5 Ways a Virtual Assistant Can Boost Your Facebook Ads + Free Workbook

The beauty of social media marketing is that a small business can make a major impact… with the right ads!

Facebook has become one of the most indispensable digital marketing outlets for small businesses. Not only does it give them access to a potential audience of billions, but it’s also super cost-effective. Anyone can create a Facebook ad that can be seen by thousands of people every day; you only need to know how to do it effectively. 

Or you could always hire a virtual assistant to do that work for you! Rather than needing to worry about researching your target audience, writing and designing and optimizing an ad, a virtual assistant who is an expert in Facebook ads can create something using their social media marketing expertise to reach out to both your current customers and potential customers alike! Let’s jump in on the best ways a virtual assistant can boost your Facebook ads! 

Creating An Account

You can’t create a well-performing Facebook Ad if you don’t have a polished and professional Facebook business page. 

Many small businesses put the bare minimum into their business’ Facebook page. They don’t see the point of investing time and money into it when they could put their resources towards their website or other digital marketing strategies. The problem is that strategy can severely hobble a Facebook Ad’s effectiveness.

When someone sees a Facebook Ad, they are logically going to want to check out that company’s Facebook page. If there is a lack of information on it or no updates in months/years, that’s instantly going to impact the ad’s effectiveness. Potential customers logically assume that the ad may be a scam or that the business isn’t as legit as it wants them to think. 

Thankfully, there is an easy fix: spruce up your Facebook page! All you need to do is hire a virtual assistant to create a professionally designed banner, optimized description, profile images, and of course some value packed social media posts and graphics. You also will want to hire a virtual assistant who specializes in social media copywriting to add to your “About” section and make sure that your Facebook page has all of the information your audience needs to make an informed choice about your company.

Once your Facebook page is in great shape, you will still need to create an account with Facebook Business Manager. This step isn’t too difficult but can be time-consuming if you don’t know where to start. A Facebook ads expert can head there, confirm your information, set up your payment method, and start to configure how you want your ads to go out. Once fully set up, the Ads Manager will become the place you go to create and manage all of your Facebook ads.

Doing Audience Research

Facebook Business Manager can be a powerful tool, but only if you know what you want to use it for.

Whenever one of my clients comes to me wanting to create a Facebook ad, I ask them a series of questions, here are the top three:

• What is your objective? 
• Who do you wish to reach? 
• What is your budget?

Let’s dig a little deeper into them. 

The objective of your Facebook ad is precisely that: why are you running it. Do you want to sell a product or service? Are you collecting leads to build a list of raving fans? Alerting your audience about something new about your business? Or are you merely trying to get the word out to a broader audience by building your online presence? All of those objectives would require a very different kind of Facebook ad. With Facebook Ads, you have the option to focus on brand awareness, engagement, website traffic, reach, lead generation, and much more.

Next, you need to know who you are reaching out to. Generally, this coincides with your target audience for your business. This is where you really need to know who your ICA (ideal client avatar) is. If you usually focus on women 25-45, then that is who you want to aim your ads at. But you also need to know the geographic location you want to focus on, their income, languages, education, interests, and behavior. There are many options in Facebook Business Manager that allow you to “dig deep” into the demographics you wish to target.

Finally, you need to determine your budget. While Facebook Ads can show a remarkable ROI, that’s no reason to spend more money than is necessary. You can set up a Facebook ad with a daily budget (how much you want to spend in a day) and a lifetime budget (how much you want to spend throughout the ad’s run). These options can help prevent you from running over budget. While Facebook can automatically control your maximum “bid” for an ad, I would highly advise you to get your virtual assistant who specializes in Facebook ads to manually handle it to get the most out of your money.

Writing/Designing the Ad

Now that we’re through all that, we can finally get to the fun part, creating the ad!

The overall design and copy of your Facebook ad will reflect all of the things you researched above: your objective, audience, and budget. You can create a single static image or video with a link or a carousel that scrolls several photos. They all have advantages, depending on your objective.

