Blog, Facebook, Finance, Marketing, Mortgage Broker Campaigns, Yabber

The Most Powerful Facebook Advertising Prorgram in the Finance Industry – Guaranteed

If there’s any one secret to business success, hundreds of millions in turnover derived from our online and offline campaigns tells us that it's those businesses that cleverly craft compelling online marketing campaigns, and build immersive organic marketing funnels, that predictably prevail over all overs. The one common denominator that the successful businesses have is that they all have a strategic social, content, and advertising programs in place to supplement their extremely powerful and persuasive offline relationship and referral programs.

WIP: I apologise in advance for repetition and grammatical errors in this article. Created as a draft in a single sitting, I'll have to come back to this article over time to introduce a better understanding. We expect to break up each topic and introduce the very specific techniques our clients use to generate more business than any competing program in the country.

There's little doubt that you've been exposed to various marketing or lead generation programs in the past, and we can categorically state that most of them are junk, and none of those aimed at the mortgage industry provide an integrated and holistic experience. If you have ever paid for leads (the bottom-of-the-barrel digital experience), or you have engaged with a third-party platform that claims to manufacture a funnel, then our experience well and truly offers over 90% more value compared against virtually all competing products, and our superior technology will service your business in way that no other platform can.

If you want to easily add another 5-10 million in organic unpaid monthly volume, or you wish to generate virtually unlimited inquires via paid promotion, then our systems are a fit for your business. If you add our various partner, referral, and other relationship programs to your schedule then your business will easily measure up against the highest performing brokerages in this country. We live in a world where technology plays an extremely important part of any online transaction, and if the technology is implemented poorly, isn't optimised, or isn't integrated with your core assets - such as your website - then your returns are seriously compromised. Digital Marketing done right just works.

In this article we're going to introduce you to the Facebook component of Yabber - the only turnkey and purpose-built, integrated, and full-stack marketing digital marketing and social media system ever manufactured for finance professionals. For those that are looking to attract a stream of high-quality 'leads' via Facebook we'll provide you with the basic guidance necessary to understand the technical nature of advert creation.

We want you to keep in mind that our most successful clients reach a point of inflection where organic growth will be very predictable and follow a very clear and KPI-defined growth trajectory. The biggest problem we tend to encounter with our close clients is that of growth management: how is staffing managed once you're on the greasy end of the growth-curve? There will come a time where Facebook, Google, YouTube, and other paid promotion will be used to simply regulate lead generation in order to ensure a measured and manageable consistency of business. So, the purpose of paid promotion is to build your brand to a point where you don't need paid promotion.

Many have tried online advertising programs in the past without success. Others have enlisted the services of a 'marketing agency' - usually nothing other than weekend-educated individuals with a Facebook account – and these charlatans will have also failed to deliver upon best practice, or perhaps they've even introduced non-compliance into your operation (a certainty if you're engaging in pay-per-lead programs). Don’t let these adverse experiences dissuade you from the powerful realities of modern marketing.

Related Articles: We encounter brokers that come to us every single week that have had their Facebook account banned as a result of platform non-compliance (some brokers were even told to set up 'Community' pages on Facebook to mitigate the damage when the ban was inevitably imposed). We deal with brokers every single day that have advertisements published that are in clear breach of legislated requirements. It may be worth reading an article titled, "Mortgage Broker Advertising Compliance", and another earlier article titled "Ethical and Legal Financial Advertising". In our entire history not a single broker of ours has had their Facebook account banned in any way. Why? Because we publish compliant adverts that follow Facebook's clear guidelines.

The simple truth is this: online advertising works. It doesn't matter what market you're in or what product you have to sell, a highly fashioned campaign and immersive marketing funnel will continue to provide you with the base of clientele you need to succeed and grow.

Facebook Advertising is Easy

The first thing I need to state is that Facebook (and other types of digital) advertising is simple to implement. I'd say I could probably teach a monkey how build a powerful Facebook campaign, but instead I'll state categorically that my 7-year-old daughter can manufacture a more powerful campaign in 15-minutes than most of the charlatans could build with their existing 'systems'. In fact, we've challenged our 'competition' to a live-stream challenge that none of them will accept because they know they're peddling an inferior product (we've had this program running for over a year).

Note: Of those marketing groups that are attracted to our Propel Program (a program to deliver finance marketing agencies with the tools their clients need to grow), all thus far have been brilliant agencies that didn't need our software or support, necessarily, but instead recognise that they didn't want their finance clients to 'miss out'. Most of the lower-tier guys are afraid they'll forego their bloated subscription model to the third-party and highly inappropriate HighLevel product, and they're far less interested in delivering their brokers a sound product or experience.

