Let’s face it, Facebook is still one of the biggest social media platforms that engage millions (actually, billions) of people worldwide to connect and communicate. And even now with its transition to transforming into a social technology company, Meta promises to deliver immersive experiences and a three-dimensional digital social experience for everyone.
The reach that we get with Facebook is yet unprecedented, meaning with this reach, Facebook ads are being viewed daily. Therefore there is a huge and increasing possibility that these ads are getting viewed or clicked by the right target market.
Facebook ads are those ads that you can see almost everywhere on Facebook—in your feed, even in your Messenger—videos, slideshows, images, and the like. These are paid ads that businesses and brands create and post on Facebook to target a specific online market and as mentioned, can be posted in different formats depending on your budget.
You have options on how much you want to spend on these ads; of course, before deciding, you have already planned out and strategize your marketing campaign so you can tailor fit it best to your branding needs and goals.
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Why use Facebook Ads?
Let’s get our facts straight first. With so much hype on the internet nowadays, people are flocking towards the loudest social media platform there is; where they can be entertained, informed, get connected and recognized, all at the same time. With so many social media platforms that anyone can choose and by knowing best social media ads, Facebook is still one of the biggest fish out there.
According to data, it stands as the second most downloaded application today. And Facebook is the third most visited site in the digital arena. You can say it’s pretty much part of everyone’s daily life.
With billions of registered users, Facebook still has unparalleled reach and if you’re a digital marketer, it’s almost a no-brainer to make sure you maximize the potential of this reach to market your brand or business.
How to Maximize Using Facebook Ads
First off, this is not the ultimate guide as there are many out there who can share almost the same tips on maximizing Facebook ads. We are all simply contributing to the wealth of knowledge and tips that can help digital marketers be the best that they can be.
If you want to explore within Facebook, you can head to their Facebook Ads Guide to help you optimize your existing marketing strategies and mesh them with their available ad tools.
To bring you a step further, here are some tips on how you can maximize the use of Facebook Ads:
Recognize Your Goal
Before you get into all the action, maximizing this amazing social media platform for your ads requires you to first recognize your own marketing goals.
This will determine how much you will be spending on these ads as to where you want to take it further and how you want to actually post it out there.
Bear in mind that choosing the right marketing goals for your marketing campaigns will create value for your branding. And this will evolve as you move on with your process depending on where your business is at and depending on how you have fully utilized Facebook ads.
Some goals you possibly might want to go after—
- Reach— Getting your ads as visible and exposed as you possibly can to a targeted audience.
- App Installations— Getting your audience to download and install your application after seeing the ads you put out
- Views— If you’re putting out video ads as your main thrust for marketing, then you should be paying attention to the views, gauging if you have met your targeted number of views; this is also a basis for your reach.
- New leads— Generating new leads out of your marketing campaigns can be a possible goal. Once you have recognized your target market and have gained ground, it’s time to get new leads.
- Conversions— From curiosity to conversions—not an easy process, but it will be worth it once you have your objectives in place and your plans of execution steadily being done. It is important to have a clear goal in mind so you can proceed seamlessly with all your marketing agendas.
Reach: Knowing Your Target Market
You need to get your mind and hands working on this one. This is not simply just creating a design for your Facebook ad or something flashy to get clicks in, and expecting it to work—even after getting insight from Facebook ads guide to optimize things better. It requires you to strategize properly, do your extended research to make sure you’re reaching the right audience.
This will carve out a path for you to even help you allocate the budget for the ads you deliver. You have to figure out and know who your audience is. This will determine the leads to conversion number you’re aiming for, the revenue you’re expecting, the increase in site traffic, and the engagements.
Practically speaking, Facebook has tools that can help you get a head start on your targeted marketing campaigns. They offer:
Custom Audiences
Generated from a customer list, Custom audiences is the classification of audiences to help and support you in building your reach. Information from your customers that has been provided to Facebook is being matched to the data with the profiles in Facebook so that you can increase your Marketing thrust here and also in other social media platforms that Facebook covers. The more information there is, the more the match rates are improved.
Core Audiences
In utilizing Core Audiences, you can adjust and tailor-fit your audience based on certain criteria. This is a great option to reach possible customers that you have not even considered yet: Location, Interests, Demographics, Connections, Behavior.
Go and check out Facebook’s Audience Insights to get you going with this process.
Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike Audiences are ways that you can reach new and possible customers who might be interested in your product or business. This is because they share the same characteristics as your already active and existing customers.
When you utilize Lookalike Audience, the audience of people that are similar to your already customers – or those that look like your existing audience can view or see the same ads. You can also tailor-fit the percentages on how you want the match to be with your existing customers with the lookalike ones. That’s why you need to get your goals secure first to determine this.
Get Familiar with the Algorithm
This is technically important if you’re a digital marketer—all the more if you’re going to push your ads on Facebook. The algorithm in Facebook takes control of the post-presentation and its order and what is most relevant to your audience.
The posts and ads that you see are presented only based on what Facebook has determined is valuable and relevant to the audience or user (you).
But one thing is true, it is evolving.
The best way to adapt to this is actually to learn how to adjust the timings of your posts by sticking to a specific schedule or tapping into a social media calendar tool that allows you to know the best time to post on Facebook. So with this, the engagement strategies become defined as you realized that posting ads on Facebook gets more competitive.
Another way to navigate through this is to prioritize content that can drive discussion. Get creative in doing this like starting a poll that could lead your audience to discuss in the comments; you can provide questions in the poll that can get the discussion going. The more people are talking about your product or what’s relevant to it, the more Facebook algorithms will pick up on it and organically feature that content.
