Facebook knows a ton of information about all of us, and that knowledge makes it an amazing place for businesses to advertise. Whether you’re after individual customers or other business clients, Facebook can deliver ads to a very specific audience that you choose. This guide will help you create the best Facebook ad that connects with your target audience, builds your brand, and drives traffic straight to your site.
We’ll skip the techy steps for the initial setup. You can learn more here about how to get started with your Facebook ad account.
Defining Your Objective
Ask yourself exactly what it is you want to accomplish with this ad. You want to ultimately sell your product or services, but this step requires more narrow thinking. Is this ad an effort to grow your social media following? Or build awareness? Sell a featured product? Drive traffic to your site?
Depending on what you aim to accomplish, set your main objective to either Awareness, Consideration, or Conversions in the Facebook Business Manager. You’ll also need to consider budget here because choosing Awareness, for example, is generally a lower cost than the Conversions option. You can, however, reach a larger audience and have more eyeballs on your website through awareness/traffic campaigns compared to conversion campaigns.
Choosing Your Audience
Next, you must carefully decide who your audience is and what makes them tick. It can be tempting to try and sell to everyone, but your ad will make a bigger impact if it’s uniquely designed for a specific audience. It is important to know who your customers are BEFORE you start advertising on Facebook.
As you’re choosing who to target in the Audiences section of the Business Manager, you’ll need to decide whether you’re retargeting those who have already engaged with your company or prospecting new customers. The Audience Insights tool allows you to select among dozens of specifications for your prospects including age, gender, location, interests, behavior, and much more. Facebook will take this insight and deliver your digital ad to exactly the type of audience you want it to reach.
Be very thoughtful about who you’re targeting, because understanding your audience is the key to then creating an effective paid ad that attracts the right prospects and drives traffic to your site.
Creating Your Ad
Your ad photo is going to be the first thing Facebook users see when they scroll their feed. Choose a hi-res, eye-catching photo that stops scrollers in their tracks. It has to be compelling, relatable, and personable. Overlaying text on your photo is a great way to add impact, but the text can cover no more than 20% of the image or it’ll get the red light from Facebook. So make it short but mighty.
Next, write a compelling ad copy. Follow these recommendations to craft high-converting copy:
a) Tactics – What are you offering?
Your ad copy must have a strong, compelling offer that would differentiate your brand from your competitors. It should be happy, inspiring, and upbeat. Rather than focusing heavily on the pain points, win new customers by explaining what life could look like after the problem has been solved. If done correctly, it will entice your audience to click through. For instance, what are you trying to offer? Is it a coupon code, influencer content, or a video?
b) Call To Action
Your Facebook ads should have a strong Call To Action. It will help your audience determine what the ad is about, what your offer is and what they get out of clicking your ad. Facebook gives you an option to choose from a list of CTA’s such as ‘learn more, ‘sign up’, shop now, etc.
Some examples of CTA’s are:
- Download the free e-book now (tell them what they get)
- Offer expires soon (create urgency)
c) Split-test
It is important to test a few variations of ad copy and images to find out what works best with your target audience. After a week of A/B testing, Facebook picks the winning campaign with justified reasoning. Allow one week to test your different ads and be sure to watch the metrics closely before choosing which ones to cancel.
A couple more things to keep in mind about copy is that any ad placement will always show the first 25 characters (including spaces) but it may not show the copy after that. Whenever possible, keep your headlines to 25 characters or less and make sure your keywords are in those first 25 characters.
After your initial setup, ad copy and targeting are complete, your campaign is ready to go live! The next step is to track the performance of your ads and the conversion rate.
Also, while the words you and your are not forbidden, Facebook does not want you to run ads that assert or imply certain attributes of a person including race, ethnic origin, gender age, etc. Does this mean you can’t direct your ads to specific audiences? No. But, you’ll want to protect your reader from feeling targeted, singled out, or bad about themselves.
For more strategies on how to tackle your digital marketing, check our blog post 4 Types of Digital Marketing Strategies Your Business Needs.
Do you have a question about how to set up your first ad campaign? Book a complimentary call and let’s chat about how to get started.