AdvertiseMint has been managing businesses’ Facebook ads for several years now. It has seen what has worked for clients, which strategies helped them lead their businesses to success. Now, AdvertiseMint is sharing its secrets to creating successful Facebook ads. Among the plethora of implemented strategies, here are the six best ways to create high-converting Facebook ads.
Table of Contents
1. Begin with an Objective
Before creating Facebook ads, you must do one important thing: establish a clear objective. You can’t move forward with the campaign otherwise because running an ad campaign without a clear objective is a disastrous fault. It’s as faulty as sending football players to a football game without a game plan: they won’t know the best steps to take to win. Thus, before starting an ad campaign, ask yourself what you want your ads to do for you: do you want them to collect leads, to drive people to your brick-and-mortar store, to compel them to like your Facebook business page or to purchase your product?
Here are the advertising objectives available on Facebook:
Awareness
- Brand Awareness-raise awareness of your business
- Local Awareness-send people to your brick-and-mortar store
- Reach-reach as many people as possible
Consideration
- Traffic-increase traffic to your website
- Engagement-increase engagement of your Facebook posts
- App Installs-encourage users to install your app
- Video Views-encourage users to view your videos
- Lead Generation-collect your customer’s information
Conversion
- Conversion-encourage users to take a desired action
- Product catalog sales-encourage users to buy products from your catalog
- Store visits-drive users to your brick-and-mortar store
Because your ads’ features and optimization depend on your objective, you must determine the objective you want for your ads before creating them.
2. Add Value Proposition, CTAs, and Social Proof to Your Creative
Attract users to your ads by adding a value proposition, CTA (call-to-action), and social proof to your creatives.
Value proposition
The benefit your ad offers, value proposition, which gives your customers incentive to take action because of your ad, may be a solution to a problem (relevancy), a money-saving deal such as a discount or free shipping (quantified value), or a reason why customers should buy from you and not your competition (unique differentiation).
Here are examples of ads with value propositions:
This GAP ad contains a value proposition of quantified value by offering a discount and free shipping.
This TrackR ad offers a value proposition of relevancy by giving customers a solution to a problem: never having to lose one’s belongings ever again.
CTA
CTA, or call to action, is a word or group of words that urges people to take an action. Examples of CTAs are “buy now,” “sign up,” or “click here.” While CTAs are usually forthright, they are also sometimes subtle as illustrated by Tesco’s ad below. In Tesco’s ad, the CTA “Find more tips” urges customers to explore its online recipes.
Adding a clear CTA on your copy lets people know what you want them to do after reading your ad.
Social Proof
Social proof, evidence that people are engaging with or taking action on your ad, can appear on the copy or the image, with lines such as “1,000 people have purchased this product.” It can also be the engagement section on the bottom of a Facebook ad where it lists the amount of likes, shares, and comments on your ad. Social proof is important because it functions as word of mouth on social media: when people see ads that their friends, whom they share interests with, have liked, they are more likely to trust that ad.
3. Optimize Your Ads for Mobile
Mobile usage has been increasing throughout the years. eMarketer found that mobile accounted for half of all digital advertising in 2015. A year after this discovery, Facebook’s daily active mobile users rose to 1.17 billion—that’s 1.17 billion potential viewers for your Facebook ads. Thus, to reach your customers, you must create mobile friendly ads. There are several ways you can optimize for mobile:
Place ads on mobile
Choose “All Devices” or “Mobile Only” on the “Edit Placements” section of Ads Manager to place your ads on mobile.
Use short copy
Use shorter copy so your mobile ads’ text don’t get truncated. Although you can use a maximum of 345 characters on mobile before your text gets truncated, try to be concise by keeping your copies to a few lines.
Link to mobile-friendly landing pages
If you’re using an ad that directs your customers to a different web page, make sure your landing page loads quickly and works properly when accessed through mobile.
4. Improve Your Targeting
Advertisers must improve their Facebook ad targeting to target the right audience and save money on ads. To improve your targeting, narrow down your target audience by demographics, connections, interest, Custom Audience, and behaviors. For example, if you’re in the restaurant business, you need to create an audience profile like the example below:
Gender: Male and Female
Age: 25-60
Language: English
Connections: women and men who like Cheesecake Factory and Olive Garden and friends of women and men who like Cheesecake Factory and Olive Garden
Custom Audience: customer contact list
Behaviors: women and men who like food brands’ Facebook pages, women and men who are homeowners
Interest: food, Gordon Ramsey, travel, cooking, Williams Sonoma
The more specific your target audience, the better your chances of serving ads to an audience likely to convert.
Unfortunately, many advertisers either don’t know how targeting works or they haven’t unlocked Facebook’s vast targeting options. Because most advertisers usually use the most ineffective, most popular, and most competitive targeting options, they squander their budgets and fail to reach a high-interest audience likely to convert. What these advertisers need—and what you need, if you, too, have not mastered Facebook ad targeting—is a complete guide to Facebook ad targeting to help you unlock all of Facebook’s ad targeting options.
5. Refresh Creatives
Refreshing your creative combats ad fatigue, a phenomenon that occurs when your target audience that has seen your ads too many times ignores or overlooks your ads. Ad fatigue causes your CTRs to increase and your frequency to decrease. There are three cost-effective ways you can refresh your creative:
- Reword ad copy
- Edit image with graphics, captions, or filters
- Turn videos or photos into gifs
6. Test and Analyze
A/B testing allows you to know which ads garner the revenue and which do not. To A/B test, you can test copy against copy, image against image, and CTA against CTA.
After running your test for three to four weeks, it’s important that you analyze your data. Your Insights will show you which ad performed better. It can also give you insights into the demographics of your audience, the relevance score of your ad, and the amount of engagement, among numerous other vital information. Analyzing data allows you to see what works and what doesn’t. It allows you to improve your campaign to gain better ROIs.
These are the strategies AdvertiseMint implements when running ad campaigns. This has proven useful to us, and we hope that this too will be useful to you.
