How to Generate Tons of Quick Sales with Facebook Ads
I love doing tutorials like this. Today I’m going to show you how to generate tons of quick sales with Facebook Ads.
This technique isn’t something that I see a lot of Facebook advertisers using all that often.
I’m not sure why. It’s a fantastic thing to have in your arsenal and to have in your back pocket for when you need to generate A LOT of revenue very quickly.
And, of course, it’s also fun to make more profit and more sales. After all, that’s what we’re all in business for.
The Two Components to Make a Ton of Facebook Sales Quickly
There are two components to getting a lot of people to take action.
- Incentive
- Urgency
You need to incentivize people to take action as they are going about their daily lives. You also need to make it urgent.
So if you incentivize action with a great offer, but they can access that offer today, tomorrow or in a month’s time, a lot of people will just put it off.
It’s human nature. We’re all busy and whatever your offer is, it’s probably not on the agenda of the person you’re trying to reach.
So how do you incentivize action? And how do you go about generating that urgency?
The best way is very simple. It’s not new and it’s been done forever when it comes to marketing. It’s a flash sale.
Using a Flash Sale to Generate Lots of Sales Fast on Facebook
You can tie a flash sale into a specific event like Black Friday or the Black Friday/Cyber Monday combo. Some people also do sales around holidays like Valentine’s or Easter.
But there’s no reason you have to limit yourself to national holidays and things like that. You can just run a flash sale for the sake of it.
For instance, you can come up with something that’s specific to your industry.
I’ve seen tons of businesses do this, where they might be selling soap and they say something like “It’s national soap day on Thursday.” There probably is no national soap day, it’s just something they made up as a reason to run a flash sale.
Advertisers undervalue flash sales.
Warning: Flash sales are extremely effective, but you can’t do it all the time. Your customers will become skeptical and jaded if you run them too often.
You can run flash sales every six weeks or every two or three months depending on your industry.
Using Facebook Ads to Run a Flash Sale
Using Facebook ads to promote your flash sale works great. That’s because you can get your offer in front of a LOT of people very quickly.
These folks will likely have a very good conversion rate if it’s a product or service that you know they’re interested in but they get a LIMITED time good discount of 30%, 50%, or even 75% off.
Maybe you even give away a free thing or special access that’s available for a limited time only.
I’m going to show you how this works in my example Facebook ad account.
Creating the Campaign Level
The first thing we do is go to the business manager and click on the green create button.
Then I’ll name my campaign. In this case it’s going to be “example flash sale campaign” and the campaign objective needs to be Conversions.
Flash sales are usually designed to generate leads or sales on your website – and either way you want to use the Conversions objective.
You could also use the Messages objective or create a Lead Generation campaign if that’s how you’d rather construct your sales funnel.
I’d recommend turning on campaign budget optimization.
Don’t be too conservative when setting your flash sale budget. This is one of those places where you want to be a bit more aggressive. Especially if you know you have a solid offer.
You will only run this thing for about 3 days to 5 days at most. So you want to push your budget on this type of sale.
Let’s say that your monthly budget for Facebook ads is $1,000. You may want to take half that budget and run it on just these 3 to 5 days.
Setting Up the Ad Set Level
Next you’ll move onto the ad set level. For this example, I’m going to focus on the things that are different from other types of campaigns that you might create.
The first thing we need to talk about at this level is who you want to target with your ads for the flash sale.
With a flash sale, you’ll usually see much better results when you target warm audiences.
What I mean by warm audiences is:
- People that have bought from you previously.
- People on your email list whether they have bought or not.
- People who have previous exposure to you or your brand (such as visiting your website).
Those are three warm audiences that are my first go-tos when it comes to running a flash sale.
These people might have hesitated at full price, but might be ready to take action if they can get your product or service at a discount.
Now you can also run this offer to cold audiences, but that’s usually not going to be as effective.
Extra Resource! It’s easy to create warm custom audiences. I have the steps laid out for you here in my “Facebook ads make simple course".
If you don’t have large custom audiences yet, then you can start by targeting both warm and cold audiences. Make sure these are in separate ad sets within the same flash sale campaign.
If you have campaign budget optimization turned on, Facebook will optimize toward what is going to work best for your campaign.
Setting Up the Ad Level
When you are creating an ad for a flash sale, the offer should be strong enough to sell itself, so you want to make sure people can see what the offer is at a glance.
You want the offer to be 100% crystal clear.
In our primary text we might use something like “Biggest sale ever” with fire emojis or something alongside it. Then something like “Get our… offer up to 60% off for the next 3 days only!”
Then in the headline we’d usually reiterate the offer. So we might have something like “Up to 60% Off – Three Day Flash Sale”
If you have a strong offer, these copy examples typically work very well with warm audiences. When they see your ad pop up, they’re likely to recognize the brand name of your business and your little Facebook icon.
So fairly generic discount ads are likely to resonate with them.
If you’re advertising a flash sale to cold audiences, then you’ll want to provide a bit more information about your products and services.
But I’m going to assume for this example that your focus is mostly on warm audiences, in which case you just REALLY want to emphasize the deal.
Then I’m going to pop my URL in here and choose an image that’s very representative of the offer. You could use a single image or a carousel here.
You can even put a text overlay on the image that says something like “60% off.” Just remember that Facebook doesn’t like a ton of text on images.
This is an incredibly simple ad to create and publish, and it can work very well. In the description you want something like “Take advantage of our flash sale before it ends.”
Remember with a flash sale there are two things you need to get right. There’s the incentive and there is urgency. That’s what you want to come back to again and again.
It’s best to focus all your ad copy and imagery on those two things.
For a flash sale campaign, I don’t usually recommend video ads (other than simple slideshow style videos) as they don’t usually work well with the flash sale approach.
Optional Extra: Another thing you can do with a flash sale is run different creative everyday. This helps to keep the audience engaged and stops ad fatigue setting in.
The Landing Page
With a flash sale it’s important to have your landing page messaging match your ad.
You’ll want a banner or something similar at the top of your page that reiterates the offer. I really like to include timers here as well.
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