The TTS Strategy is a simple budget allocation tool that we think you could use to great effect, because knowing how to correctly allocate your Facebook advertising budget is essential to obtaining the best return on investment for your ad spend.
Business owners have numerous responsibilities, one of which is to manage spending and increase profits. We’ve always maintained that digital marketing is an investment, not an expense, but with that being said, you still have to spend your marketing budget wisely.
Keep reading if you have no clue how to split your Facebook advertising spend, or if you just want to learn another key strategy to leverage on the platform.
What the TTS Strategy is NOT
The TTS Strategy is not a quick fix; it is a long term marketing strategy. While you should see immediate results, the true beauty lies in the benefits it brings over the long term.
What the TTS Strategy can do for your business
A problem that a lot of non-digital marketing people have is that they just don’t know which Facebook campaign to choose and how much of their budget they should allocate to the various options available.
The TTS strategy is elegantly designed to show you how much of your Facebook marketing budget you should be spending to:
- generate traffic to your business Facebook page
- introduce cold audiences to your brand
- warm your audience even further
- eventually sell to them
Quick recap on a Marketing Funnel
Before we dive into the strategy in detail, we need to ensure that you understand the basics of a marketing funnel.
Cold audience: these are people who have no idea your company, brand, product or services even exist. The aim is to put content in front of them so that they can begin to know, like and trust you. You are not trying to sell anything to them at this point. Remember, it is a BIG turn-off for people who have only just discovered you if the very next thing they see from you is a “Buy now!” message – it comes across as desperate and spammy.
Warm audience: these are people who are now aware of your company and are happy to consume the free content you provide them. They might regularly read your blog and begin to comment and share your content.
These people are perfectly primed to join your email list and one of the easiest ways to do this is to give them something valuable for free in exchange for their name and email address.
This is a voluntary opt-in and they have the right to unsubscribe at any time but if you put entertaining and informative content in front of them, they won’t want to.
Hot audience: these are the people on your list who adore you. They are on your email list, so you send them exceptional content and put in a lot of effort to retain their interest. The idea is to give so much to this group of people, that when you eventually ask them to make a purchase, they do so gladly.
Now that we’ve recapped the essence of a marketing funnel, let’s dive into the TTS Strategy in detail.
The TTS Strategy
In a nutshell, TTS stands for TEN – THIRTY – SIXTY and this is going to be the percentage split of your budget when you run your Facebook ad campaigns.
The TTS Strategy Chart
Note: you do not have to do this every time or for every ad you are creating.
We’ve found that this strategy works extremely well for new businesses, businesses launching a new product or businesses who have found that interest has waned in their online presence or sales have stalled over time.
T is for Ten Percent
The first “T” in the TTS strategy is for ten percent of ad spend. The aim of this segment is to introduce cold audiences to your brand. The way we do this is by growing your Facebook page audience using a Facebook Like Campaign.
Set up your Like campaign by selecting the “Engagement” campaign objective:
and then “Page Likes” as follows:
Target your ad according to your ideal customer (age, gender, interests, location etc).
Pro Tip: be sure to exclude people who have already liked your page. This saves on ad spend.
You could also split the 10% segment further by dividing it in half and using one half for the Like campaign and the other half to boost posts in your feed.
The ideal type of post to boost would be one that has had the most engagement (likes, shares and comments).
Boost to people who have liked your page and people pixelled from visits to your website. The Boost post is used to warm up your audience further and to RETAIN the Facebook likes you have already acquired.
They know about you, and now you are sending them quality content to add value to their lives as they scroll the Facebook feed.
Pro Tip: Please only boost your own content and not other people’s content that you’ve shared to your page!
T is for Thirty Percent
The second “T” in the TTS strategy stands for thirty percent, and it works like this:
Use half of this ad allocation (15%) to place ungated content (meaning there is NO opt-in request) in front of COLD audiences.
The goal is to warm up a cold audience, so use similar targeting as you did for your Like campaign above, and remember to exclude people who have already engaged with your Facebook page.
Use the other half of this budget allocation to put regular (not the most engaged) content in front of your warm, pixelled audience. The purpose of this is to keep your warm audience aware of your brand and what you do. You want to retain their interest and engagement.
Pro Tip: at this point you are not pushing people to buy from you.
You may be wondering why we are using the 10% segment AND the 30% segment to put content in front of people. You might be asking why we didn’t just combine them, so let’s explain the difference between the two “content” aspects of the ad spend budget allocation.
The boost post from the 10% segment will be your best performing content that has the MOST engagement (think viral content), whereas the content you select in the 30% section is your regular content such as your weekly blog post.
The reason you have to spend that little bit extra to promote your “ordinary” page content is because organic reach is <2%. This means that the vast majority of people will never, ever see what you’ve posted in their feed, unless they actually go into your Facebook page and scroll there (which they may, or may not do, sadly).
So if you really want people to see your online content, you have to pay Facebook to show it to your target audience.
S is for Sixty
The final letter in our strategy stands for Sixty because 60% of your Facebook ad budget is going to be spent on the ultimate money-maker: lead generation.
And once again, we’re splitting this segment in half:
Use the first half to send your opt-in offer such as a free pdf, cheatsheet, discount voucher etc. to completely cold audiences.
Spend the other 30% to send the same lead-generating offer to your warm audience that have already seen your content and offer, but have not opted in as yet.
Pro Tip: Exclude anyone who has ALREADY opted-in and is on your email list, because the purpose of this exercise is to acquire new leads from new opt-ins.
Wrap it all up by making sales
By using the TTS strategy, your Facebook page likes should increase and so too should your email list from opt-ins.
You should now have a digital conveyer belt moving people from cold to warm by using these percentage splits for your Facebook budget.
Naturally, the final step in this strategy is to move your warm audience to HOT and make some sales.
The way to do this is by placing select offers in front of your warm, engaged community to encourage them to either purchase online from you, book an appointment with you, sign up at your gym/ take out a membership or visit your physical store to buy from you.
If you nurture your warm and hot leads carefully, you can secure loyal customers and brand ambassadors who will begin to promote your business via digital word-of-mouth, for free.
Never underestimate the power of the like, share and comment button on Facebook.
Your warm-to-hot audience and your opted-in leads is a group of people you should strive to appreciate and retain, because the key to selling on Facebook is to build community first, and make sales last.
The Takeaway
The TTS strategy is simple, yet effective and the beauty of it is that the results get better over time.
Splitting your Facebook budget allocation will help you obtain new leads, retain current ones and also provides a mechanism to encourage people to make a purchase.
We hope we’ve encouraged you to try out the TTS strategy for yourself for at least one of your overall ad campaigns, but if it seems too complicated or you just don’t have the time to implement it, remember Big Domino Marketing can do it all for you.
