If you’re new to Facebook advertising, you might be daunted with your first attempt at creating the perfect ad, especially if you don’t see great conversion rates from it. There is an art (and a science) to creating engaging social media advertising that hits home with your target audience. Let’s look at a few of the ways you can create engaging content for your Facebook ad.
See What Your Competitors are Doing
I’m not encouraging you to be a copycat, but it can be helpful to see how your competitors are advertising to the same audience you want to reach. You can often learn from what others are doing, whether that’s to emulate (but not totally copy) a strategy or to do a better job with your own ads.
Notice the images they use, the words, the offer, and the call to action. Ask yourself how well that ad is at hitting its mark. Would you click it? Would you buy the product or service based on the ad itself?
Try A/B Testing
You probably won’t hit a home run with your very first ad, but you can’t know how much better it would perform unless you test making small changes. The purpose of a/b testing is to have a nearly identical ad with one tweak.
You might run the same ad but use a different colored background for your image. Or change the headline or CTA. You might modify the audience you target with the ad or invest in different keywords.
Whatever element you change, only modify one at a time and then measure the difference in results for the two ads. You can then take the ad that does better and tweak one more thing and measure. Lather, rinse, repeat until you have created the ideal ad with the best conversion rate!
Create a Sense of Urgency
Do people read your ad and think, “I’ll get around to clicking on it later?” If so, you’re missing out on serious opportunity. Effective advertising on Facebook requires a sense of urgency. If people see that they can save 48% on your product for only 23 more hours, they’re more likely to click and buy than if there is no urgent deadline. They’d be fools not to click to save!
Try Different Ad Formats
Facebook is the master at offering a wide variety of ad formats, and by trying them all, you can discover which is the best fit for your product and offer.
There are image ads, which use an image of your product to catch people’s eyes as they’re scrolling through their Facebook feeds. If you have engaging video content, try video ads. For brands with multiple products they want to advertise (such as an annual swimsuit sale, where you want to highlight various styles and body types), a Carousel ad can display up to 10 images or videos in an ad, each with its own link to the product.
You can also leverage Boosted posts to amplify content you publish for your Facebook page with a wider audience.
Don’t overlook your mobile audience, because they’re on Facebook in droves. The Instant Experience and Collection ads let viewers click to get a full-screen interaction with your brand, products, or services.
You may find that certain products or promotions do better with one type of ad than another.
Write it to One Person
Rather than making the rookie mistake of trying to make an ad appeal to a number of people (you want to get thousands of clicks, so that makes sense, right?), you’d do better to write your ad copy as if you were writing to one specific person.
Use your buyer persona to drill down into who that person is. What gender is he/she? Where do they live? What are their interests? What motivates them to buy? By writing your ad to one person, you end up reaching more people who feel like you’re speaking to them directly.
Try Custom Audiences
Rather than focus solely on attracting customers who have never heard of your brand, divert some of your attention toward people who have. Facebook’s custom audiences feature allows you to show your ad to people who have visited your website or taken certain actions there. You can also upload your contact lists and target those people on Facebook.
By installing the Facebook Pixel on your website, you can connect activity there with your ad campaign, and by doing so, reach people who are more likely to be impacted by your ad.
Constantly Monitor and Tweak
Even if you’re currently seeing good results in your Facebook Insights, you can’t rest as an advertiser because nothing is permanent in the land of online advertising. You’ll need to constantly monitor results, pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t, and make modifications to keep generating clicks and conversions.
You might be outbid for a keyword, so you’ll need to decide if you want to increase your bid or choose another one. You might see a dwindling number of clicks on an ad, so you might refresh the copy or choose another image. And if you aren’t hitting the demographic you want, you might make modifications to your target audience.
Invest in High-Quality Images
While, yes, people are taking on-the-fly videos for their businesses using their phones, when it comes to digital advertising, phone pics aren’t going to cut it. Instead, you need to hire a professional photographer to take sharp and appealing photos of your products from all angles.
You may want to test a few versions of the product photography for your ads to see which is the most attractive to viewers.
Create a Clear Call-to-Action
Your call-to-action is what drives people to do what you want them to do, whether that’s click to your website, sign up for an event, download an app, or make a purchase. If your CTA is clear as mud, people won’t know what to do. And if you have more than one call-to-action, you’ll confuse them and they will move away from your ad.
Decide what you want people to do, and then ask them to do so assertively and plainly. Say it in as few words as possible. Here are some examples:
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Explore Lookalike Audiences
Another fantastic feature Facebook offers to advertisers is its lookalike audiences. This allows you to target people who already like or follow a certain brand on Facebook. It’s a sneaky way to target people who follow your competitors on the site and it can save you time in trying to zero in on a new audience.
Make the Offer a Good One
Suffice it to say, your ad is going to have to be fantastic to stand out. But it’s not just about the words and images you choose. The offer itself needs to be unique and appealing. That means no 5% off promotions! Go big on your promotion to let Facebook users feel they’re getting a really VIP offer.
Realize that if someone clicks on your ad, they may buy now…and again later. You may lose more profit margin by heavily slashing prices for this promotion, but if you can hook people by getting them to sign up for your newsletter, you can more than make up for that if they continue to buy from you.
Focus on WIIFM
Remember: your ad is about your audience, not you. Before someone will click on your ad, they ask themselves, “what’s in it for me? (WIIFM)” If there is a clear benefit to clicking, they’ll do it. If they’re unsure, maybe because the ad isn’t direct enough or the offer not enticing, they’ll move on.
See your ad from your audience’s perspective. What would get them excited enough to click?
Have a Goal in Mind
Each Facebook ad campaign may have a different goal. But it needs to have one. Only one. That goal might be to get signups on a landing page, purchases, or visits to your site. Make sure you have numeric goals: how many signups signify a success? What dollar amount do you need to sell to see a return on your investment?
Once you know this goal, you can measure how effective your ad is at reaching it, and tweak slightly if you’re not hitting your goals.
Don’t Overlook Insta
Now that Facebook (well, Meta) owns Instagram, it’s a breeze to advertise on both platforms from your Meta Business Suite. Instagram is a fantastic platform for putting visual content in front of the right people, so consider splitting your ad spend between the two.
Maximize Your Ad Spend
Speaking of ad spend, as they say, it takes money to make money. The social media advertising game is no longer a cheap one for many, so be prepared to increase your budget if that’s what it takes to garner market share and boost sales.
Use a Smarter Payment Method
The final tip here is: reconsider how you pay for your Facebook ads. If your ad spend is high, your credit card may flag activity and your ad campaigns may get paused. This not only causes a headache as you scramble to get the card active again, but it also means you miss out on serious opportunity to generate revenue through your ads.
Here’s a better way: dash.fi has 10-20x higher spending limits than traditional credit cards, and your account will never be flagged because of high ad spend. On top of that, dash.fi offers cash back on your ad spend. What could you do with a little extra money back in your business account?
Succeeding with Facebook ads is always going to be a moving target. If you pay attention to what’s working and modify what isn’t, you’ll be sure to connect with your people there.