Measure Your Metrics
Audience engagement is valuable. And with the data you get from Analytics, you can improve, make changes with your postings, and rethink your strategies based on audience feedback. There’s also the Insights portion on your page and assess the differences that happened or the changes that transpired when you posted your ads.
You can maximize these insights to tailor fit your next ads to further cater to the needs and curiosity of your target audience. Even a slight change in the data can be used to your advantage. You’re not following formulas in this process, but rather it’s more of a trial and error thing.
Also, remember your click-through rate. It’s one of the important metrics that you need to pay attention to as it measures the clicks you get and the amount that you shed out per click.
Don’t Forget the Budget
As mentioned earlier, defining your goals and objectives before putting out an ad is necessary as it affects how much you’re going to spend on these ads. Especially with Facebook ads.
Setting a budget helps you streamline your campaigns. You can start small and as you utilize your analytics and gain insight from it, you can discover what your audience is there for—what posts are they engaging more with, what content are they sharing the most, etc.
You can allot a certain amount daily for an ad campaign and you can also determine the duration of the campaign.
Get strategic with your post boosting and when to boost it.
Best Practices to Create High-Converting Facebook Ads
Objectives + Target Audience
There are so many ad formats out there that exist to help businesses deliver the right ad for the right target market. But of course, emphasizing it again, you need to clarify first your campaign objectives and who you’re wanting to target for this.
Both factors are fairly valuable to the success of a marketing campaign. With clear goals, you can then decide on how much you’re going to budget for your ads; with the data you get, you can choose how you’re going to deliver these ads in a way that makes an impact. Engaging and impactful content goes a long way.
On Facebook, you can narrow down your target audience. Although this may also narrow down your leads or reach, you’re sure to get an increase in engagement. The options to tailor-fit your ads on Facebook are so practical and dynamic that it helps you decide what to prioritize.
Make it Move
We know that we just don’t want to create ads that stand out. We want to create ads that stand out and matter. As dynamic as we want our ads to be, it also needs to carry content that adds value and contributes to solutions.
But on the design side, getting the audience to take a second look at our ad means creating an ad that captures their attention. There are so many tools available now that can help you create great and dynamic designs for your Facebook ads. Removal.ai, Pixelied.com, Hyperlapse are some of these tools that you can use to create dynamic ads. Utilizing these can help you grab a potential customer’s attention and eventually get them converted to purchase your product. It all depends on your planning, strategy and execution.
Don’t Overdo it with Words
Some ads become boring because there are just too many words. Too much information can lead your audience to scroll up or move to another page. People’s attention spans have gotten a lot shorter and it has been proven that using less text on visuals performs better.
People on social media scan and search fast. Only a few seconds. So to get into that very short window, make sure that you keep your ads as dynamic as possible, with a clear message in place. You can make stunning visuals with more images and fewer words using free online graphic design software.
Test. Test. Test.
As mentioned earlier, this whole ads campaign does not follow a formula. It’s not a one-way street. It’s a process where you get to do a lot of trial and error. A whole lot. A/B testing most of what you put out can increase ads performance. A/B testing your ad, creating a version of it and tweaking portions here and there—whether it be a design element, your text placement, changing your CTA, and more will be worth it when the results come in.
By altering an element in your ad campaign, you can determine which of these performs better or has increased rates in customer engagement. Just remember to test everything before putting it all out there!
Schedule
What a wonder that Facebook has made it practical for business owners and digital marketers alike to optimize their options for advertising their businesses and products.
Scheduling is an important part of an ad campaign and Facebook allows you to schedule your ads by hours and by days. There’s an option for a daily budget and the former is only accessible with a lifetime budget.
Knowing when to post up your ads is a huge deal, especially since it helps determine when the right timing is for a higher audience engagement. Analytics will tell you that. And when you finally discover your ad flow and when is the most effective time to post your ads, you can expect a higher click-through rate and eventually conversions along the way.
Provide a Call To Action
Providing a CTA or a call to action in all of your ads can help you increase your conversion rate, increase traffic to your site and double customer engagement. When your target audience sees a CTA button it triggers them or gets them curious to click and explore more. Again, test and experiment and see how effective it is for your ad campaign.
One-word CTAs or two-word phrases are highly effective. “Sign Up”, “Shop”, “Like”, are all calls to action that a customer might want to take. And again, strategize, gain insight from your data and keep testing.
Takeaway
Facebook ads are a powerful platform for your marketing campaigns. You can convert possible customers to loyal shoppers once you know how to take advantage and maximize the tools and guidelines Facebook Ads guide has to offer or what Facebook ads have in general. Learning how to navigate, optimize and test the customization power of Facebook ad marketing can help you gain success in your marketing campaigns on this platform.
It’s highly important that you know what to focus on that can support you in helping your audience capture the core objective of your business. Investing your time and resources is part of the process; getting the right people in to help you in this endeavor is as important. Working together with creative marketing strategies will help you get further—all this while discovering your voice in marketing that aligns with your objectives and meets the needs of your customers.
Navigating the dynamics of Facebook ads is not a walk in the park but with research, insight and testing, you can make the most out of it—and get the results that you’ve always wanted.
Author’s Bio:
Shelly is a passionate blogger and digital marketer with more than a decade of experience as an online freelancer. She is one of the women behind SaaSLaunchr: SaaS Marketing Agency, a marketing service provider for SaaS-focused businesses and startups.
