FREE FACEBOOK ADVERTISING PLAN TEMPLATE

Create Facebook Ad Campaigns That (Actually) Drive Revenue

Stop winging it with Facebook ads. Seriously.

The key to Facebook ad success is putting together a comprehensive plan of attack. If you’ve been struggling to get Facebook advertising results, it’s most likely because you’re making the same mistake. 

This proven Facebook advertising plan template eliminates the ever-rising CPC and CAC from Facebook ads. 

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What is a Facebook advertising plan?

A Facebook advertising plan is a comprehensive document that presents all the key pieces necessary to construct a winning ad campaign. Laying out the complete Facebook advertising plan helps you uncover ideas for how to put effective ad campaigns together. 

Your Facebook advertising plan should consist of many elements to help it succeed. Some of these elements include:

  • Ad campaign goals
  • Current Facebook engagement statistics
  • Brand messaging
  • Audience
  • Content mix

How do I create a Facebook advertising plan?

A Facebook advertising campaign is a lot like any other traditional marketing endeavor. You create specific goals and objectives for your campaign, choose the target audience(s) you want to reach, and then determine what tactics you’ll use to achieve those goals.

You need to understand everything about your target audience:

  • What do they do?
  • What are their specific interests?
  • What are the critical demographics (e.g. age, location, job)?
  • What problems do they have?
  • How do they express their frustrations?
  • Where do they “hang out” online?

You’ll also need to think about your goals:

  • Do you want more traffic?
  • Are sales the objective?
  • Are you running an email subscriber campaign? 

A written plan is always more effective than trying to remember it all in your mind. That said, a fleshed-out Facebook ad plan can be so much more effective. Creating your plan can seem like a lot, so start by answering the bullet-pointed questions above. 

Keep reading and we’ll show you what to include in a Facebook ad plan and how to get a Facebook advertising plan template to jumpstart your campaigns. 

Are Facebook ads still worth it?

Yes! Facebook ads work like a charm. If they aren’t working, it’s likely because you haven’t planned successfully.

Many marketers try placing ads without thinking through the process from beginning to end. The result? Frustration when the campaign costs more than they expect. 

It’s like anything in life. Failure to plan is planning to fail. Remember the only goal of any Facebook campaign: earn back more than you spend on ads (this is known as the return on investment, or ROI, on the campaign). While some run after vanity metrics such as likes or shares, at the end of the day the only measure of success is the ROI.

What should a Facebook advertising plan include?

Your Facebook ad plan must include 3 major sections:

  1. Current situation analysis
  2. Analytics (reporting and measurement)
  3. Continuous improvement

Current situation analysis

Your current situation analysis needs to take a good look into your brand’s current Facebook situation. What does your Facebook page look like? Is it performing well in terms of engagement and activity level? If not, brainstorm improvements to use throughout the advertising campaign. 

Take stock of the campaign’s goals during this process. Ask yourself how your current Facebook-related strengths and weaknesses may impact these goals. 

Any wrong steps will result in a lack of engagement. If you’re running a lead generation campaign, for example, you’ll either see a lack of clicks to the opt-in landing page, or get clicks from the wrong people. You’ll then experience a low traffic-to-lead conversion rate on the opt-in landing page, lowering your ROI. 

You must put together the correct brand messaging after defining the target audience. What type of content will you use? What types of ads will you use your content with? Answering these questions will go a long way towards helping you reach your goals. 

One more step you can take is looking at your competition and seeing what’s working and what’s not. Understanding who you’re competing against and what they’re trying to do will help you contextualize your own performance and what you may be able to do differently. 

Analytics (reporting and measurement)

Measure your campaign by identifying key metrics, goals for those metrics, and how often to report those metrics. You might measure the following:

  • Overall engagement rates: These are metrics that track how involved with your content your audience is. You want to see your audience as highly engaged, since that means they’re interested in the content you’re creating and staying involved with your company. 
  • Total number of fans: How many people are liking your pages? Simply put, it’s a case of the more the merrier. 
  • Advertising metrics: These are quantifiable ways of measuring performance and tracking how well you’re doing. What’s the ROI of your ads? Are certain ads performing better than others? The answers to these questions will help inform your marketing plans.
  • Website metrics: Google Analytics is a great resource when it comes to understanding how you’re performing online. A key part of your plan must be to understand your SEO (search engine optimization) performance and analyze how well you’re reaching a larger audience. 
  • Other post-level metrics: Post-level metrics display lifetime data from individual posts. Select a time period and analyze how the post performed during that time. 
  • Other page-level metrics: Explore other metrics of your choice using a tool like Google Analytics. These can include page views, average duration of page views, and pages per session. 

Continuous improvement

This is an area that derails most Facebook advertising campaigns. Many businesses let unsuccessful campaigns run too long and then wonder why they aren’t profitable. Analyzing key data throughout the campaign helps accomplish the continuous improvement needed to make more money than you spend on ads.

Focus on continuously improving your ad campaigns by trying different things. Try A/B testing to see if one advertisement works better than another. This will help you make an informed decision on how to advertise to your audience, and understand what works for your next advertisement.

Try different forms of media such as GIFs, videos, pictures, and more to see if they increase clicks. The key is to always stay flexible, vigilant, and focused on growth. If you keep your focus there, you should find that you’re always in the driver’s seat for improvements.

Get more customers with this free Facebook advertising plan template

Would you like to get your hands on a comprehensive Facebook advertising plan template that includes every element covered above? We have you covered. If you follow this template on each Facebook ad campaign, then you’ll discover running successful campaigns isn’t as difficult as you might think. 

Most of your competitors are “winging it.” But not you. Not any more. Imagine how much you could dominate once you’re planning correctly using this proven Facebook advertising plan template. 

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