Kim Walsh-Phillips: How to Build Your Audience Quickly and Cheaply Using Facebook Impression Ads

As someone focused on ROI, you are always looking for tips and hacks on how to leverage your competitive advantage. Right?

Using Impression Ads effectively will not disappoint.

First, what is a Facebook Impression Advertisement?
The difference between paying for impressions (CPM) and paying for clicks (CPC)…

• CPM stands for cost per 1,000 impressions.
• CPC stands for cost per click. If you’re paying for clicks, you’ll be charged each time someone clicks on your ad.

So with Impression Ads, you are paying for thousands of people to see your ad for pennies on the dollar.
How to get this to work for you? Let’s start with the basics.

Why would you want to increase your audience?
Your “audience” is the group of prospects that you warm in order to convert them into a customer, your customer list and anyone else that has an affinity with you. You are building a community around those who will and currently do business with you.

How Do I Use Facebook Impression Ads to Increase My Audience?
A. Build awareness of you and your brand to grow trust prior to an event, conference, speaking engagement or sale. With impression ads, you can inexpensively run ads as a step before trying to make the sales. These ads should feature things like content-rich information, testimonials of your customers, clients or patients, or case studies.
Inspiration on how you can use this strategy:

1. Run ads prior to speaking or exhibiting at an event to some of your most popular blog posts.
2. Before pitching an investor, run posts targeted to the investor’s company.
3. When applying to be a speaker, run ads to fans of their Facebook page.
4. Before meeting with that big enterprise prospect, run impression ads to the executive team.

Example:
This week I will be exhibiting and conducting strategy sessions at GKIC’s InfoSummit, so for the last two weeks, I have been promoting blog posts to fans of GKIC’s Facebook page.

B. Develop qualified leads. Facebook’s powerful advertising platform allows you to retarget people who visit a certain page in your site. You can use this feature to your advantage with Impression Ads.

Before you start to run an offer, develop an audience of qualified leads through Facebook’s Website Custom Audience option. Here’s how:

Write a blog post or post a video that is content-rich and would clearly identify qualified leads, such as:

1. An accounting firm running a blog post: “Ten Ways to Decrease Your Expenses at Your Small Business in the Next 30 Days”
2. A fitness guru: “Ten Workout Videos to Complete in 10 Minutes or Less”
3. A realtor: “Ten Ways to Increase Your Profit When you Sell Your House”
4. Or one that I ran recently: “Powerful Changes To LinkedIn You Should Be Using (But Probably Aren’t)”

Run a promoted post to the content to a page outside of Facebook and insert, making sure your Website Custom Audience Pixel is set up ahead of time.

1. Develop your content on a separate landing page outside of Facebook

Example:



2. Insert your Custom Website Audience Pixel on your website:






3. Create an audience of people who visit this page specifically (you only need to insert the code once on your website and can set up as many audiences as you like)



4. Run an Impressions Ad promoting the content



5. When you are ready to make an offer (in this case, attend a paid workshop), target the audience you just set up. This is now a group of warm leads that you pulled together without having to spend a lot to get them.

With Impression Ads, you can inexpensively run ads as a step before trying to make the sales, and build your audience and positioning as the authority or expert in your industry.