muddy. Furthermore, Facebook\u2019s ability to snuffle out the right traffic for you has become impressive \u2013 but it needs data to work with, and those early clicks cost money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, all that says that you can\u2019t really engage intelligently in a Facebook campaign without being willing to plonk down a significant sum of money, which you are very likely to lose<\/em>. I\u2019d say that you probably need to commit $150-200 just to get your feet wet: that is, to get your testing to a point at which you might start making (or at least stop losing) money. And that would actually be a good result. You\u2019ll only achieve that if your images, your text, your campaign set up, and your Amazon books page itself are all<\/em> excellent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When and if you think you have a successful campaign, you\u2019ll probably want to run that at no less than $10 a day, and perhaps more like $20\/day. Just go carefully \u2013 and watch that data!<\/p>\n\n\n\n When and how to use Facebook ads<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The book promo sites, which we looked at last week, can certainly add a chunk of low-cost, fair-quality traffic on demand \u2013 but you can\u2019t scale up, or not beyond a point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amazon ads have a huge potential audience, but \u2013 even for really proficient advertisers \u2013 it\u2019s hard to get scale and it\u2019s essentially impossible to support a surge-marketing campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Facebook, on the other hand? If you want to surge market via FB, it\u2019ll be more than happy to take your cash \u2013 and deliver your ads in potentially huge volumes. That quality of scalability is vital to most seasoned book marketers. It\u2019s going to be an element of any large-scale, professional digital marketing campaign for books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That said, it is NOT likely that you can earn money by marketing a single book: you probably want to have a decently performing series of three books first. (Decently performing? That means good evidence that a good proportion of Book #1 readers will end up buying Books #2 and #3.) As I say, Facebook is not a newbie-type technique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/FB-ad-Harry.png\")
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