While the process of Facebook advertising is easy (creative and copy aside), it's the compliant aspects that tend to get most businesses in trouble. You're bound by standard finance advertising standards and compliance requirements, but you're also advertising in Facebook's special ad category that limits the scope of features connected to your ad. We'll introduce why adherence to Facebook's advertising policies is essential in order to preserve the integrity of your account.

The Rescue Package: There's a couple of products that made their way into the market that thankfully no longer exist, notably Backpack and Mastery. The number of brokers we've inherited from these older programs after having their Facebook Ad Account banned is staggering. We've introduced a reduced-cost program that seeks to course correct the damage introduced by these and other damaging programs by way of lower entry costs and additional support.

Belief's Yabber system support the creation of fully campaigns in mere minutes.

Your Website is Essential

We guarantee that our systems are more powerful than any competing product in the market, and we 100% guarantee our Facebook systems are more efficient (and will deliver more high-quality leads for less). Yabber is purpose-built software designed to provide the only fully integrated and turnkey experience in the industry, and it is the only full-stack compliant turnkey solution that works on a one-click basis. As we'll come to explain, our one-click campaigns (via the "Solis" module) can have your campaigns up and running on your own website - supporting the only real course-correcting and AI-driven marketing funnel in the market - all with the click of a button.

Note: As we've mentioned a hundred times already, anybody that has ever introduced you to High Level, Lead Pages, Click Funnels, Kartra, or any other off-site landing page service is objectively wasting your marketing budget, they have not provided you with a real marketing experience, and certainly haven't provided you with a marketing funnel. The proliferation of illegal pay-per-lead services is also somewhat disturbing; never engage in a service that provides leads for cost. In most cases these services are operating in a completely non-compliant manner.

As we make clear in about every article on our blog, your website is absolutely essential, and we implore you to simply ignore the competing messages in the marketplace indicating otherwise. A highly fashioned and well-crafted website experience will support organic traffic, strengthen referral business, convert cold and undecided shoppers, and literally explode the effect of your Facebook and other paid campaigns. It's this necessity that led us into creating a 'generic' but highly-customisable mortgage broker website that provides a 6-figure experience for less than what you'll pay for a simple 10-page website.

There are 'professionals' that will have you set up landing pages on third-party services for the purpose of building landing pages - an utterly absurd, clueless, and professionally negligent business-destroying recommendation. A landing page is just a webpage, and sending paid traffic to somebody else's website negates your ability to integrate your website - your most powerful digital market asset - into your marketing funnel journey. Third party services negate your ability to apply escalation, collect detailed user statistics, or even simply measure the effectiveness of any campaign you put in place outside of a single page.

As described in another article introducing our landing page creation, Yabber supports one-click landing page creation, and your website itself will support drag-and-drop landing page (or inline landing panel) creation. If you're after something more specific (such as an event, or when you're promoting a 'scaled' product) even a total newbie can build a complete custom landing page in a few minutes. Of course, all the automated landing page assets on the 'periphery' are immediately connected to Yabber supporting email campaigns, SMS messages, autoresponders, and calendar bookings.

The Facebook Experience

Science, psychology, and technology are all intrinsically connected with your modern sales experience. What follows in this article are a number of basic Facebook advertising considerations that will guide you in your online endeavours. Through Facebook’s retargeting, lookalike audiences, and other tools, it’s never been easier to capture the attention of your target market.

Capitalising on the idea that 3% of any market is ready to “buy now” (this small 3% is often – but certainly not always – also suited for use with Google AdWords), and knowing that an additional 7% of any group (on average) are open to a purchase, and given that Facebook has roughly 2.2 billion active monthly users (15 million in Australia), it makes it the ideal advertising and marketing platform. As we discuss elsewhere in this document, if you know what your ideal customer looks like, and you put appropriate targeting strategies in place, you can ruthlessly target specific segments of the platform that are considering the product and/or service you provide to ensure profitable returns.

Audience Advantage: The advantage that brokers have over many other industries is that their potential customer is always looking for a better deal. The 'typical' audience is one that doesn't necessarily apply; your audience is everybody.

It’s the predictability of Facebook and consistent returns that has made it the platform of choice for most marketing agencies.

Through the business tools the Facebook platform makes available, it’s easy to monitor, split-test, evaluate, and alter your campaigns. Because the costs of using Facebook are quite low when compared against other platforms, it allows you to ease your way into a campaign and increase your marketing spend only if your efforts see some success.

Keep in mind that Facebook represents a small part of our services. We employ our proprietary “Matrix Method” that integrates a number of components to ensure maximised conversions. An advertising experience, and a broader marketing funnel experience, requires a number of digital assets on the 'periphery' to be fully optimised.

A maximum Return on Investment should be at the heart of every campaign you embark on. While every advertising platform potentially returns excellent results it’s generally Facebook that has the best response and ROI from what might be considered a cold market.

