Before you even create your ad
Every part of you advert should be well thought through and intentional. Here are a few things you should ask yourself before even sitting down at your computer and creating your ads.
- Who are you speaking to?
- What digital assets do I have that will resonate with my audience enough to stop them scrolling?
- What message can I share with them that will enter the conversation that is already happening inside their head?
Additionally, think about what is important to the customer. This may be different from what’s important to your brand. For example, a product made with all vegan materials might be very important to you, but the customers main focus will be on whether it solves their problem. Having an all-vegan product might be important, but people won’t buy it until they are fully convinced that they you have a quality product that can solve their problem.
How to get people to stop and click on your ads
There are a multitude of tried-and-tested strategies that have been proven to grab attention on Facebook. Here are three Key Principles techniques you can use to help you create attention grabbing adverts (did you see what I did there?) 😜
- Simple language: Fancy words are hard to read, and they can confuse some people. Use simple language so you audience can easily digest the information. If you advert says something along the lines of “Make sure you don’t promulgate your esoteric cogitations and articulate your superficial sentimentalities with amicable and philosophical and psychological observations.” – you might understand what that means, and it will make you look extremely smart, but your advert will end up with no impact. Not so smart, then?
- Have multiple ad angles: It doesn’t matter what Facebook advertising method you use, all Facebook adverts will need to be refreshed at some point. After an advert has been running for a few weeks/months, the advert will become boring, and you will lose your audience, and your ROI will drop. Therefore, if you keep creating more fresh adverts and more advert angles, you will always be able to experience that initial freshness of an ad, which will bring a higher ROI.
- Generate the click: The whole purpose of the ad is to generate enough curiosity in the right people, to encouraging them to click on the ad and visit your landing page/website – that’s it. The advert should generate the ‘click’ not the ‘sale’.
Facebook Ad secrets
- Cut the music: Do you scroll social media with the sound on? You probably don’t, and neither do other users. If the user doesn’t have the sound on, music is futile. If they do accidentally have the sound on, and they come across your ad, they’ll quickly scroll past it to stop the music (particularly if the user is out in a public setting i.e. on a packed train). This has been tested before and you can increase click through rates by 30%-50% just by removing the background music in video ads.
- Ad Imagery: You do not always need to have professional, studio shot images to create a successful image ad for Facebook. There are some cases where non-professional, authentic looking imagery can outperform the professionally shot images. Why is this? Well, let’s think of this from the perspective of the user. When people go on their phone/computer and open Facebook, they are not looking to be sold to by companies. So, when they see an image that looks polished, they immediately think “ad”, and this can deter some users. However, using imagery that looks natural in their newsfeed, yet still evokes curiosity can be extremely powerful.
- Refine your audiences: Facebook has roughly 2.85 billion monthly active users. Yes, more than one-quarter of the world’s population are actively logging onto Facebook daily. You can’t target all 2.85 billion people with your adverts, and you shouldn’t want to. There are enough people on Facebook that will absolutely need the product/service you offer, so you might as well only target that specific demographic, instead of going too broad and targeting people who just might be interested in your offer.
3 Types of Audiences
Understanding the 3 types of audiences is extremely important when it comes to running paid ads on Facebook. The 3 audience types are listed below.
- TOF: TOF (Top of Funnel) audiences are cold audience. These are the people who have never heard of your brand before.
- MOF: MOF (Middle of Funnel) audiences are warm audience. These are the people who are already familiar with your brand, and they have interacted with you before in some way. For example, they may have visited your website, signed up to your mailing list, engaged with you on Facebook, liked your Facebook page, etc.
- BOF: BOF (Bottom of Funnel) audiences are hot audiences – raving fans of your brand. These are existing customers who have paid for your products or services before in the past.
Typically, your biggest ROI will come from the adverts directed at your MOF and BOF audiences. This is because these audiences already know who you are, they have already established a connection with you, and they trust you. Adverts that are targeting TOF audiences will always be more expensive because this audience is made up of people who haven’t come into contact with your brand before. They’re new to you, so they don’t know whether or not they can trust you. You will have to spend more and do more to convince cold audiences to interact with you. But this is where you draw new customers from, so it’s a necessary evil.
Final thoughts on making Facebook Ads that work
Pay-to-play: Facebook is a pay-to-play platform. Typically, whenever a new social media platform is brought to market, they reward content creators for using the platform and offer them free, organic exposure. However, when platforms become as large as Facebook, the organic exposure starts to decrease, and you have to buy ads to get the same level of exposure you formerly got organically.
Appease the platform and the audience: Facebook’s main goal is keep people on their platform. They want to figure out what people like and show them more of that in their feeds. Therefore, when you are creating content/adverts it is important to keep Facebook and the user in mind, to ensure you are serving their objectives.
