How To Make Facebook ads work for a SaaS business…Don’t Complicate It.

With an increased focus on new marketing approaches, SaaS organisations keep searching for techniques to improve the customer acquisition process by using advertisements.

Facebook Ads are a great way to reach new customers however is this an effective strategy to target SAAS users?

Facebook marketing is a very popular strategy because the audience size is so vast. From a testing standpoint Facebook ads for saas will typically be one of the first approaches used to validate an acquisition channel.

This blog is going to look at the most effective strategy, funnel, offers, audiences and nurture techniques to use with your saas facebook ads strategy.

If there’s any burning questions you have by the end feel free to leave a comment or email me on info@auditmyadaccount.com

Understand the funnel

An effective Facebook marketing funnel should be supported by a solid marketing strategy and an extremely focused product/offer.

The most common mistake businesses make is they try to force the Facebook Ads platform as the focal point of their acquisition strategy, however once you get past that fact most SaaS organizations will find this advertising channel very effective if implemented properly.

To begin with you may find going straight to checkout an effective strategy, you can’t rule this out until you’ve tested it. However if you’re offering a B2B saas product your price point may be higher and therefore the sales cycle longer. This means you may need to bring some top of funnel awareness blogs and videos first to retarget from.

You need to be aware of your baseline metrics, this includes your cost per acquisition, CPC, cost per landing page view and the conversion rates from each stage. This will allow you to understand how well your FB campaign is performing Vs baseline metrics.

This should also be a data led approach where you test and validate different funnels and their overall impact.

Choosing your ads and audiences

Your ads should be based on your competitor research, market research and customer research combined. Using competitor facebook ads as a control then creating variations around USPs, pain points and obstacles customers typically have.

The copy, headlines and creative (image and video) being used will leverage the Facebook Algorithm to identify the most relevant customers. When a Facebook ad is launched their AI will analyse the ad copy and images and find prospects who they believe are your ideal target, this is the same for B2B saas companies and B2C.

Your target audience can be found a variety of ways on the ad set level. You can target based on location, job title, interests, lookalikes and behavioural data. In my opinion I would suggest with 5 different target audiences to find what works best;

• Broad (no limitation except geographic, gender and age if necessary)
• Lookalikes x 2
• Interest x 2

To begin with I would recommend testing the same ads against those 5 different audiences (4-5 different ads in total). From here you want to find winning audiences and ads which match, this will allow you to increase the budget on the best performing combinations.

After a couple of days you will begin to see a trend of which ads are spending the majority of the budget. This will allow you to create new ads and experiments based on this data.

 

Content, lead generation and nurturing

This is a follow on from the funnel section above. Your target audience isn’t going to be necessarily receptive to checking out straight away. There’s a sales process that goes on psychologically with your customers which looks something like this;

• Interest
• Education
• Transfer of ownership
• Rationalise
• Decide

Or for us and our sales team it looks like this;

• Awareness
• Educate
• Validate
• Justify
• Close

The above sales process is taken from the book ‘Proactive Selling’ by William Miller if you’re interested in learning more. We need to help users along their journeys with our digital marketing efforts and if they don’t want to decide now we need to educate first.

This is where white papers, demo’s, blogs, videos and webinars can become useful. Whilst it may seem more expensive by adding in more steps to your funnel it can dramatically improve your conversion rates and thereby decreasing the overall cost per acquired customer (CAC).

Fundamentally, and annoyingly, I’m going to say you need to test this process. I appreciate how boring and obvious that sounds but you need the data to be able to make these decisions. As a starting point I would test different offers first (next paragraph) and make data led decisions from here.

Offers

There’s a variety of ways to get prospects into your saas. The most popular is a free trial so users can ‘try before they buy’ however that isn’t necessarily the best approach.

Having a free option could incentivise time wasters and those who aren’t interested in the product but just want to see what it’s about. Whereas having a high priced checkout could decrease conversions because they don’t fully understand what’s on offer.

Again, same as the funnel strategy above, this is going to have to be tested to find what converts best. Nevertheless testing your offers is paramount to success.

What you may find effective (which I have done with FB marketing in SAAS) is to drive traffic to a free trial and retarget them with a demo if they don’t convert. This will give them a chance to speak to a member of the team to make sure their questions are answered.

That doesn’t mean your Facebook ad campaigns should be setup the same however it does give you an example to start with.

Pay attention to existing customers too

Once your customer has signed up, or is having a free trial, you can use facebook ads to support their journey. For example you can create a custom audience with only those who are in the ‘free trial’ phase of their plan and retarget them with a particular piece of content or offer.

One fantastic approach I’ve seen used is a personalised video from the CEO to all those in the trial. This video message basically said something along the lines of;

“Hey I noticed you were doing a free trial of our product and I just wanted to share this video and let you know how excited we are to help you.

If you have any questions or need any help to get the most out of our service please send us a direct message on here or email us on XYZ”

Simple but powerful ad copy to bridge the gap between consumer trust and purchase.

Whilst this will only end up being a tiny 5% of your overall ad spend this is still a powerful way to maintain a relationship with your paying customers.

Tracking and attribution

This is the worlds most painful subject but let’s dive in.

A user clicks on your ad, they leave the site to discuss with their team about whether this solution is good for them, they get a google display retargeting advert and sign up for a trial.

Who gets the advert attributed to them? Well FB has no idea about google’s performance so it will automatically claim victory assuming the journey is within 7 days. However Google will do the same.

Oh and Facebook only has a look back window of 7 days now so what happens if the sales cycle takes longer then 7 days?

Now you can see the headache…

What can you do about it though?

Determine how efficient your marketing efforts have been by calculating the total income generated by your investments, this is known as your marketing efficiency ratio (MER). Keep records of days that were unusually profitable and unsuccessful to see which MER you fall into on average.

Additionally ensure you have your conversion API in Facebook setup, simply google providers for this but I would personally recommend https://www.customerlabs.com/ (I don’t have any affiliation with them, I’ve just used them on several accounts now).

Finally I would recommend agreeing a logical attribution methodology. The best approach would be to always look at last click non direct to see which channel was responsible for the final say but also the first click to see where the awareness was brought in.

There isn’t a right or wrong when it comes to attribution because it’s impacted by a variety of inputs such as sales velocity and marketing strategy.

Final thoughts

Overall facebook ads is an effective acquisition channel strategy. However as the digital era grows you need to adjust to the components that impact the approach.

The most effective starting point for any saas business is;

1) 1 x campaign budget optimisation for testing different audience and creatives

2) 1 x middle of funnel campaign for nurturing those who have visited low intent web page and social engagement

3) 1 x bottom of funnel retargeting for those who have shown high intent to push them over the line.

I’d recommend a free trial (however this advice is very broad so take as a pinch of salt) and ensure you create a variety of ad copy and ad creatives to appeal to your audience from all angles.

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