Note: In the last few years alone Belief has inherited over one-hundred brokers that have had their advertising accounts disabled as a result of promotion that is contrary to their 'Special Ad Category' rules, so if you're going it alone we'd encourage you to ready that section to properly understand the consequences of running ads that don't comply with Facebook's strict guidelines

Once again, it's worth reinforcing that entire campaigns may be created on your website with a single click. It's also worth repeating that you should never ever host your marketing assets on third-party resources, and understand that any marketing agency that might suggest this method has about the same understanding of marketing as you do.

It's Not Just About Facebook

Our systems process a Facebook lead that makes its way directly to a broker, on average, every 4 minutes. Our clients see the highest Facebook returns in the industry, but despite this, it's actually not our highest-performing program. Our referral, relationship, partner and other modules all routinely return far more business. Our Saturn program is the highest-performing in the industry returning an estimated 400-million per months to our clients, and our EDGE post-settlement software facilitates billions every year.

One must explore all available advertising options. At the time of publishing this article on of our brokers inherited some TV airtime from another of our clients he and returned 52-million in volume over 10 days with an ROI more effective than YouTube, and certainly more effective than Facebook.

In an article titled "One Billion Dollars of Medico Home Loans Every Year", we talk about how our brokers have successfully positioned them as medical finance professionals based almost exclusively on advertising in a particular manner... and it's not on Facebook (at least not initially - they're targeted later based on landing on a specific landing page).

We have brokers that pick up discounted billboard exposure, bus advertising, and numerous other means all the time. Sometimes Facebook isn't the answer. Interruption marketing is slowly losing its effectiveness over some other types of promotion based on the blindness we're developing to certain kinds of messaging... and more 'traditional' means of advertising are becoming more affordable and effective since the platforms are abandoned in favour of digital. While we almost always suggest Facebook initially, as your marketing matures you'll certainly want to explore options that will grow your business.

Your brand, positioning, clientele, and audience attributes all determine how your business should be promoted... it's just that Facebook is an effective catch-all approach, and one we'd argue is necessary simply for the purpose of maintaining brand exposure.

Entry into the Facebook advertising market is very quick and easy. This same barrier to entry isn't necessarily shared by traditional platforms.

Yabber's Facebook Marketing Features

Introduction

First and foremost we should state that Belief’s Yabber platform is not a replacement for the Facebook Ad/Business Platforms. Instead, we provide a conduit to make campaign adjustments, retrieve leads and provide associated automation, and we provide highly detailed statistics that provide an immediate visual, visceral, and tactical appreciation of your efforts.

Facebook’s ad platform may seem a little daunting at first but it is surprisingly easy to use (you'll want to watch a video of my 7-year-old daughter creating a $2 lead refinance campaign by clicking a bunch of buttons). Not unlike any piece of software it might take a few days to wrap your head around the moving parts and concepts, but once you have a basic understanding it becomes extremely intuitive.

Yabber does support the majority of functions necessary to manage highly efficient advertising campaigns, and the Platform supports virtually all the features necessary to manufacture, support, and create highly targeted and effective campaigns. We do not require copy and pasting in our system. The crazy cut-and-paste methodology – if employed in your current setup – is an antiquated and seriously flawed mechanism upon which to conduct business.

Because our system is fully integrated we manufacture campaigns that are infinitely more powerful than those you might be familiar with. Our website and platform targeting options are created automatically and guarantee better results.

Facebook Statistics

We’ll introduce Facebook statistics before anything else because they’re vital to your Facebook success (the entire Yabber system provides integrated statistics and is supported by the industry's only AI engine). Facebook’s generic system is generally inadequate to make informed decisions so we mash up advertising data to provide a very clear indication of how your campaigns are performing.

Pictured: Basic Facebook statistics. A sensible campaign cannot be conducted without the appropriate data to support your decisions. We provide in-depth statistics to ensure your campaigns are analysed correctly and with appropriate insight.

While it is true you have to test your campaigns over and over, and relentlessly split test and modify all your advertisements to optimise upon their conversions, doing so without data and detailed insights is a foolish endeavour.

Can you believe that there are ‘marketers’ that sell businesses a on a generic program without providing the necessary insight to make educated and informed decisions? The plethora of ‘Facebook Marketers’ has created an environment where it makes it so easy for our clients to outperform their competition.

Pictured: A simple aggregate campaign graph. While it appears complicated at first glance it’s actually very easy to read. With a single glance you’ll have an appreciation of exactly how your Facebook marketing is performing.

We provide detailed Facebook statistics for geographical traffic, age and gender, and other data – both for individual ad stats and split against competing ads – to provide a very clear indication of your marketing success.

