The Secret to Successful Facebook Advertising

Facebook is no longer just a tool for your social life. It is also a powerful tool that allows businesses to access their target audience where they are online in an effective and targeted way.

Facebook advertising gives businesses the opportunity to extend their reach and capitalise on their “perfect” client or customer by allowing them 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. Obviously, you also have to be sure that you target audience is actually on facebook too and there are a number of ways you can do that, the first step being creating a detailed ideal customer profile and from there, personas for each key buyer type.

Getting your target audience to take action can be quite straight forward. Adding calls to action to your campaign can encourage your potential client or customer to take action and can 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 they motivate them into taking the step into converting.

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 (what niche do you occupy? Price, quality, variety...etc)

These four areas are going to be what differentiates you from the competition, so ensure you're making the most out of what makes your business unique and special. The key is to give your potential customer what they actually want, not just what you think they want so some careful research is in order.

High converting copy

Writing ad copy can be 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 reader and could ultimately put them off taking any action towards your ad possibly because they can't absorb all the information or simply because they don't believe you.

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, focuses on one or two key points and gets straight to those points, simply and without jargon.

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 audiences' minds and encourage them to see your product or service in their life.

Much like calls to action, being personal in your ad copy can push people along the buyer’s journey more quickly, 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. However, video and image ads perform exceptionally well and are more accessible to the user. They needn't be difficult to product either, tools such as Unsplash, Canva and Pexels make high quality free imagery easy to find and easier to produce. There are a number of useful and intuitive video tools too if you've got the creative in mind!

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 a more metaphorical or emotive image, which shows consumers an idea of what your product is about and what it could achieve for them. Using these two styles, try out different approaches to see which one works best.

Choosing imagery for your ads can be tricky, so why not let your market decide. Testing 3 or 4 different images for ads will ultimately help you to see exactly what your audience wants 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 for the medium to long term.

Let’s talk tactics

As Facebook advertising allows every business to access the same tools, you have to use tactics to create differentiation. 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 campaign include gaining social proof to increase engagement with 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, your customers are 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 their lead.

Using the principle of social proof In relation to Facebook ads, the idea is that you would create one ad designed to generate engagement. Then use 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 that have significant, positive, social engagement already. Reusing one post is easier, it saves time and you don’t have to work to gain social engagement every time you create a new ad. It can also mean that your costs can be reduced while engagement increases.

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. You also show your potential customers how you manage complaints. After all, it's not the mistake that counts, it's how you fix it.

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 perform to be shown.

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, designed ot open and develop a conversation with your audience.

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

Once you have perfected your ad, it’s time to refine your target market. Lookalike audiences have been and are continuing to be powerful tools 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, for example, from your website traffic or 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 develop an existing customer list, it's a good idea to run some ads to test your content and then record the data that you receive in terms of website traffic or leads that you capture to get you started.