If your business is on social media then you have probably at least considered running Facebook Ads. I’m guessing that at some point Facebook has also prompted you to boost one of your posts?
There are a lot of reasons to use Facebook for your social media marketing campaigns. For starters, your audience is probably there and Facebook is totally targetable. You can target on location, demographics, interests, behaviours, connections like friends of your followers and build custom audiences from mailing lists of website visits.
The call to actions are all there too – people can learn more, get directions to your physical premises, view videos, add items to a shopping cart, visit your website or message you. You can find the right call to action for your goal.
So, how do we build and run a successful Facebook Ads campaign? Well, I have my top tips for getting it right and getting the right results!
The 5 steps to running a Facebook Ads campaign
1. Get the right goal
First things first – you need to decide on your goal. What do you want your audience to do? Are you trying to get potential customers to sign up for your newsletter? Do you want them to download a PDF or an app? Do you want to drive them to your website and purchase your products?
You need to get this piece sorted first because this will drive how your set up your campaign and your ads.
2. Target the right audience
There are basically two key types of audiences that you can target. Firstly there is a cold audience, which could be everyone and anyone on Facebook. A much warmer audience is likely to be your followers or custom lists, such as your email marketing list, visitors to your website, or current/previous customers.
Facebook can really help you with this. You can even mine their Audience Insights to help to build your audience. This is a really useful too and you can even see which types of Facebook Pages your target audience like.
You can chose region, demographics (age, gender etc), interests, job roles to really aim at your target audience. It’s both flexible and laser sharp!
It is always going to be a good idea to nail the personas of your audience before starting this. If you’ve been running your business social media for a while then you have probably already done this. Here are some links through to a user persona template and an example user persona:
3. Tell a good story
You may have nailed your audience but you still need to get those visuals and text right.
There are so many Ad formats to choose from too. For example, you can have a single image, a carousel, a video or slideshows.
If you are going for a single image then make it something striking that will stand out in the feed. Something that with delight or engage your audience. Make sure your copy isn’t too wordy and tells the right story.
If you sell lots of products or services then Carousel Ads can be a brilliant choice.T hey can also be excellent at telling a story in a series of images. Aso if you are going to serve your Ad out to Instagram too then they generally perform well on Instagram.
Video usually performs well on Facebook generally, and the same can be said for using it in Facebook Ads. You can even generate a video style Ad from within Ads Manager using a series of still images. These look great in the feed.
Don’t forget your call to action. Sometimes using something like ‘Learn More’ to a colder audience might seem a softer approach and more appealing at that stage of their journey. Think about what your goals are and whether you are serving your Ads to a cold or warm audience.
4. Get the right landing pages
There is nothing worse than your target audience clicking through from your Ad and then not converting because your website was confusing. Maybe your call to action on the website is buried and not clear? Maybe your audience liked the look of the Ad and the service or product and it just didn’t follow through onto the website?
If you’re driving traffic, i.e. potential customers, through to your website then the call to action needs to be crystal clear to them.
If you want them to purchase a product then take them directly to the product page. Don’t drop them at your home page and expect them to navigate to the product.
It can sometimes make perfect sense to create a landing page specifically for your Ads campaign if you want to make the flow through to conversion nice and easy for those potential customers. Using the same imagery on the landing page as the Ad lets it flow and lets them know they are in the right place.
Don’t forget to add the Facebook Pixel to your website and, if you create them, landing pages. This not only gives you stats but also will allow you to create re-targeting Ads for your website visitors. You can also set pixel events on specific actions on your website pages, e.g. they added a product to the basket but didn’t check out. You can send a different re-targetting message based on the events.
5. Test Everything!
This is so important to running Facebook Ads. You need to monitor, adjust and test in realtime and not just when everything has finished running.
You don’t want to just set a couple of Ads running for 4 days and then just leave it and check it on day 5. Keep on top of your Ads, check what is working, what isn’t working, and then adjust.
The relevancy score of your Ads is a good guiding point. You’ll need at least 500 impressions before this is displayed, but about 7 is generally considered to be a good perfomance. Facebook is phasing this out though and replacing it with a new scoring, which you can find here – Ad Relevance Diagnostics
As part of your campaign you need to test your audience, your creatives and your call to action.
For example, for one audience adset, i.e, the same audience, you might test 2 different single images with the same text and call to action. Give them about 24 hours to bed into the algorithm and see how they are performing against one another in realtime. One might be romping ahead and the other tanking. If that’s the case then you can pause the tanking Ad. You might want to then try another Ad with the same audience but maybe with a video Ad and the same text, or the same single performing image with different text. Test and see what’s working.
What else for Facebook Ads?
These 5 steps are all about running your Facebook Ads. Like everything else, you should be planning this before diving in.
This Social Media Marketing Facebook Ads Planner is is a really useful starting point.
It will help you to focus on what the objectives are for the Ads and what sort of hook you can use for your specific audience. Planning and testing is everything for successful campaigns!
Need help?
Why not book a free 30 minute Discovery Call with Plumb.Digital and find out how we can help you to get results with your Facebook Ads?