How to Perfect Your Facebook Ad
March 20, 2019
Facebook has come a long way from the social connection tool it once was. Now, it’s a platform for families, friends, educators, and businesses around the world. It brings together all types of profiles and content, into one beautifully chaotic tool.
Facebook Ads are one of the many ways Facebook makes money. They’re also a huge advantage and a great investment for businesses looking to expand their brands, increase traffic, and boost conversion. Your Facebook business profile only works so far on its own. Without proper advertising, your profile could wind up with few visits, and even fewer conversions to your official website and ecommerce platform.
Anyone can use a Facebook Ad, but how do you use them right? Throughout this article, we’ll dive into the best practices for Facebook Ads and how to benefit from them. Here are 3 tips to strengthen your campaign:
1. Place Your Ad Appropriately: Choosing the optimal placement for your ad could be the difference between catching the eye of your target audience and being forgotten on the sidelines. From news feeds to sidebars to messenger, there’s a time and a place for your ad, and you need to figure out where that is.
According to Facebook, the best place to put an ad is everywhere. This is no joke, the tool used to optimize placement offers categories such as feeds, stories, marketplace, suggested videos, and more. Facebook recommends advertisers click all the boxes available to them, spreading their ad to more areas, and hopefully increasing success. Whether this is the right plan of action for your brand is up to you. For some, it might be more beneficial to stick in one area or two, rather than all over the grid. This could also depend on frequency.
Now, there is a theory behind Facebook’s suggestion, and that’s optimization; machine learning that sees where your content is posted, which location receives the most hits, and therefore, what’s most successful or you. This eventually also increases cost-effectiveness and accounts for other advertising factors as well.
2. Choose The Right Objectives: Getting into a Facebook campaign really helps a business define itself and its parameters, even if you weren’t sure what they were before. One of the ways you learn more about your business is through choosing your objectives. Advertising objectives are the outcomes or goals you want to achieve through your ad. Of course, there are long-term multi-step goals like increased revenue, but there are also short-term immediate goals like improved page likes or conversion.
One of the interesting and helpful objectives now offered by Facebook Ads is brand awareness. This is a huge piece in the sales funnel and helps to extend your reach and eventually branch over into consideration and traffic as well. The most basic sales funnel functions as follows:
Awareness: This is where consumers get to know your brand by first seeing it displayed in an ad or a post. Following this stage, customers might want to research you by clicking your profile and reading your content or heading over to your website.
Consideration: Here, customers are diving deeper, learning about your products, seeing which ones suit their lives and whether they want to buy. At this stage, you might see more videos consumed, more comments, likes, and shares.
Conversion: Finally, you strike gold. This is when your customer is finally ready to buy. He or she makes their way to your website or shopping tool and starts filling a cart. Contests, promotions, coupons, and more are popular at this stage.
3. Be Mobile-Friendly: When designing your ads, like designing your content, consider the viewers mode of access. Mobile internet traffic makes up about half of the traffic online these days. That’s half your Facebook market out the window if they’re unable to see what you’re trying to sell.
The best place to start with mobile optimization is size and shape. Videos, photos, and anything else visual should be trimmed in length to increase loading speed. You should also square off borders to fit more evenly on a mobile phone or tablet. Not everybody wants to have to turn their device to horizontal view, and even when they do, some content spills over. It’s best to use a format that’s inclusive to all devices, rather than trying to build one for desktop and one for mobile.
When scrolling on a small phone screen, you’re less likely to see some of the finer points of an add during a quick scroll-by. It’s more important than ever to make content in your ad bright, energetic and eye catching. You can better tailor your ads to mobile users by checking it out from your own phone or tablet. If you get frustrated trying to view it or connect to your site from the ad, so will everybody else.
Facebook Will Help
Facebook is extremely helpful with their ads, offering a support team for those who have questions or concerns. Newcomers to the Facebook marketing concept can also read a lengthy list of FAQs and walkthrough guides. The platform has put user friendliness at the forefront, making it simple to get started and moderate ads without the need of a professional marketing firm.
Many companies do employ the use of social media marketing experts. These businesses cater to the needs of those who don’t understand the complexities of Facebook marketing or simply need help keeping up with all the content they need to post. When in doubt, ask for help. There’s always somebody online who can offer insight into this advertising platform.