Regardless of which you choose, you will need copy for the ad. You will have 125 characters for the description and 25 characters for the headline (40 for carousel ads). This requires an economy of language that makes the maximum impact possible, which can be challenging if you aren’t a professional copywriter. Have you ever heard this famous quote:

“I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one.“

– Mark Twain

Of course, it would also help to have professionally designed graphics to go with the ad that will attract your audience’s eye from their newsfeed. And a little pro tip, video is killing it right now on Facebook, so if you haven’t tried a video ad, I highly recommend it. 

You (or your VA) should always check to see how an ad will appear, depending on where you want it displayed: the desktop newsfeed, the mobile newsfeed, or on a sidebar. I would HIGHLY suggest going for one of the newsfeed options, as they are less likely to be blocked by ad blockers. Even Desktop Newsfeed Ads can be blocked by specialized Facebook ad blockers. Thankfully, Mobile Newsfeed Ads are still very safe from ad blockers. 

Monitoring and Tweaking the Ad

You don’t want to send your ads out there without carefully monitoring how they are doing! You can do this through both Facebook Business Manager and the Facebook pixel. 

Through Facebook, you will want your virtual assistant to be monitoring performance (reach, frequency, and impressions), engagement (page & post likes), clicks (click-through-rate & cost-per-slick), and much more. 

Using the Facebook pixel, you can monitor things like how many leads you are getting, how many people have actually purchased your products or services, and other vital metrics. If you want to get the most out of your Facebook ads, it’s essential for your virtual assistant to be monitoring these ads in every way they can and of course seeing what is working and what isn’t and tweaking the ads accordingly on a very regular basis. 

If an ad isn’t working, my advice would be to stop spending money on it and try something else. This could be a simple revision of the ad. You could try out some different copy, or maybe an altered image or video. You could also try running two different versions of an ad to see which one performs better. The data you take from the split testing will go into all of your future ads.

Building On Your Success

Some people say that you learn from your failures; others say you learn more from your successes. I say that you should be learning from both! 

Once you learn what works, you can replicate that success in all of your future ads. Let’s say that you run a super successful Facebook ad. Well, you will want to analyze WHY it was successful. Was it the wording? The graphic? The video? The landing page? Did the message resonate with a specific audience? Once you’ve determined why it was successful, you can incorporate those lessons into your next Facebook ad.

Similarly, if you have an ad that got almost no traction, you should be doing a full audit to determine why. This is a service I offer and I can’t tell you how many Facebook ad funnels, I’ve audited. Once I dig through all of the analytics and insights, it’s pretty easy to determine where the disconnect is and fix it. The lessons you take from that should go into all future Facebook ads.

You can also take these lessons and apply them elsewhere to different social media channels. If you have a super successful Facebook ad, why not get your virtual assistant to adapt it into an Instagram ad or post? 

So, What Did We Learn? 

Let’s review what we learned:

1. To make the biggest impact with your Facebook Ads, you need a polished Facebook page. 
2. A VA can help set up Facebook Business Manager for your business.
3. Before creating an ad, you need to know your objective, audience, and budget. Most importantly, you really need to know your ICA. 
4. Your objective is: why are you running the ad.
5. Know your audience: your target demographics.
6. Your budget is: how much you are willing to spend.
7. You only have 125 characters for an ad and 25 characters for the headline, so make sure they are impactful! 
8. You should be using both Facebook Business Manager and Facebook pixel to monitor how your ads are performing.
9. Try running two variations of the same ad (split testing) at the same time to see which performs better.
10. You should learn lessons from both successful ads and failures. 

Which do you think is more difficult: writing a 1000-word blog or writing a 125-character ad? Believe it or not, I would say that the ad is WAY harder. You only have 125 characters to communicate your message, so you need to make every one of them count. If you’ve never written a Facebook ad before, you can get a start by checking out my free Facebook Ad Writing: Workbook. Inside, I’ll break down everything you need to know to create a compelling and well-constructed Facebook ad that will draw eyes and get clicks! 

Or, if you’d prefer to let a professional do the work for you, you can contact me here for a free consultation. I’d be delighted to speak with you about your social media aims and how professionally designed Facebook Ads can help you meet them! 

Links For This Episode:

• Facebook Ad Writing: Workbook

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