Facebook Pixels (and Targeting Options)

Pixel Introduction

Whether or not you’re actively advertising on Facebook you should be using the Facebook Pixel now. The pixel is part of a snippet of code that is copied into your website and allows Facebook to collect data necessary to track conversions from Facebook ads, optimise your ads, and build targeted audiences for later ‘retargeting’. Even when you’re not advertising Facebook still collects information on your users so they’re able to build an audience profile.

The pixel is absolutely necessary in order to improve upon the effectiveness of your advertising budget. So, even if you’re not using Facebook advertising right now you should still set up the pixel on your website and start collecting data so you have a head start when you do start a paid program.

Pay Per Lead Trap: Pay Per Lead charlatans will use the same pixel across all broker landing pages, even if promoting your presence via a branded page (the exception rather than the rule). This means you don't capitalise on the audience interactions, and your audience is shared with your competitors. A seriously dodgy approach.

Belief’s Facebook pixel integration is highly sophisticated yet exceedingly simple to use. In fact, since the system is fully automated you’re just required to sit back and enjoy the results. We incorporate data into the pixel that wouldn’t normally be possible – such as basic web traffic (even if the user is driven to your site via a means other than a Facebook ad). Additionally, if the user is identified by way of any interaction – such as a form submission, Venus report, or inbound via an email campaign, we record each user into the Facebook ad code by default. We also include the BMID (or BeliefMedia ID) into the code so we’re able to match the behaviour of a user against any previous actions, such as viewing a Wistia video or downloading an e-book. What we’ve just described may not sound like a big deal... but it is game changer for those that use it. It's also a little complicated... but it does start to become clear when you're exposed to the advertising environment.

The Facebook help documentation has a long-winded section on how to install the Facebook pixel – suggesting a flawed approach of copying directly into websites (making updates difficult) and, on the other end of the scale, suggesting you enlist a developer. Because our system is fully integrated the process of creating a pixel can be performed on our Platform, and the sending of that pixel to your website is done so with the click of a button.

The Belief Pixel: The Facebook pixel shouldn't be confused with the BM Website Pixel used to gather website statistical data. The BM Pixel also feeds our AI engine with user interactions to develop a broader understanding of their behaviour.

There are some actions that must be taken from within Facebook’s ad platform, such as setting up advanced matching, and verifying your account. Our BeLearn module shows you how to complete these steps which take no more than a couple of minutes.

Conversion Tracking

The Facebook pixel enables conversion tracking on pages where the pixel is installed. In most cases you’ll read that Facebook can track the behaviour of a user after they land on your page after reading an advert. However, because we use an integrated and fully automated system we feed Facebook with encrypted user data as long as a user is identified by past behaviour on your website. This greatly improves upon targeting, retargeting, and audience curation.

Conversion tracking is the tracking of a user’s behaviour on a website when they perform some sort of action, such as subscribing to a list, or using your contact form. While Belief provides this functionality by default as part of our own tracking pixel features, Facebook’s data is used primarily to improve upon advert delivery and ad campaign optimisation.

Facebook provides 17 standard pixel events by default (we generally only

Purchase: Someone completes a purchase on your website.

Lead: Someone signs up for a trial or otherwise identifies themselves as a lead on your site.

Complete registration: Someone completes a registration form on your site, such as a subscription form.

Add payment info: Someone enters their payment information in the purchase process on your website.

Add to cart: Someone adds a product to their shopping cart on your site.

Add to wishlist: Someone adds a product to a wishlist on your site.

Initiate checkout: Someone starts the checkout process to buy something from your site.

Search: Someone uses the search function to look for something on your site.

View content: Someone lands on a specific page on your website.

Contact: Someone contacts your business.

Customize product: Someone selects a specific version of product, such as choosing a certain color.

Donate: Someone makes a donation to your cause.

Find location: Someone searches for your business’s physical location.

Schedule: Someone books an appointment at your business.

Start trial: Someone signs up for a free trial of your product.

Submit application: Someone applies for your product, service, or program, such as a credit card.

Subscribe: Someone subscribes to a paid product or service.

Whenever one of these events is fired the pixel will report the action back to Facebook and use the data to improve upon your marketing campaigns. Additional custom events are able to created but rarely necessary, particularly for businesses with only a few types of transactions taking place.

Yabber fully automates all events and a simple select menu is used in our SEO panel to specifically force a type of event to be recorded on a page (such as a contact event on your Contact Form page, and we force some type of actions on certain type of pages, such as the ‘lead’ event on landing pages, thankyou pages, and the ‘schedule’ event after a user makes a booking via your integrated calendar).

Facebook Retargeting

Retargeting is a means that allows you to get extremely granular with your advert delivery. Retargeting permits you to target people in ads that previously visited your website and completed some sort of defined action, or visited a specific page. In the e-commerce space you might target somebody that put an item in their cart but abandoned it before purchase.

