Although nearly all social networking platforms now have their own completely integrated advertising systems, when it comes to audience, insights and features, Facebook is still the premier platform. For businesses, that means that Facebook is the best place to get started. However, unfortunately, Facebook might be an excellent advertising platform, but that doesn’t mean it is used effectively by all brands. Many of them ending up wasting resources and money, because they don’t understand how to properly use it or don’t have an effective strategy. Hopefully, you are not one of them. All it takes to be successful is some knowledge of the way that Facebook advertising works along with some best practices.
The follow are my five best tips for creating highly effective Facebook ad campaigns:
- Make use of audience insights for better Facebook Ad Campaigns
The Audience Insights feature offered by Facebook is one of the most effective tools that is available to you. It basically lets you learn about certain audiences before you target them or have to risk any of your budget. The way it works is through mining Facebook data and it shows you precisely who your target market is, by basing it on the individuals who have liked your page already.
So rather than having to just take a shot in the dark, now you can know precisely which users will most likely follow through on the call-to-action in your ad. It saves lots of money and time, and lets you focus on your ad’s quality and avoids you needing to waste a lot of your value time on figuring out who to target.
- For each of your audiences, create unique ad sets.
One of the best features of the Facebook advertising platform is having the ability to create separate sets of ads for each unique audience. Two different ads can be created and they can be delivered to two different audiences that are completely unique. You can also send the same exact add to two completely different audiences. The end result is better targeting.
For instance, say that you happen to be a retailer and sell kitchen supplies. Perhaps you have a great new stainless steel mixing bowl you are attempting to market to two separate groups. Rather than sending the same ad to everybody, you can instead have two unique ads created and then deliver them to your two unique and distinct target markets. Your first ad might target professional chefs, and the second one might focus on stay-at-home mos who love chef-grade high quality kitchen supplies. These two ads will be totally different, even those they are marketing the same product.
- Use landing pages with ads.
You should almost always first send visitors to a landing page from your ad before connecting them with your product page or website. Landing pages let you make maximum use of your Facebook advertising efforts through educating users before you ask them to buy anything.
Facebook advertising is definitely not cheap so landing pages do make sense. When you have to spend a fair amount of money on each click, then you want every one of them to count. When you just send visitors to a basic product page or website without any clear instruction on what they should do, you are just wasting your money.
- Make use of striking imagery
There are entire courses out there on how to write great Facebook ad copy, however, not as much attention is paid to the images that are used in those ads. That’s unfortunate, because visual content is much more influential compared to textual content.
Facebook doesn’t allow you to use images that are more than 20 percent of the words. Clearly images are designed for grabbing attention rather than displaying a message. You definitely want to take full attention of this incredibly value real estate that is part of your ad. This piece of content from agency2.co.uk uses striking imagery and is also about this exact subject.
- Establish your budget and bid strategy
Setting your budget and bid strategy is critically important. If you don’t you’ll end up spending way more money than you were intending to. Fortunately, Facebook offers Optimized CPM, which makes this very easy to do.
When this tool is used you give Facebook permission to ad on ad space for you based on the goals and constraints that you provide. Usually it allows you to avoid overspending and maximize your budget. It is best to allow Facebook to handle this part of your campaign for you until you get a good idea of how to set your budget and know how much ads cost.
Putting Everything Together
Creating an effective Facebook ad campaign revolves around having a good understanding of the platform and making use of all of the features that it provides. Although you definitely need to think about your actual ads, you need to begin with the specific platform that you are using. After you have determine who you want to target, and the amount of money you are wiling to spend on your advertising, you can start focusing on the finer details.
