Over 70% of Facebook users visit local business pages every week. This means that this platform is an effective way for local businesses to connect with their communities. Facebook is the most popular social media platform, with over 3 billion monthly active users. It is a top choice for marketers alongside Instagram.
Facebook is a great platform to engage with your target market, as billions of active users are there. Advertising on Facebook can be cheaper than advertising anywhere else. In this blog, we’re going to discuss what makes a Facebook advert successful.
Before undertaking a Facebook advertisement, it is important to understand what type of Facebook ads are available and what they offer. Facebook Ad Manager allows for many different options of advertising, and you should look into each one to make sure you are selecting the appropriate one for you.
A successful Facebook advert involves several key components, like the right objective, precise targeting, engaging content and eye-catching visuals. In this blog, we are going to cover the different elements that contributes to a successful Facebook advert, along with testing strategies to maximise results.
Define Your Goals
You must have an idea about what you want to achieve from your Facebook Advertisement and how it fits in your overall marketing funnel. When you’re clear about your goal you can create ads that are more effective, to help you achieve better results.
Common Mistakes When Running Facebook Ads
- Poor Targeting: Ads that aim too broadly often miss their actual target audience. Without a focused and clear target audience, businesses waste budget on users that are unlikely to engage or convert.
- Ignoring Performance Audits: many advertisers set campaigns and forget to review performance metrics or KPIs. Without regular audits, it’s easy to miss things like low CTR or high CPCs (Cost per click)
- Using Poor Ad Creative: This includes a low-quality image, a confusing design, that can make your advertisement ineffective, you want to make sure that your visuals are high resolutions, your messaging is clear and that your call to action is compelling enough to drive action.
Set Up a Conversion Funnel
A marketing funnel is critical for the marketing process. It outlines the journey that customers might take in their path to take action. It is a helpful framework for connecting and engaging with customers along their way. By aligning your campaigns with the four stages of the funnel you can guide your audience through it.
Think of your audience as people at different comfort levels of engagement with your brand. A conversion funnel organises these relationships into tiers, from those just discovering your product (at the top of the funnel) to those ready to buy (at the bottom of the funnel). Effectively managing your Facebook pages can also enhance audience engagement and inform your content publishing calendar.
By aligning your campaigns with the four different stages of the funnel you can guide your audience through the funnel, identify target audiences, develop stage-specific campaigns and offers and use cross-channel strategies to nurture leads.
Create a Buyer Personas
Understanding your ideal customer is critical to tailoring your campaigns to make it better and improve it. Defining demographics, interest and pain points, this means your messaging matches their needs. Creating a buyer persona is to understand your target audience before creating audiences on Facebook. You can also know the size of your audience and how much you should budget for that specific ad. Overall, building out buyer personas for Facebook audiences will boost campaign results (conversions, clicks, impressions by targeting).
Align Your Ad Copy and Visuals
Aligning content and images will enhance your campaign in multiple ways. As your target audience will feel your advert is personalised to them. Increasing their chance of converting or engaging with your content more. Better engagement also positively impacts quality rankings, engagement rates and conversion rates.
Have a Clear Call-To-Action
Every advert should have a clear goal. Call to actions encourages readers on your website to take action or boost brand awareness. A clear and powerful CTA is crucial to the success of any businesses. If your conversion rates is doing poorly, it is most likely that your CTAs need tweaking.
A conversion campaign should focus on CTAS that leads to revenue like “Buy Now,” “Sign Up”, “Order Now,” etc. On the other hand, a traffic campaign might tell users to “Learn More,” “Book Now” or “Subscribe”. A traffic campaign focuses on leading people to visit your site, optimise clicks on your link leading to more impression. Whereas conversion ads drives people to your website and encourages them to take a certain action (mainly to purchase), this is suitable for businesses looking to increase sales.
Do You Have an Offer to Promote?
Communicate clearly to your audience why they should engage with your adverts or purchase your products, especially during sale periods. Make sure you state how long the sale is going for, create a sense of urgency so that people are willing to buy it, you could include a countdown, how many percentages off and how much you’ll be saving. Adding social proof like testimonials can further boost interest in your products or services.
Keep Your Advert Consistent
Your advert design and landing page should be aligned for a seamless transition from Facebook to your website. Maintaining consistency in colours, fonts, logos, structure and tone is super important, for it to feel like your landing page is an extension of your advert. Make sure that the overall content matches, this includes the CTAs, prices and offers. This helps avoid high bounce rates and maximise the campaign’s effectiveness and conversion rates.
Designing Ads for Mobile
According to statistics, 81.8% of Facebook users access the platform exclusively via mobile devices only. Which means that is it more important than ever to design your eds, including images, videos, text in vertical placements, to ensure it’s a full phone screen experience for your audiences. Create and optimise ads for each placement, with a mobile-first approach.
How Relevant is Your Advert?
Evaluate your current advert, is your text and images relevant to your target audience? If they don’t resonate, then users are likely to scroll past your advert without engaging. For example, in a retargeting campaign, your adverts should showcase the most relevant products based on user behaviour, acknowledging that the user has visited your website but hasn’t taken action. Or have added to their cart but not purchased, you could consider headlines like:
- "Eyeing something special?"
- "Haven’t decided? Enjoy 5% off your order!"
- "Still looking? Treat yourself!"
In contrast, a prospecting campaign for an audience who hasn’t visited your site will require a different approach. They need to learn more about your business, services, or products, and you should provide a compelling ‘hook’ before introducing specific retargeting phrases.
Test Everything
This is vital for creating the ‘perfect’ advert. Determine key insights about your audience to improve results. Categorise elements of your advert for testing using Facebook’s A/B testing tool. Without testing, it’s challenging to know which adverts will give you the best results.
Test elements include:
- Text
- Image
- Headline
- Call-To-Action
Once you’ve established a testing method for these elements, consider testing other aspects of your overall campaign, such as:
Campaign structure:
- Objective
- Advert Placement
- Advert Format
- Landing Pages
Audience targeting:
- Age
- Gender
- Custom Audiences
- Interests
- Behaviours
Create The Perfect Facebook Ads with SQ
Our insights can help you establish a solid foundation for the perfect advert, so you can find the best strategy for your business.
Successful Facebook adverts require careful consideration of targeting, audiences, and objectives, all contributing to your overall advertising strategy. This is why we emphasise the importance of testing to drive results.
If you feel like you need further assistance to perfect your paid social media adverts, please do not hesitate to get in touch with our expert digital marketing team at SQ Digital. We have over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, and we are happy to hear from all businesses looking to improve their online presence.