Note: If you’re visiting an e-commerce store and intend on making a purchase, add the item to your cart and then abandon the purchase. You may be retargeted on Facebook soon after with a significant discount. This behaviour is as ubiquitous in the e-commerce trade as landing pages are everywhere else.

Retargeting allows you to target First Home Buyers with relevant advertisements and Investors with a completely different ad (often changing the style of ad at the same time by way of an escalated video or carousal advert). Retargeting is an extremely powerful tool.

Because Yabber operates as a Prospect Management System (rather than a CRM), once a user is escalated to Opportunity we’ll automatically remove them from a retarget list and move or keep them in a custom/lookalike style of list (doing so improves Facebook’s understanding of our ideal customer).

Creating a Facebook Pixel

There are some in the marketing digital industry that require coping and pasting of a Facebook pixel code into your website. This manual action is somewhat antiquated and a good signal of digital mediocrity. We’ve made management of pixels easy.

Once the pixel is created in the Platform (or synced if already created), a simple select menu is used to assign that pixel to a website. Your website immediately starts feeding Facebook with the necessary data to assess your website interactions.

Pictured: Pixel creation in the Platform is easy, and certainly easier than using the Facebook Platform itself. Once the pixel is created, or once you’ve synced existing pixels to the system, your pixels are immediately available from select menus and can easily be sent to your website.

Pictured: Pictured is the basic Facebook SEO panel. Once your Facebook credentials are created all those options become available in select menus. When sending the basic data to your website necessary for Facebook SEO and FB JavaScript code generation, we do so with the click of a button. This process is only truly appreciated when you understand the archaic competing methods provided to businesses (not to mention the difficulty in updating such data).

Facebook Custom Audiences

Introduction

Facebook custom audiences are groups of people that have previously had a relationship with your business by way of a sale, subscription or phone call (these audiences permit the tracking and targeting as described in the previous section). Once the audience is defined the list of people can be targeted directly in your advertising efforts. The lists can be used by Facebook to generate ‘lookalike’ audiences from a known high-value client list so you might find other people that would likely be interested in your business’ services.

Note: It’s worth noting that we mentioned you can add a user to a custom audience by way of a phone call. Because Yabber fully integrates telecommunications, an individual calling a specific number is enough to have them added to a defined Facebook custom list. This massive advertising advantage might be considered when creating offline campaigns with a phone number attached. In the minutes after an individual hangs up the phone after making a quick inquiry they may start seeing your ads in their Facebook and Instagram feeds. This feature is fully automated. Comparable systems that provide this functionality often sell for hundreds or even thousands every month.

The process of setting up custom audiences permits the retargeting of those people that interacted with your Facebook page or website assets in further advertising.

Platform Real-Time Audience Creation

Belief’s Platform automatically adds an individual to a relevant custom audience list based on various defined actions – such as a subscription to a newsletter, downloading a lead magnet, subscribing to an SMS list, watching a defined portion of a Wistia video, simply clicking on a link within your website, viewing a specific type of page on your website, receiving a phone call, or landing on your website by way of link-click in an email marketing campaign (the latter is a unique and extremely powerful feature that demonstrates the effectiveness of our integrated system).

Pictured: An example of adding a subscriber to a custom audience as part of form creation. The addition of a user is made in the same way for SMS subscription forms, inbound telco logs, and the completion of any form (including Venus forms). We provide a platform to create highly customisable audiences through our connectivity with Facebook systems.

There are number of ways that custom audiences might be created and we make every effort to ensure that no data source is lost or ignored with any signal-based transaction. In fact, just the basic features we’ve just described are often made available via third-party products for a few hundred dollars per month.

One of the more powerful features of our telco and Facebook integration allows for a user to be sent to a custom audience based on inbound phone calls to your business (yet another powerful feature you won’t find elsewhere).

Pictured: Jabber (Telco integration) includes a number of triggers, one of which is addition of an inbound caller to a custom list. If Facebook can match the origin number to a user they’ll be targeted with ads utilising that custom audience. This particular trigger is actioned on calls to a specific number (as opposed to any company number) – this makes it ideal for campaign types with a specific inbound or geographic prefix (the latter applies if not calling from a mobile). The system is fully automated and a uniquely powerful feature of BeliefMedia’s system. The Jabber platform is discussed in an upcoming chapter.

Uploading Custom Audiences

While the Platform creates audiences automatically by virtue of various interactions, such as email and SMS subscriptions, completion of Venus reports, and inbound telephone calls, you may upload an existing list of users to Facebook into a specific list. This action may be completed via Facebook or via the integrated tools on the Platform.

Creating a Custom List on Facebook

Pictured: Creating an audience list in Facebook. Select ‘Create a Custom Audience’ and select ‘Customer list’.

