How to Create Great Facebook Ads
January 25, 2018
Whether you scroll through your Facebook newsfeed several times a day or occasionally log on to stay connected with friends and family, you’ve probably noticed several paid advertisements from businesses both local and across the country. As you know, Facebook advertising is nothing new. Companies across the world have been posting ads for years to drive awareness for their brands, increase sales, and stay connected with their customers.
If you’ve posted ads of your own before or if you’re new to the online advertising arena, there are a few key tips you can use to create great Facebook ads and ensure the right customers find your business in the future. Whether you’re a local restaurant or a leading manufacturer, connecting with customers through familiar platforms like Facebook not only is building the right ads for the right audience not only saves you money long with users on familiar platforms like Facebook is a great way to grow your business
Develop Clear Goals & Purpose
One of the first areas we sit down with our clients and discuss before putting together any campaign is their overall goals and purpose. As obvious as it may sound, sitting down and understanding your objectives and what you want to get out of your advertising efforts will help you to not put the cart before the horse. Putting the cart before the horse is a phrase we commonly use here at VIG to describe projects that have all the necessary components but didn’t follow a well-planned process. For example, we’ve seen clients put together ads, publish them to the marketplace, and fail to see a positive ROI because of miss-matched goals. To help steer everyone on the right path, we outlined the essential goals Facebook walks you through for a new campaign.
When it comes to advertising on Facebook, there are three distinct categories of goals; awareness, consideration, and conversion. These three categories relate to common business goals professionals like you have when setting up a campaign and mimic the basic purchasing funnel of a customer. For example, if you have a relatively new business and are looking to get the word out about your brand, creating ads around the goal of awareness might be a good first step for driving initial interest in your market.
If you’re looking to drive traffic to a landing page or a website, setting up your ads with strong calls-to-action under the consideration objective might be a good idea as well. Lastly, if you’re established in your market and have clear actions you want your customers to perform (online purchases, contact form submissions, etc) you can set up ads with specific conversions in mind.
Having a strong understanding of what you want to accomplish with your campaign and the types of ads you want to post will help you tailor the content and messaging of your ads to effectively reach your target audience. From this, you will have a better idea of who you want to target market is, what they want to know, and the best ads to use.
Know Your Target Market
Many of you might have read this title and rolled your eyes. Knowing your target market is one of the most essential components of not only running a successful ad campaign but also a successful business. Business courses, blogs, and professionals have been stressing the importance of this for years. Where many professionals fail to understand their target market is in the nitty gritty details that set customers apart.
Anyone can research simple demographic characteristics of their target market and understand things like age, gender, occupation, and even the general location of where their customers live. In order to be successful with online advertising and Facebook advertising in particular, you need to understand your customer’s likes, dislikes, behaviors, and interests. Understanding your customer’s lifestyle and how your product/service fits that lifestyle, as well as their needs, is vital to delivering the right ad content to the right user.
For example, if you own a gym you should be trying to target customers who like Facebook pages related to health and wellness related topics. You should be trying to reach consumers who are genuinely concerned about their health. If you are in the HVAC industry, targeting customers who like DIY pages and pages with info for homeowners might be a good strategy as well. Not targeting teens and children.
Facebook Ad Manager will walk you through some of these areas and allow you to hone in on which customer base you choose to target and will give you some useful insight into how to improve the quality of your ads.
A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words
As cliché as it sounds, powerful images can truly change the entire mood of your ad. Whether you own a local coffee shop or manufacture medical equipment, choosing the right images for your ads is key. The images you use should not only be relevant to your ad (deceptive clickbait ads are being penalized on Facebook’s ad network) but they should also be interesting and of the highest quality for your customers.
Avoid using cartoon stock images or images with terribly low resolution or pixelated photos. These images not only make for a poor user experience on Facebook’s ad network but they can also hurt the messaging of your content. Use high-resolution images that accurately convey the messaging of your ad but also present it in an interesting way. Planning an appropriate subject, angle, lighting, and concept will help you present the best images for your ad and attract the attention of your customers.
Write For Your Audience
When putting together Facebook ads, it’s important to steal a tip from the copywriter’s handbook. Whether you’re targeting Baby Boomers or Millennials with your ad, you need to develop a message and tone that’s appropriate for your audience. For example, the tone you would use for selling healthcare products to consumers would be different than the tone you would use for ads directed to doctors and MDs.
Even though the topic could virtually be the same, the audience and purpose change. This is no different from your ads. To create an ad that’s effective, you need to understand how the ad will be perceived from your audience’s perspective. You need to write using vocabulary your audience understands and deliver ad content that’s both useful and captivating.
Having a clear purpose for the ad such as spreading the word about your business, driving leads or sales, or even increasing attendance at an event are all good examples. From understanding this purpose, you will have an easier time tailoring the images, content, and messaging of your ads to meet the specific needs of your audience.
The online advertising area is fierce, crowded, and filled with a plethora of ads spanning across numerous industries and disciplines. It doesn’t matter if you sell coffee or dental tools, knowing how to get the most out of your online marketing efforts is essential to long-term success. Facebook advertising is no different and with the tips and guidelines above you should be able to put together a great ad that will help drive awareness and leads to your business.
Need to get the word out about your business? Not sure where to start? Think VIG!