Facebook is the most popular social media platform by far, with 68% of US adults using it. Trailing behind are Instagram (28%), Pinterest (26%), LinkedIn (25%) and Twitter (21%). As the most popular of the social media bunch, you definitely want to include a Facebook advertising campaign to your business’ strategy.
Why? Because you there are many benefits for doing so, including:
All in all, social media ad campaigns are excellent ways for your business to stand out (and are a best practice for growth), and Facebook is the platform you want to focus on. To point you in the right direction, here are 10 tips you should follow before starting your Facebook ad campaign.
The more you know about your audience, the better your campaign can perform. As such, first and foremost, before you do anything, even before you create your ads, perform preliminary research so you don’t end up wasting your budget on the wrong audience.
At your disposal is Facebook Audience Insights, a useful tool that will save you valuable time and money by giving you the information you need to make the right decisions concerning your audience. For example, you can choose to target everyone on Facebook, those already connected to your page, or a custom audience. Once you choose an audience, you’ll glean insights into who they are and what will work with them by studying their demographics, the types of pages they like and follow, their location, their purchasing activity, and so on. With this information, you can then create and tailor your ads specifically for your target audience.
If you did your audience research, you’ll end up with unique audiences that share common characteristics. No matter how many people make up your audience, chances are good that while they all share features that make them your audience, they’ll invariably fall into subgroups that will react differently to the same ad. For this reason, it’s best to create different ads for each unique audience.
With different ads aimed at different groups, you can greatly improve ad targeting and increase your chances of conversions. For example, you can create an ad for people in certain age groups, occupations, or even locations (e.g., a fashion retailer can use specific ads for people living in warm versus cold weather locations).
What’s the point of paying X amount of money and spending Y amount of time crafting ads if your audience is going to click out as soon as they land on your site? There's absolutely no point, which is why you need to optimize your landing pages so that your bounce rate doesn’t increase with your click-through rate.
Key to optimizing your landing page is to match it with what your ad says, or vice versa. In other words, if your ad mentions reduced prices for designer shoes, you better make sure that once a user clicks on it, they’ll be taken to a landing page with designer shoes, not a page with your new products — that’s a sure way to get a bounce. If you see that your CTR (click-through rate) and bounce rate are both high, then you know that your ad is doing its job of attracting people to your site, but your landing page is falling short of keeping them there.
Whenever you embark on any sort of ad campaign, you’ll need to set up a budget and an optimal bid strategy that will make the most of every dollar you spend. This is because there are two things you don’t want to happen while budgeting: overspending on a campaign that’s not paying off, or bidding so low that you waste your money because you didn’t get a modicum of exposure. You can either manually set your own bidding strategy or let Facebook optimize bidding for you, and you can follow different strategies based on your goals. For example, if you’re aiming for increased brand awareness, go for CPM, and if you want to focus on clicks, CPC.
As important as ad copy is, your images will be the first touch point between your audience and your ad. Think of love at first sight — if you don’t capture their attention from the get-go, you can forget about them sticking around long enough to read the full thing. To not only capture your audience’s attention, but also hold on to it, you need to use striking imagery that makes use of contrasting and complementary colors, bold fonts, and overall, things that stand out.
Now that you have your audience’s attention, use your ad copy to seal the deal. To do this you need to pair your copy with compelling CTAs that’ll pique your audience’s interest and get them to actually click on your ad to see what you have in store for them. For your copy and CTA’s to work, make sure to let them know how you can improve their lives (focus on benefits, not features), use emotional triggers, and include action verbs with your CTAs.
Videos are immensely popular nowadays, so do yourself a favor and don’t discount them. In fact, shoppers are 1.81 times more likely to make a purchase after watching a video than non-video users. Not only are videos engaging, but they also capture attention better than text or images. If you choose to pursue this avenue, include subtitles in your video, as Facebook videos start playing while muted, and bonus points if you opt for a live video.
Like videos, make use of carousel that display three to five images within an ad unit (regular ads consist of one image). Carousel ads are excellent for showing off a product and its benefits, promoting multiple products within a single ad, promoting company culture, laying out the steps to do X, Y and Z, offering varying discounts and offers, and so on.
Advertising is expensive, so why not let your audience do your advertising for you? How? By creating ads with interactive content that will make them want to share it with their own friends and family. For example, people are more likely to share content that creates a visceral response, that outlines a story, or that provides value.
Finally, test everything — your headline, your copy, your CTAs, your images/videos, everything — to get the most out of your ads. If something’s not working out, don’t make the mistake of hoping that things turn around by themselves — that will only lead to wasted time and money. Instead, do the opposite and test different variations of your ad’s components until you reach the optimal combination.
How about we go through the tips one more time?
This blog post is contributed by Matthew, a content writer for Aumcore, a digital marketing agency based in NYC. He writes on a variety of topics that range from social media management to content marketing.
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