The first time you create a list you’ll be prompted to advise Facebook if the list contains a ‘value’. A value contains the numeric value of that customer to your business.

Pictured: Accepting terms for a value-based custom audience.

In the finance world this value-based upload might translate to a commission value. The numeric value assigns importance to your customers and enables Facebook to match higher-value customers ahead of lower-yield borrowing. This kind of ‘discriminatory’ targeting isn’t always able to be used by finance practitioners by way of the ‘Special Ad Category’ criteria but it is worth creating if we’re able to automate the process.

Pictured: Facebook’s upload form to create a custom audience. A sample value-based and standard CSV file is available to ensure you adhere to correct formatting.

The more data you provide in your audience list the better Facebook is able to match a user. Our own system might record email subscribers into a list in real time but a secondary email is often used making matching somewhat problematic. Including a country or state (both fields are automatically created when a subscriber is added to the system) might narrow the options and make the submission higher value.

Pictured: Example CSV file made available by Facebook to assist with the creation of customer audiences. You may download from Facebook or directly via the Platform.

Before any data is sent to Facebook for addition into any audience list, a form of cryptographic security method known as hashing is used which turns the identifiers (or field values in your CSV files) into randomised code and cannot be reversed. This means that custom audience creation is a one-way process – you may send audiences to Facebook but that’s where the love ends; you cannot download audiences.

Website Audiences

Audiences can also be created by way of website traffic or various types of engagement on Facebook (such as a direct message, engagement with a page post, clicking on a call-to-action, or saving a post). In fact, we’ve even automated the functionality to create audiences out of a simple website link click based on interest type (remembering that no signal should be ignored when it comes to creating an audience).

Your Website Feeds Facebook with Data: As mentioned earlier, there are those in the marketing industry that often recommend Facebook marketing without a website (these are normally the same crooks that’ll send you off to Lead Pages, Kartra, HighLevel, or ClickFunnels – just ridiculous). This kind of negligent practice often completely negates your ability to build truly powerful website audiences based on page interactions. Your website remains your most valuable marketing asset, and any transaction that takes place on your website adds huge value to your ability to convert off paid promotion.

The audience creation process is one that will you apart from your competition… and it’s the reason we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure we provide the most advanced features in the marketing industry.

While custom website audiences might sound a little complicated and daunting, we’ve automated the process almost entirely to make the process a simple task. As discussed shortly, part of the reason we’ve included the website audience creation features – essentially reproducing some of Facebook’s own functionality – is so we can more effectively create turnkey audiences at the click of a button. We’re also positioned to apply machine learning algorithms to fully understand your audience and how your marketing efforts are performing (and how they might be optimised).

Audiences are created on the basis of certain rules applied to the interaction a user has on your website. For example, you might choose to include a user into a defined audience if they visit a page on your website with the slug of ‘first-home-buyer’ (or just “first”) in the URL. Another example might be the addition of a user to an audience by way of a webpage with ‘investor’, ‘investors’, or ‘investing’ in the URL. Additionally, and a unique feature to our integrated Platform, you might choose to include a user into a custom audience if they click on an internal website link that is labelled with an ‘interest type’ of, say, ‘investors’ (created via the same links used to assist with conditional content). You may use website events such as visiting a contact page, viewing the ‘thank you’ page after a lead magnet subscription, or subscribing to a list, to further build upon your audiences. In some cases you might simply apply a global rule for any user that lands on any page of your website. Of course, if you use the same pixel on a few of your websites you might include only specific domains to be assessed for new audience members.

By applying this myriad of rules (and child filters) we’re able to segregate our audiences into known hot ‘buy now’ groups for further retargeting and possible escalation into our marketing funnel.

Pictured: Facebook’s audience creation tool. Outside of the ‘Special Ad Category’ (as shown shortly), you may create audiences based on URL part, page interaction, or website actions. Belief has replicated this panel for the manual and automatic creation of audiences via Yabber.

You’re limited to 500 audiences per ad account (you’ll never use that many), and Facebook place no limit the number of audience members.

Creating high-converting rules isn’t necessarily an easy task if you’re new to the world of Facebook. As introduced shortly, this is why we’ve introduced a turnkey option to create ‘kick-start’ Solis rules automatically.

As finance professionals it should be noted that you’re restricted to a ‘Special Ad Category’ (as detailed in an upcoming section) that limits the scope of website and offline audience creation.

Platform Creation of Facebook Audiences

We’ve created our own mechanism to create custom audiences. In fact, the Facebook API permits creation of audiences in a more refined manner than the Facebook platform itself. This additional functionality provided via the API, and the fact that having a one-click form permits one-second creation of ‘typical’ audiences, made the Platform’s integrated feature an absolute necessity.

