Running Facebook Ads to grow your business? Well, you might have got mixed up at various points when managing your ads or planning strategies. That’s completely okay! Most advertisers or business owners give up the idea of running ads or keep losing money due to ineffective advertising strategies. If you fall into the same category or you are just a beginner who wants to start advertising profitably on social media right from the beginning, you are at the right place.
Agreed, the myriad targeting, ad formats and advertising options that Facebook offer do overwhelm most marketers and advertisers, but all for a good reason. After all, it provides plenty of effective options to target your right audience and make sales. However, it is not that tricky to understand how to design Facebook ads that make you millions of dollars instead of spending millions. So, here, in this article, you will learn 5 great ways to design effective Facebook ads. Shall we get started? Here you go…
- Know the Basics of Facebook Ads Beforehand
Setting up an ad campaign on Facebook takes simple steps. You just need to set it up from your Ad Manager by providing some details. But, it actually involves a lot of research, analysis and marketing tactics in the background which you will learn now and create a successful ad today.
Getting started, the best way to make the most out of ads is to learn completely about how to run ads effectively. So, learn about different types of ads (video, photo, slideshow, carousel, instant experience and collection ads), ad placements (news feed, marketplace, video feed, right column, Messenger Inbox) and the latest updates before you put tons of money on the table.
You can also gain immense insights by spying your competitors. Big brands like McDonald’s, Starbucks etc. keep on updating their strategies to outperform. So, that works well.
- Target the Right Audience
In order to create an effective Facebook ad, you need to start with creating your customer list. You can either use the list of people who are already your customers or find out potential customers with Facebook ads. Running your ad for people who don’t even know your brand or simply don’t need you is a waste of money. So, the secret behind a successful ad is the customer list.
You can find out the right audiences to run your ad in two different ways. While one is grouping people based on their gender, age, region, interests and other demographics. The other is targeting people who you already knew. They are simply known as custom audiences.
Wondering who these custom audiences are?
Custom Audiences are the ones who convert well and bring you profits out of your ads. Yes, you’ve heard it right! The people who you are familiar with are your most powerful potential customers. You need to simply pull the data from your own business and website.
Say, your customer list, subscriber list, your website visitors, users who interacted, or viewed your posts on Facebook.
This way you will be able to get in touch with your customers and make them your lifetime customers. As said, there are multiple options to promote your business to make sales or create brand awareness. You can also try and test targeting audiences based on demographics and behavior. However, custom audiences are most likely to take action as they are warm.
For example, consider you are running an ad campaign for your pet food business, targeting people who already have purchased your product will work better than those who don’t. It is because you don’t know if they really own a pet or not (at least you don’t get optimal ROI).
On the other hand, when you are running a campaign to promote an offer on activewear for females in your store, you can target users based on their demographics (including your segmented custom audience).
- Be Clear About the Purpose of the Campaign
As you see, in the above two examples, there are two different strategies. Those strategies if interchanged will cost you a lot of money. So, it is your offer, or purpose that makes your ad successful. Therefore, you need to be clear about why you are running your campaign. If your aim is to create brand awareness, you need to target the audiences who are unfamiliar with you. At the same time, if your purpose is to increase your sales in a given time, then you must target custom audiences or lookalike audiences to reach your goal. Provide a clear Call-to-Action for your customers, else they will simply ignore or plan to come back later and forget you.
Keynote: It is important to set goals before you start running a campaign as it helps you decide who to target and where to target.
- Pay Attention to Visuals, They Do Matter a Lot
The images or videos on your ad play a critical role in the success of your campaign. So, make sure you choose the original, high-quality and most relevant visuals or templates for ads. Fortunately, you can find customizable templates on PosterMyWall which saves you a lot of time as you don’t need to create beautiful templates every time. Instead, you can focus more on planning marketing strategies. Otherwise, you can choose the traditional method of creating your own visuals and edit them on photo editing tools like Canva, Adobe Photoshop etc.
Also, ensure that your visuals do match with the captions or content. Because, of course, your content also does matter because they speak about your offer or ad along with your visuals. You should also pay attention to the landing pages because they can break your sales if they are not relevant or pleasing.
So, try and test one segment (change either visual or content) at one time while running your campaign. This way you will know what works best and what does not.
5. Motivate Customer by Retargeting ads
It is quite painful when your audience doesn’t turn up after investing a lot of money on your ad campaign. But don’t get disheartened, they are just a decision away from you. They may likely turn up with your motivation. So, inspire them to take action by retargeting them using Facebook Retargeting Campaigns. Your team will thank you sooner.
Bonus Tip: Optimize Ads for Mobiles
Last but not least, optimize your ads for mobiles. Over 79% of people access Facebook on mobile devices. Hence you can’t ignore targeting mobile users. You can choose to target mobile users in Target Audience and even select specific mobiles in Edit Placements.
However, you can simply proceed to skip this if the audience base is too narrow for Facebook to accept or harmful to your budget.
Bottom Line
As you see running a successful campaign focuses more on targeting the right audience, promoting the appealing visuals, content and many more things. However, preparing an audience list and setting goals take the front seats. You can’t actually start without having these two.
After you are game, setting goals and the list, plan whom and when to target. Also, pay attention to templates, content and landing pages you use as they act as key profiles of your brand. Remember, a low-quality image and content can make your audience overlook your ad despite your marketing strategies.
