Unlocking Secrets of Facebook Ads & Repurposing with Zach Hesterberg

Facebook advertising can be viewed as the behemoth of content marketing for many business owners. But after reading this blog post, you may just consider including it as part of your content marketing toolkit, if you haven’t already.

I recently had a chat with Zach Hesterberg about Facebook ads and repurposing. Zach is a Facebook™ Advertising expert, marketing consultant and public speaker. After doing digital marketing for multiple businesses he set out to start his company, SoZesty.

For a 25-year-old, he has quite an amazing resume with a wide range of industries, organizations and budgets. Impressive!

I was delighted to meet him and share conversations over coffee at Podfest 2019. So, in this article, we explore the world of Facebook advertising, Instagram, the differences between these two important platforms and, of course, practical repurposing strategies.

Facebook ads are truly an opportunity not to be missed by businesses of all types and sizes. But the platform is far from intuitive and it can be overwhelming.

Zach believes Facebook is a really powerful platform because of two main features:

1. Lazer-focused Targeting

Facebook allows you to really target your audience down to unique characteristics that are not available on other platforms. You can target people based on their behaviors, age, gender, geographic location, interests and more.

Zach believes that the hidden power of Facebook advertising lies in using this targeting feature as a way to nurture the audience that already knows about you, and to carefully select the content they see.

2.Quick Testing & Data

The second benefit is the ability to test your ads in a variety of ways in short periods of time. Within a day you can see how your ad is performing.

The wealth of data Facebook provides allows you to make educated and informed decisions. By acting quickly and being responsive, you can impact your sales and your business in a big way.

The data that comes from Facebook and Instagram advertising shows you immediately how your money is spent. And, who is watching your ads as well as how many people are tuning in. It doesn’t require huge sums of money to see a difference in your business.

For small business owners, being able to observe how their money is spent and see the immediate ROI is a huge benefit.

Whether you spend $5 per day or $10 per day, you can still be effective with your advertising.

This is unlike the traditional methods of advertising, like billboards or TV commercials, where you gain little, if any, useful performance data.

Facebook ads and repurposing your content to retarget your audience

One of the best ways to repurpose your content with Facebook ads is by using the retargeting method.

Many people start using Facebook ads by promoting a particular piece of content, which could be a new long form blog post, or video, to a “cold” or desired audience.

And that’s it. Done and done.

But what most businesses don’t realize is that there is an opportunity to develop and nurture this audience by continually retargeting the ads to those people that have shown interest in your content.

Essentially, you are narrowing down to a more interested audience with repurposed content.

An example of the retargeting method

Zach shares an example, with video content, to help explain this idea.

• Start by creating an ad that promotes your long form video to a targeted, cold audience.
• With the results that start to come in, you get to see who watched your video and for how long.This is important information!
• From the original video, you can draw out a quote or a 15 second video clip that you can use in a second ad campaign.
• But this time, the campaign will target those people that watched 50% or 75% of your long form video. These people are committed and are looking like pretty good leads.
• Facebook Business Manager facilitates this targeting work and enables you to customize your audience in terms of how they engaged with your video.
• The next step could be creating a third ad campaign with a call to action for those that engaged with your quote card or short video clip.

So essentially, you are creating a funnel, using your repurposed video content and showing these pieces to a more refined, more targeted audience that have already shown an interest in you and your business.

And these people are warmed up and are more likely to convert to a possible sale, or consultation call, or freebie download.

Facebook appreciates it when content is being promoted natively within the platform. So subsequently, Facebook rewards you by stretching every dollar you spend.

Repurposing on Instagram

If you are going to start using Facebook’s advertising platform, it’s useful to know that since Facebook owns Instagram, this is also the place where you place your Instagram ads too.

When I spoke to Zach we dipped into a conversation about Instagram as well as Facebook. Zach’s perspective is that Instagram is a wonderful platform to repurpose because of all the different types of feeds. You have stories, IGTV, photo feed, highlights, and live! I couldn’t agree more!

There are so many choices on how you can convey your message and many opportunities to repurpose on this platform.

Instagram is a repurposer’s dream platform. Find out more about repurposing on Instagram here.

Retarget from one platform to another

Facebook and Instagram are obviously very different platforms with different audience behaviors.

In Zach’s experience, he’s observed that while social engagement and entertainment is important to people on Facebook, more people are shopping and converting on Instagram.

Instagram has an aesthetic appeal and people are curious, looking around, and are essentially window shopping.

In his opinion, this is an opportunity that can’t be missed!

There are ways you can set up an engaged audience on Facebook and retarget them on Instagram.

It’s a great way to leverage the audience from one platform to the other, raise awareness and ultimately increase sales (all through Facebook ads and repurposing wisely!).

Interested in learning more?

One easy way to learn more is through a free course that Facebook offers called the Facebook Blueprint.

Zach suggests this as a perfect starting point to delve into the technical know-how of Facebook ads.

If copywriting is one of your weaknesses, then he recommends the book Ca$vertising by Drew Eric Whitman as a great resource to refine your writing skills.

Zach himself also offers Facebook ad training courses and coaching. You can learn more on his website.

And of course, to connect with Zach, you can find him on Facebook or Instagram. Feel free to DM him with any questions you may have and let him know you heard about him through my podcast episode or blog post.

Better yet, take a picture of your screen right now, pop it into your Facebook or Instagram feed and tag both Zach and Content 10x to say hi!

Thanks for reading!

Say Hello on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Originally published at https://www.content10x.com on October 17, 2019.