Pictured: The creation of Facebook audiences from the Platform. As discussed in the next section, having an integrated audience tool was essential in providing a turnkey marketing solution. Rules are added to a ‘stack’ and then sent to Facebook for creation.

One-Click Creation of Website Audiences

You want results without having to spend time learning the Facebook platform, and the complexity of audience creation isn’t something you want to trouble yourself with in the early stages of your Facebook endeavours. Since the marketing learning process - and learning the depth of available options available via the Facebook Advertising Platform - is one that takes significant time, we’ve created an option to completely automate your custom audiences based on common audience attributes. The simple click of a button will create your initial audiences and our website plugin takes care of the rest. As previously introduced, Yabber also boasts its own full-featured audience-creation tool which occasional negatess the need to visit Facebook directly.

At the time of writing we base lists on defined ‘interest types’ so Facebook targeting pairs with options universally assessed in the Platform. The basic interest types are also most common, such as ‘First Home Buyers’, ‘Investors’, and ‘Refinancing’. The mechanism adds absolute simplicity to audience creation.

Pictured: Creating default (assigned) users. The single click of a button creates an array of default audiences based on URL criteria and Event types. We enhance audience creation based on website link click features.

The automatic creation of audiences is a defining characteristic of what digital media is meant to look like. In this day and age, the exclusion of this sort of tool in a paid product is somewhat negligent (albeit commonplace).

We want you to understand how website audiences are managed yourself but we also want you to launch highly effective campaigns in minutes – not days.

Creating Lookalike Audiences

When you have created a substantial custom audience list you may create a lookalike audience. Using an existing audience you may create a Facebook-generated list of users that look like your ideal customer, or look like users currently engaging with your business. Facebook will then seed your source list in order to generate their own highly effective list of people to target with advertising.

An Introduction to Facebook Advertising

Introduction

The creation of Facebook advertisements isn’t nearly as difficult as Facebook’s Ads/Business Manage might suggest. The difficulty or challenge with Facebook ads does not lie with advert creation but rather the effort required to constantly assess your audiences and optimise your advert delivery. Of course, if you’re using our system, you’ll have the statistical data necessary to make those decisions, and you won’t have to invest any effort into any of the technical aspects of the process.

We’ve talked about generic one-size-fits-all generic ads elsewhere in the past. While we do provide generic ads for template-based starting points, using the same ad as somebody else is never a good idea, and they’ll never deliver the best results for your business. Ads in Western Sydney won’t necessary work the same way as those in Eastern Suburbs, or even those in Wollongong or the Central Coast. A generic ad doesn’t represent your brand, your voice, or highlight your points of differentiation.

“I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.” ― David Ogilvy

Remember, an advert at its core is a promise - a promise that delivers upon claims your ad copy makes… and the copy used must be consistent with regional vernacular or culture. If you’re sharing the ad with multiple other brokers the ad quickly loses its effectiveness… especially since Facebook’s algorithm will deliver ads with similar targeting and identified interests to the same people (we’ve seen the same ad three times in less than a minute) – how does this generic presence create a point of difference or highlight your unique positioning in the market?

Creating Facebook Ads

We decided not to include the specifics of creating a Facebook advert in this 'brief' article but we’ll likely include details over time. Instead, we’ll introduce just some of the basic and necessary concepts before you create your first ad.

The best learning platform for creating Facebook ads is Facebook itself via their own education portal at facebook.com/blueprint . The training our BeLearn system provides is more of a quick-start ‘do it now’ guide, while Facebook generally provides the education necessary to fully understand how to very quickly create an ad.

12 Basic Tips For Creating Better Facebook Ads: In an article titled 12 Basic Tips For Creating Better Facebook Ads we introduce some basic attributes of higher-performing ads.

What You Should Never Include on Landing Pages or Facebook Ads: In an article titled Stop Asking Conversion-Blocking Quiz-Style Questions in Facebook Advertising we discuss some of reasons why asking 'qualifying questions' is a seriously flawed mechanism for generating high quality leads.

Even without any formal training, the Facebook system is very intuitive and enables you to get started with a very low barrier to entry. The Facebook advertising platform – like other similar social advertising platforms – was designed with small businesses in mind. It’s not complicated.

The Lead Cost

We routinely see marketing agencies promote ‘First Home Buyer’ leads for $1.50, or refinance leads for $1.30. We can deliver leads to you easily for under a dollar… but we won’t! The cost of a lead is absolutely no measure of its quality. Would you prefer 100 leads for $1.50 (and covert just a few) or 50 leads for $3 and convert 20 into much higher value products? Targeting higher quality sources (if you ad category actually permits targeting) might cost a little more but they’re well and truly worth the investment.

