Facebook Ad Creative Gamechanger!
In this tutorial I’m going to be going over an absolute game changer when it comes to your Facebook and Instagram ad creative and ad performance.
If you advertise on Facebook or Instagram then you are probably trying to improve your results. Most of the time this is done by split testing things like:
- New images
- New videos
- New slideshows
- Copy elements
Those types of adjustments and testing can make a difference in your campaigns and you should do them. But they typically result in small, incremental improvements.
What I’m talking about in this guide is something that is about as close to a silver bullet as you’re ever going to get with Facebook ads. This hack can make a huge difference in the performance of your creatives.
The Importance of Influencers
Major brands have been using influencers for decades. This is something that started well before the internet and the current type of social media influencers ever existed.
Think of the iconic Air Jordan or the cover of the Wheaties box and how these major brands used the images of celebrities and star athletes to sell more of their product.
To get celebrity endorsements or collaborations you used to have to be a large company with deep pockets, but now because of social media influencers almost any company can get an ad performance boost by using influencers. This is often the fraction of the cost of hiring a nationally known celebrity.
It all comes down to knowing how to find influencers, understanding your numbers, and reaching out to influencers to rep your company and/or product line.
How Using Influencers Can Dramatically Improve Your Ad Performance
First, let me show you what I’m talking about.
I have a private Facebook Group of 118,000 members. You can ask to join the Facebook Ads Mastermind group here.
The people that are in this group are interested in Facebook and Instagram advertising and marketing. Because I have such an active Facebook group, large Facebook page, and an active You Tube channel – I’m an influencer in the Facebook ads space.
People who are interested in running Facebook ads often follow me or know who I am.
That’s why a lot of the campaigns for our company include my face. Like this one:
Important! You don’t need to use influencers who are national celebrities’ or even the top influencers in their niche. There are many people who have strong followings that can give your ad campaign a lot of credibility. You just have to search them out.
What we have found is that if you use the face or video of an influencer in your creatives that it can dramatically increase the conversion rates of your ads.
We have seen this in our own ads when we feature my face in the photo or video. We’ve also done this for several clients where they either had existing relationships with influencers or we’ve helped them build those relationships.
The difference is usually quite a bit more than what people imagine – especially in highly competitive industries.
I personally get emails at least 1 to 3 times a week asking me to endorse a product or service, and what those folks are looking to do is use my INFLUENCE to get more sales for their product or service. When people who are interested in Facebook ads see my face in an ad they are more likely to stop and look at the ad.
Now, in my case I usually say no. I am an influencer, but that’s not my business. My business is my ads agency and helping businesses run successful ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. But there are many, many people out there that being an influencer IS their business and they are open to making deals around brands and products.
Keep reading, because we see very few advertisers use influencers in their ads. Which means you have the chance to get in on this method before it becomes overused.
You Aren’t Using the Influencers Own Channel – You Are Using Their Likeness
Many advertisers know that you can contact influencers and have them promote your offer on their own channels. But a method that is often overlooked is that influencers will sometimes give you permission to use their likeness in your own ad or record a video for you that you can use as a creative in your Facebook campaign.
You do need permission to do this, but the positive results can be profound. It can be well worth the effort and money you put in to make it happen.
We’ve seen that using influencers can drop the cost per lead or conversion by 50% or more. Of course, not all influencers are equal and not all campaigns work. But this is one of the strongest techniques that we’ve found to move the needle on a campaign’s performance.
How to Approach an Influencer
I’ll go over how to find influencers shortly. First, I want to go over how to approach an influencer.
When you start to identify influencers that might be a good fit for your brand, you will need to contact them. The best way is to reach out and say something like:
“We would love to use your image in our ads. We’ll send you the XYZ product for free and please only accept the offer if you think the product is useful. We’ll pay you a fee for the use of your image. Let me know what you think.”
Tip! This influencer technique can work well because you aren’t asking an influencer to promote to their OWN audience. Most influencers have limits on how much they’re willing to promote to their own audiences. We’ve found that if you approach influencers the right way they are more likely to let you use their image for less money in your campaigns then they would if they were promoting directly to their audiences.
How to Find Influencers
First, it’s important to know that there are many different levels of influencers who have very different sized audiences. Some influencers have audiences of many millions of people, and other influencers have followers in the hundreds of thousands and even thousands.
The more followers a person has the more expensive it typically is to work with them.
Your budget will determine who you engage with to work with your brand. Don’t be afraid of starting with influencers who have smaller audiences. It’s a good way to get started with this technique and is usually quite a bit less expensive.
The place that you want to start looking for influencers in Instagram. This is especially true if you are advertising on Instagram or Facebook.
You might already know some of the major influencers in your niche. But you you should also do some more research. Often there are a lot of people that you don’t know or aren’t aware of yet that could be useful for your brand.
To find the influencers it’s as simple as typing in a keyword in the search term that’s related to your niche.
Here you can see how the keyword “dog training” is brining up the hashtag #dogtraining and over 5 million posts.
Then you want to spend a few hours looking around and following a whole bunch of different hashtags that are relevant to the product or services that you’re selling. This will help you find the influencers in your niche.
Google Search
The next thing you can do to find influencers is to use Google search to find Instagram influencers. Most people don’t use Google for this, but it can be quite effective.
To do this you want to use the same or similar keywords as you did on Instagram, but add “Instagram influencers.”
In this example I’m using the keyword phrase “instagram influencers dog training.”
Google will often list big influencers and depending on the subject there are probably websites that have already put together lists of influencers. This is a great resource to find new people to contact.
Pro Tip! If you have a smaller budget, being more specific with your search can often get you more targeted and less expensive influencers to connect to. So instead of using “dog training” you might use “recall dog training” or something more specific to narrow down your results.
YouTube
You can also search for influencers on YouTube.
The only challenge is that influencers from YouTube will have more influence on YouTube than they will on Facebook or Instagram.
It’s generally better to start with influencers from the platform you will be advertising on. They will give you more bang for your buck.
Upfluence and Other Influencer Platforms
There are also platforms that can directly connect you with influencers. Upfluence is the one that most people talk about.
If you go this route, it’s easier than contacting people directly, but it’s often also going to cost you quite a bit more money in the long run.
More Free Facebook Ads Training
To help business owners succeed with Facebook ads I’ve created a FREE webinar training that you can register for here.
When you attend this webinar you’ll learn:
- 3 different Facebook ad strategies that we use every day. These strategies have generated millions of dollars in revenue and are tried and proven to work.
- How to customize the Facebook ads strategy to your particular business. There is no such thing as a one size fits all approach to Facebook ads.
- How Facebook and Instagram have changed and how to adjust your ad strategy to what works in 2021.
Video Training on Using Influencers in Your Facebook Ads
In this video training I go over why influencers can have such a big impact on your Facebook Ads, how to find influencers, and how to connect with influencers to ask them to be featured in your Facebook Ads.
The Bottom Line on Using Influencers in Your Facebook Ads
Using a video or image of an influencers (with permission) can have a huge impact on the performance of your Facebook ad creatives and Facebook ad performance.
We’ve seen 100% increases in performance of campaigns that use influencers effectively. This can work in any industry, but if you’re in a highly competitive industry using influencers can be an instant gamechanger by helping you stand out from the pack.
It does take some time and effort to get influencers to work with your campaign successfully, but we’ve found that it’s almost always worth it.
