Most people will tell you to how to improve your conversion rate by talking about segmenting your audience. This is a good technique, but they miss the mark.

You have to take a step back.

You have to look at what the most important aspect of your campaign truly is – earning your potential customer’s trust as quickly as you can.

To earn this trust you’ve got to start at the basics of a good Facebook campaign that creates an emotional domino effect within your customer.

Quick Story

I worked with a client who didn’t want to understand his buyer’s core needs. He didn’t actually admit that to me. The reality was that he thought he knew because he didn’t want to make the effort to learn more. He asked me to create a campaign without allowing me to dig into his why.

We created a Facebook campaign to capture emails and it fell short. At first I blamed myself, but then I realized that my client made a lot of mistakes too.

He didn’t understand the most most important rule of any campaign. Know your customers. Now I make all my clients share their core values, their “why” and who they think their customer is inside and out.

If you don’t understand your customer’s needs you aren’t able to do a good job of selling to them.

I don’t want you to make the same mistakes.

A.I.D.A

It’s an old copywriting concept from the 1950’s that still rings true today. Please no Don Draper jokes.

The acronym stands for:

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

I wish “trust” was inserted in between Desire and Action because it’s vital to improving your conversion rate. I’ll explain more as you read on.

A lot of small business owners miss out on applying these concepts because they forget the number one reason anyone buys a product.

Avoiding Pain

People buy from you because they want to avoid the pain of losing money, time, comfort, beauty, etc.

It’s your job to convey this quickly so you can close the deal.

Let’s look at the how to do this in a Facebook campaign.

1. Understand Your Customer’s Triggers

You must start by digging down, understanding your customer’s trigger points. What pain points are your customer’s need you to help solve?

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

– Peter Drucker

You must ask yourself why do people buy your products?

When you can answer this question then you understand how to craft your offer. It goes back to understanding how your customer thinks.

Look at how you can understand your customer’s emotional triggers that captures their attention. Once you understand how to form a connection with them you’ll also improve your conversion rate. It’s this first marketing domino that is the foundation of earning the sale.

2. Fix Your Headline

Your headline is the number one reason people aren’t clicking on your ad.

You have 1 second to grab their attention if you don’t do it quickly you will miss out on your chance at earning a new customer.

There are many bad ads, but let’s look at two that show you how you can improve your own ads.

1st Ad:

This ad’s headline is boring. The headline doesn’t grab your attention. Also photos with people in them help people connect with the ad. Remember an emotional connection is important to improving your conversion rate.

The ad doesn’t explain who they are and why you should warrant taking the time to check out their site.

Free is a powerful word, but so much screaming in their punctuation kills their conversion.

Let’s look at another ad that builds trust quickly and makes you want to click.

2nd Ad:

This ad is much more subtle and confident. I follow Neil so his Facebook advertising is probably targeting me and I already know who he is. This can mean the difference between a click or an ignore. He also adds intrigue and benefits in the copy, building trust as the reader scans his ad.

The 2nd ad’s headline does a better job of grabbing people’s attention and reinforcing why the viewer should click on their ad.

Look at your Facebook advertising campaign’s headline and put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What do they want to see that will grab their attention and give you enough time to build trust?

3. Create a Well Designed Landing Page (Hint: simple is better)

I worked on developing a landing page for a client who wanted to capture leads for his IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) software. We started by creating a page people would land on when they searched for his company. Simple is better, but it also needs to be designed to capture their attention, earn their trust and convince them that you can help them.

1st Landing Page:

You can see that there are too many links and unfocused content. This was fine for a few weeks as we tested out our different target markets, but our conversion was low.

We decided to create a dedicated page that focused on capturing the lead.

2nd Version of Landing Page:

You can see the focus is proving that WellVoice’s software can help people with their business. Once we’ve earned their trust the only action they can take is to fill out the form.

Our conversion rate improved by 75%.

We’ve gone through several revisions since and have slowly increased the conversion rate.

Look at how you are capturing leads. Is your page focused on engaging them with your story and capturing their information? If you have too many things for them to do you need to simplify your page so your readers don’t become overwhelmed and click away.

4. Develop a Stronger Call to Action

Your call to action is also weakening your conversion rate if it doesn’t spur your visitor into action.

Basecamp, software from 37 signals, created a strong call to action and they make it hard not to sign-up.

The rest of the copy hopefully sold them on the benefits, now asking for the sale is all that’s left.

You can see the headline in the information capture box is red. Right away it’s letting people know they get a free preview and then the next thing that stands out is the green button. The button says:

“Start your 60-day free trial”

If you are in the market for project management software why wouldn’t you want to start a free 60-day trial. If it doesn’t help after 2 months you can cancel. It’s a simple call to action that works well for their busy readers.

Look at your call to action. Are you making it easy for people to say yes to your offer?

5. Split Test Your Landing Page

The last and probably the most consistent conversion rate increase come from split testing your landing pages. The only way to truly know what your audience responds well to and what they don’t like is to test it.

The first thing you will want to test on your landing page is your headline. Concrete numbers work well. If you say 3,456 people currently use your product vs over 3,000 people use your product you’ll do a better job of grabbing their attention.

Look at where most of your visitors are landing when they arrive at your site and ask yourself, “Is this page helping me close leads or sales?” If you aren’t sure I suggest split testing it and see how you can increase your conversion rate.

Question: What would you add to this list that has helped you improve your Facebook conversion rate?