Note: We have a case study on our website that shows how a property expert saw zero success with $3 leads from a previous marketing company. We reduced his budget but increased the lead cost to nearly $12, but we’re seeing actual conversions of nearly 30% on property purchases. Needless to say this is a ridiculously high ROI.

Do not focus on lead cost. Focus on ROI.

The Finance Special Ad Category

Credit, Employment or Housing campaigns have some limited or unavailable audience targeting options (under what Facebook refers to as a ‘Special Ad Category’).

As mortgage brokers your advertising falls into the Special Ad Category meaning that your ads and audiences must comply with Special Ad Category advertising policies. Failing to abide by these rules, or trying to circumvent them, will get your Facebook account banned (your ads might run initially but you will be caught out eventually). Once again, we've inherited triple-digit brokers from those programs we've listed in our Rescue Package - utterly and completely unacceptable.

As somebody running special ad category advertising certain targeting options are not available:

Locations: You can target your ads to people by geographic location (such as country, region, state, province, city or congressional district), but not by ZIP code. Specific locations you select will include a 15-mile radius around that targeted city, address or pin-drop. For example, if you want to reach people in the city of Seattle, your audience will also include people within a 15-mile radius of Seattle’s city center.
Age: You can’t edit this option. Audiences must include ages 18 through 65+.
Gender: You can’t edit this option. Audiences must include all genders.
Detailed Targeting: Some demographic, behaviour and interest options are unavailable. Excluding any detailed targeting selections is also unavailable.
Audience Expansion: You can't use targeting expansion or lookalike expansion options if your campaign is part of a Special Ads Category.

Note: Certain targeting options such as Special Ad Audience and Custom Audience may only be available via Ads Manager.

To be clear: we never recommend trying to navigate any policy-based restrictions.

Under the special ad category your options are very limited when compared against the standard targeting and audience options. However, Facebook is good at learning what your audience looks like so will eventually start to show your ads to the right people at the right time. Retargeting, leveraging existing data sources, and good copy is more important now than ever before.

Pictured: If creating a campaign via Facebook’s Ad Manager you’ll be promoted to tick a box indicating that your ad relates to a special ad category. Failing to do so may get your account banned. Creating an advert via Yabber (if you have access) asks the same question in a step-by-step form.

Pictured: When creating an audience for a Special Ad Category Facebook will have you confirm your understanding that not all audience members will be used. Options for audience targeting are ‘Custom Audience’, ‘Create a Lookalike Audience’, ‘Create a Saved Audience’, and ‘Create a Special Ad Audience’.

As previously mentioned, Facebook’s Special Ad Category limits the scope of audience creation in a significant way. This limitation isn’t as debilitating as it might appear; Facebook’s algorithm does a satisfactory job or delivering your ads to the right people regardless of the limited targeting options made available to you.

Pictured: The special Ad Category audience essentially limits your group to location and a percentage match against your existing source list of audience members. Website audiences – or those people identified by way of website or on-page activity – are not discriminated against in the same way.

Pictured: Standard audience creation tool. Outside the scope of credit, housing, and employment your targeting options are greatly enhanced.

This ‘slight’ disadvantage by way of ‘Special Ad Category’ obligations is the reason we recommend strict compliance rather than opting for an advert that contains lesser information but circumvents the targeting restrictions. You absolutely you don’t want your ad account to be banned (and it will be if you’ve broken the rules). Don’t try and blindly navigate this restriction thinking you’ll avoid identification.

There are numerous considerations with relation to advertising compliance outside the scope of Facebook and they’re introduced in brief in a section on ‘Advertising Compliance’.

Conclusion

We appreciate this article was quite long. However, we'll break up the concepts into bite-sized chunks over coming weeks and introduce to you specific workable concepts you can apply in your business. Certainly, much of the information we've presented is largely redundant because Yabber automates almost everything, and we support your endeavours throughout the entire process.

We vigorously object to the typical tail-wagging-the-dog-approach - meaning that a 'marketer' will find a platform that they can milk for affiliate profits, and then try and make it fit the experience they're trying to sell. Instead, we analysed millions of pieces of data, looked back over our 24+ years servicing the finance industry, and built a system that wrapped itself around what brokers actually need, and what actually converts.

The difference between a bad Facebook product and a great Facebook product is extraordinary. We invite you to call us on 1300 235 433 (1300 BELIEF) and learn how we're able to return more volume than any competing agency in the business.

Featured Image: Charters Towers branch of the Commonwealth Bank, 1920. The Queensland Government Savings Bank, enacted by legislation in 1861, was operated by the Queensland Government. The Queensland Government Savings Bank merged with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, transferring the business and assets on 8 December 1920. The pictured branch is in Bow Street, Charters Towers. Next door is an office of the 'Scottish Union and National Insurance Company'. [ View Image ]

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