The Secret to Successful Facebook Advertising

Facebook is no longer just an incredibly useful and powerful tool for your social life. In fact, Facebook may have just created the single, most greatest marketing tool your business has available to them.

Facebook advertising is giving businesses the opportunity to extend their reach and capitalise on their “perfect” client or customer by allowing businesses to laser focus in on target demographics.

Here are some of the secrets to a successful Facebook Advertising campaign.

Offering attractive goods or services

It really does go without saying but taking the time to strategically plan and find a good offer to give to your potential target market is essential to running successful Facebook Ad campaigns. Now, this doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s as easy as determining what your target audience wants and providing them with a solution to their problem. You need to make sure that the solution to their problem is “irresistible” and makes them want to take action, otherwise, your campaigns will essentially fall flat.

Getting your target audience to take action can be quite straight forward. Adding call to actions to your campaign can encourage your potential client or customer to take action and be the bridge the gap between consideration and decision in their buying journey.

Strong call to action buttons such as “free trial” and “call today” can nudge people into the decision stage as these motivate people into taking the step into investing in your good or service. Further to this, it’s important to remember to differentiate yourself and show your business value to a potential client/consumer. To do this you need to think about four main aspects of your business:

• Philosophy
• Experience
• Branding
• Niching

These four areas are going to be what differentiates yourself from the competition, so ensure your making the most out of what makes your business unique and special.

Overall when thinking about your goods or service and how it offers benefits to your potential target audience, make sure you give them what they actually want, not just what you think they want.

High converting copy

Writing ad copy can be a little bit stressful. Trying to cram as much about how awesome your product or service in to the ad copy as possible can confuse and overwhelm the read and ultimately put them off taking any action towards your ad.

With the users attention span diminishing year on year, the average person will take 2.5 seconds to decide whether or not read a piece of content, therefore it is vital that your ad copy is a clear as it can be and gets straight to the point without all of the jargon and tech talk.

So, now that you’ve got the clarity of your Facebook ads nailed, it’s time for a little creativity. Being empathetic can prove to be hugely beneficial when it comes to getting your audience to take action. Telling a story can paint a picture in your audience’s mind’s and encourage them to see your product or service in their life.

Much like call to actions, being personal in your ad copy can push people along the buyer’s journey quicker, helping them to take action and convert. However, it is important that you prioritise clarity over creativity, otherwise the purpose of your ad gets lost and lost people don’t invest.

Profit producing pixels

There is no ignoring that video is on the rise. By 2020, 80% of all content will be video. However, regardless of how well video ads usually perform, image ads are far more accessible (tools such as Unsplash and Pexels make high quality free imagery easy to find) and easier to produce – that’s not to say video always has to be hard, with advancements in mobile phone cameras you can make a masterpiece.

A great tip for choosing imagery is to focus on two styles. The first, a direct or literal image which shows exactly what you’re trying to sell to consumers. The second being more or a metaphorical or emotive image, which shows consumers an idea of what your product is and what your product will achieve for them. Using these two styles, you and try out different approaches and see which one works best. Which leads me onto my next tip for imagery.

Choosing imagery for your ads can be tricky, it’s always best to let your market decide. Testing 3 or 4 different images for ads will ultimately help you to see exactly what your audience want to see and what they don’t. This process can take a long time to show any results, but it can help you refine and perfect your Facebook Advertising strategy.

Let’s talk tactics

The brilliance of Facebook advertising, allows every business to access the same tools. From placements and budgets to audiences and formats, Facebook offers a variety of different aspects that you the advertiser can control and use in order to create successful ad campaigns whether you’re a multi-national enterprise or just a small family run store.

Some of the best tactics to create a more profitable, more effective campaigns include gaining social proof, getting large amounts of engagements on your ads, writing your ads in a conversational way and leveraging lookalike audiences.

Gaining social proof

The overall principle of social proof is that, what other people like, you’re probably going to like too. Therefore, social proof allows users to cut the time that they take to make a buying decision, in half, by basing their actions on the actions of others and following in their lead.

In relation to Facebook ads, the idea is that you would create one ad in which will receive engagements and then using that post for future campaign. This means you don’t have to write all of your new ads from scratch, instead you will use the original post and maintain all of the likes, shares and comments.

The whole point of this tactic is to persuade users to buy into your product or service as users are heavily influenced by posts with a ton of social engagements. Reusing one post is easier, it saves time and you don’t have to work to gain social engagements every time you create a new ad. It also means that your costs will go down and your engagements will go up suggesting better results.

Top Tip: “always reply to bad comments!”

By engaging with your audience, you are able to not only give a personal touch, but also show that you care about feedback. It’s important to note that not all feedback will be good, and Facebook is full of ‘trolls’. But by taking the high-ground you are able to stop them negatively impacting your campaigns and brand reputation.

Hook your readers in!

Facebook rewards businesses that have high performing ads by showing their ads to more people for a lower price. It’s a very sneaky way of encouraging businesses to write more effective ads that keep users on the Facebook platform. Always remember that Facebook is trying to deliver quality content and a good user experience on their platform. This means your ads need to fit in with this.

Getting engagements isn’t really a tactic, however, aiming to get the highest possible engagement on your posts is probably one of your most important goals. This can be achieved through the implementation and acknowledgement of other tactics.

Is this a conversation or an advert?

One tactic to consider when writing your ads is to make you readers think twice, get them asking themselves "wait, is this an ad?"

Starting a conversation with users will more likely result in them engaging as conversations are more personal and less spammy than blatant adverts. The casual feel and look of your ads can encourage users to engage and participate in the conversation. With this tactic you can tell a story and make it relatable. People often buy based on emotions, so it doesn’t hurt to add some emotion into your ad copy.

Capturing lookalike audiences

After focusing on the above tactics that will help to perfect the quality of your ad, it’s time to refine your target market. Lookalike audiences have been and are continuing to be powerful when it comes to advertising.

A lookalike audience essentially works by taking a list of preexisting clients or customers and uploading it to Facebook. Facebook will then take this list and search for potential users to target your good or service at. Lookalike audiences can be made in a number of ways, however, such as from your website traffic and Facebook page audience.

This powerful tool from Facebook can become essential to better performing campaigns so it’s important that you build that existing customer list as quickly and as accurately as possible. If you are yet to have an existing customer list, it will be a good idea to run some ads to some content and then record the data that you receive from, website traffic or leads that you capture from these ads.