Three Tricks for Facebook Ads to Use with Your Social Campaign

Facebook is one of the most useful tools for a social media campaign: with the right techniques and strategy, you can generate a notable amount of publicity for your business. About a third of modern companies view Facebook as an essential facet to their business. As of 2013, there are a million active advertisers on Facebook. With all that being said, it is vital to have the right knowledge when utilizing Facebook as an advertising tool; here are three main tricks for Facebook Ads to use with your social campaign.

Attention-grabbing Visual Content and Text is Key

When creating your Facebook ad, it is important to write concisely and effectively. Your advertisement’s text, or copy, should speak to your audience and attract them. Don’t feel pressured to use the maximum amount of text space when you write your ad; instead, perhaps ask a captivating rhetorical question to grab users or make a statement that evokes interest. Also, differentiate your brand or company from the competition: highlight a distinguishing company feature in the Facebook ad or create a special offer exclusive to the ad. If you are trying to establish brand or company recognition, it is recommended that you mention the name of your brand or company in the ad text.

If you can afford it, it may be best to hire a copywriter to write for your business. A seasoned advertising creative will help your business by wording your Facebook ads in an experienced manner. If hiring a freelance copywriter, it is good to look for those who have created or been a part of successful social media campaigns.

It’s not enough to write a compelling advertisement headline or attention-catching copy. While those aspects of your Facebook ads are important, it is also equally important to provide a visual aspect to your ads: photos, infographics, etc. Facebook users and people on the internet generally respond more to content with eye-catching imagery.

An image with bright warm colors can stand out against the subtle and minimal colors of Facebook. Make sure that the visual content is relevant to your advertisement and that you are not spamming viewers with unrelated ads.

Get Down and Dirty with Optimization

Testing out your Facebook ad ideas is another fundamental for a successful social campaign. With Facebook, you can publish an ad and then have the option to create a similar ad: either by changing the text or swapping the image.

Run several ads with various modifications as part of a campaign, check the advertising numbers, and find out which ad or ads are performing the best. Then, take your best ad and slightly change it, creating a couple more ads to test against each other and use at the same time. This method can be extended to hiring different advertising creatives and testing their ad performances against each other. Also, you should switch your ads out every week or so, optimally less because Facebook users often get bored with social ads over extended periods of time. It will be a bit of work to build and test several Facebook ads; optimization means getting your hands dirty with different marketing tactics and closely monitoring your statistics. However, it’s worth it in the long run for your campaign.

The Facebook Ad Interface and Targeting your Market

With Facebook Ads, it is possible to directly advertise to the demographics you are trying to reach. Potential demographic profiles include: gender, age, location, education level, and interests. You can target up to 25 countries but it is recommended that your advertisements target the people who are going to sincerely be interested in your content.

To personalize and better reach this group, Facebook allows a user to specially select the audience based on country, state or province, city, and zip code. If you choose to narrow your audience down to a city, you can set a radius perimeter from 10 to 50 miles around the chosen city. Also, you can target multiple ads to specific cities in different countries e.g. Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London. Selecting global areas is a strategy best suited for online business and using the location tool is often most beneficial for brick and mortar businesses with local customers in a city. However, if you are running both a physical store and an e-commerce business, you may want to experiment with targeting both local and international areas.

Gender and age are also two customizable audience options. You can pick to have your Facebook ads be seen by men, women, or both. If marketing a product or business for a specific age range, you can set an age gate: select a minimum and maximum to create a target range e.g. 18-24.

Being able to select your audience based on interests is probably the most powerful tool in your Facebook Ad toolkit. Everything a person has liked or shown interest in is available at your disposal; Facebook has practically done the market research for you. The two options available are “Precise Interests” and “Broad Categories.” With broad category marketing, you can reach an audience that shares various interests and activities; examples include: Pets, Entertainment, Environment, Charity, Education, Health and Wellbeing, etc. With precise interest marketing, you can find an audience that is more closely in line with your business or product. For instance, a yoga mat online store could select “yoga” as a precise interest group to target.

Additional Useful Tips

Make sure that you are backing up your Facebook ads with solid social media content. Nobody wants to look at your business or company’s wall and see a lack of recent updates. Since your ads are intended to drive traffic, you should capitalize on it.

It is always helpful to know when your ads convert better. Observe the time of day when running your Facebook ads and see when the conversion rates are higher.

Looking into promoting page posts is another aspect of the Facebook advertising interface that you may wish to explore. This method allows you to advertise through one of your recent posts; the ad is already written. This category of ad appears in the News Feed and also can be seen on the right side of Facebook ads. It is important to note that this way of advertising charges you when a user likes the post. What this means is that they can like the post being advertised without liking the actual page. This is something to take into consideration when using this option.

Understanding your bidding options is also very significant. Facebook has not changed the bidding mechanism in any drastic way but it is good to know and be mindful of the bidding process. When advertising a page on Facebook, selecting the first radio button prompts either an option to increase attendance, get new users, or get more likes; Facebook then does your bidding by optimizing your ad with the cost per 1000 impressions model. In addition to this, there is the option of advanced pricing. The advanced pricing selection allows you to choose a cost per click model or set the bids yourself for the cost per 1000 impressions model.

Conclusion

Hopefully, the three main tricks that were listed for your Facebook Ads, along with the additional tips, will help maximize the effectiveness of your social campaign.