TL;DR
- Don’t try to attract everyone, target your ads directly to your customers.
- Capture attention and engage your customers with visual ads that really stand out.
- Give your customers something valuable and a reason to take action.
- Add a strong CTA and tell your customers exactly what you need them to do.
We could ramble on and on about why advertising on Facebook is a fantastic option for your company.
But instead, we’ll sum it all up in a simple statistic for you:
As of March 2019, there are 1.56 billion daily active users on Facebook.
Yes, you did read that right. Over one and a half billion people use the social media platform every single day.
That’s not just people who are signed up to the platform. This is people that are active, engaged and interacting with the content that’s in front of them.
This is the reason why Facebook advertising can be so powerful, and why you need to get it right.
To help you make the most of your budget, we’ve rounded our 4 top tips to creating winning Facebook ads.
1. Target your ads to your customers
Don’t try and advertise to everyone.
Why?
Because trying to target everyone costs a lot of money – and not everyone will care about your business or product. That means you’re throwing money away making your advert appear to people who will never buy your products.
Instead, you should target your adverts to the people who really matter: your customers.
Facebook advertising is a great platform to do this on, as it offers a lot of customizable options for your audience. This includes:
- Location
- Gender
- Interests
- Behaviours – for example, if someone has previously visited your page or website.
- Connections – this will let you target by people who already like your page or are friends with those that do.
Don’t go too overboard though. Having a narrow focus is great for performance, but you don’t want to limit your ads so far that they only show up to 4 people.
Read: How Much Does Facebook Marketing Cost?
2. Make it visual
If you want to create a winning Facebook ad, you need to make it visual.
That’s because visual ads are more engaging for the audience. They stand out, grab attention and are more likely to be clicked.
Studies show that people will also remember visual ads better, as a HubSpot study showing that people can recall 65% of visual content up to almost 3 days later.
One benefit of Facebook ads is that you’ve got a lot of visual advert formats to choose from. As well as standard image and video ads, you can also have:
- Carousel ads. These show up to 10 images that users can scroll through, making them perfect for showcasing multiple products.
- Canvas ads. These are similar to carousel ads in which they let you show multiple images. However, they also add a level of interactivity by letting users tilt or zoom inside the images. This currently is only available on mobile.
- Collection ads. This allows you to use one image or video as the main advert while putting smaller images of other products underneath. This type of advert is great for grouping similar products while making sure the audience’s attention is drawn to one in particular.
Our golden piece of advice here is to make sure you always use high-quality and relevant images or video.
Otherwise, you stand the risk of making your business look unprofessional or putting users off your brand.
3. Give value to your customers
Successful ads are ones that give your users something valuable.
Whether it’s important information or services that can solve their problems – you need to give your users something that they’ll find useful and interesting. Otherwise, they’ll have no incentive to read or click your ad.
Everyone that sees your ads will be thinking the same thing: “what’s in it for me?”.
It’s your job to answer that question. You do it by providing two essential pieces of information:
- What you’re offering
- How it benefits your customers
That’s it.
If you showcase this, it should be enough to get your users to click and find out more.
4. Add a strong CTA
You’ve got your customers attention and sparked an interest.
The next stage is getting them to take action. Whether it’s getting them to click through to your website, place an order or message your company. There’s a goal for every advert.
CTAs (call to actions) are how you get people to act.
If you’re unfamiliar, CTAs are commands that literally tell the user what you want them to do.
If you do them right, your customers will act. Which means more conversions and sales.
Unsure of what you need? Follow our tips on how to write convincing CTAs:
- Short and to the point. You don’t need 3 sentences to explain that you need people to call you. Just tell them to call.
- Don’t write generic statements to include everyone. Speak directly to your customer and tell them what you want THEM to do.
- Don’t overcomplicate what you need your customers to do or add unnecessary steps into the process. For example, if you need them to get in touch, say that. Don’t say “click onto our website, fill out this form and then wait for a callback of one of our team members”. That sounds like hard work and your customers just aren’t prepared to commit to that.
- CTA’s aren’t the time for politeness, so drop any tentative uses of the word “please” from your CTAs. Tell your users what you want to do and that’s it.
Always test and research your advertising
As well as the above tips, we also have 44 more tips to help your Facebook marketing thrive.
They will give you the insights to know what’s working and what isn’t. What the competition is doing and how your business is standing up to it.
It is the key to making sure that you keep improving your success and make a long-term strategy that truly wins.
