Drive traffic to your site, ask for that like, demand action. If your ad simply leads to your website’s homepage, your ads aren’t working.
You may feel like you are losing money when advertising online. New businesses seem to be popping up all over the place so you could be forgiven for thinking you need to scream just to have your business’ message heard above the noise.
In fact, there are over 1 million advertisers on Facebook spending a whopping $8 billion on Facebook Ads. Advertising on Facebook has grown over 680% since 2010.
So why bother, right? You’ll never find new customers that way. But another statistic that may interest you is that Facebook has more than 1.94 billion monthly active users.
If your business is not tapping into the largest online audience in the world, you’re missing out.
I know it all seems quite complicated but don’t worry. There are simple steps you can take to improve your Facebook ads for immediate results. In this post learn what an effective ad looks like and how to make Facebook Ads work for you.
There are quite a few considerations when it comes to setting up a successful Facebook Ad campaign.
Mine audience insights from your Facebook business page. Figure out who is looking at your page and what brings them to you specifically. With this information build buyer personas.
Buyer personas are a like a mix and match of features of customers and those in the audience you wish to target. For example, if you sell staff management systems and payroll, you are likely targeting the HR departments of medium and large-sized businesses. You may end up with a buyer persona like the following:
Name: Helen Johnson
Age: 42
Role: HR Manager of IT firm
Marital status: Married with 2 kids
Things she dislikes about her role: Long sales pitches over the phone in the middle of the day, clunky payroll systems and manual data entry.
Given this information, how much more focused would your ad be? Buyer personas are your target customer. Create a few for the different audiences you are targeting.
Understand that people buy things to solve a problem. If you have the solution, make it as easy as possible for your target audience to find you.
Nail your offer
The key element to selling is knowing what you are selling and how to make it as attractive as possible for a potential customer. What are you offering? 50% a second item purchased? A free trial of your product?
Until you know what you are actually selling you won’t convince anyone.
Play with the format
Facebook often rolls out different ad formats. Make sure you are using the one that best suits your goals. Test multiple designs and create unique ads for each audience.
Be sure to use testimonials in your ads. Potential customers want to be able to see how your product or service has solved the problem of someone else. How have you made a customer’s life better? Ask them for a testimonial if you don’t already have Facebook Reviews set up, and feature it in your ad.
Engage with images
Ensure the photos you use in your ads contain an interesting subject, are attention grabbing and high-quality. You aren’t going to sell anybody anything with an ad full of clip art.
Grab attention with video
Consider using video to catch the eye of potential customers. Embed subtitles into your ads so users can follow the ad without sound, many viewers watch this way when at work, riding public transport and waiting in line. Your ad should speak volumes with or without sound.
Write punchy copy
The text in your ads should be minimal and the tone of voice needs to reflect your brand, whether it is formal or funny.
Appeal to readers emotions and most importantly, make your message clear. If you are unsure of how to go about this, consider employing the skills of a copywriter to nail your message.
Ask readers to do something
Creating a sense of urgency with words like ‘Act Now!’ ‘Limited Offer!’ ‘Don’t Miss Out!’ push readers to action. Drive traffic to your site, ask for that like, demand action. If your ad simply leads to your website’s homepage, your ads aren’t working.
Cleverly, this ad is not for TradeMe insurance at all, but for Facebook Ads. See the ‘Create Ad’ message at the top? Facebook has used an example of one of their customer’s ads (like a testimonial) which is both engaging, colourful and the chocolate fish is instantly recognisable to any Kiwi. There’s hardly any text but a clear call to action.
Take your time to develop a plan, try different formats for different audiences and engage with your target market today.
To know if your ads are returning on your investment, you need to first know what you are measuring so that you can effectively monitor changes.
You could consider measuring one of the following:
Knowing which of these to measure will largely depend on your marketing strategy. If you are an established business with a good online presence you may want to see leads converted to sales more so than a startup who may be trying to build their page likes first. Maybe you’ll measure all of them. Whichever you choose, just be sure to be consistent.
As you can see, there is quite a bit of thought that should go into creating quality Facebook Ads, but with planning and testing you’ll begin to see real measurable results. Know your audience, target them directly and when you are finished your ads will look like they belong in people’s news feeds.
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