How to get Effective Results from Your Facebook Ads

• May 01, 2019
• Architects for the Web
• General Info

It keeps us in touch with loved ones around the world, it helps us find those friends we thought we had lost from our childhood days, and it touts 2.2 billion active monthly users and nearly 1.5 billion daily users. Facebook clearly offers a massive market for any growing business to tap into by utilizing their various advertising options. Moreover, with 4.68 billion projected mobile device users worldwide for 2019, Facebook is already expected to reach nearly half of the available active mobile users this year with an even greater growth potential in the years ahead. The bottom line? Facebook ads should be a critical part of every successful business' marketing strategy. But, even after selecting the best type of advertising campaign from a dizzying selection of as types that meet your primary objective and budget, how do you create an effective ad that draws the users to act and gets the results you want? Let's explore the ad elements that both draws your audience in with a solid hook and ultimately leads to increasing your revenue.

Selecting The Type of Facebook Ad
Domain ads, multi-product "carousel" ads, offer ads, lead ads, and video ads are just some of the choices available on Facebook. Before you begin crafting any ad campaign, the first thing you need to do is decide what you hope to achieve with it and who will want to know read or view it. Are you trying to drive more traffic to your website or do you want to generate more leads? Do you want more page likes or reviews? Perhaps you simply want to increase your brand awareness so that you become a more trusted household name for your products and services. The goal of the ad plus your target audience demographics determine the best type of Facebook ad campaign to select. 

For example, if you want to draw the attention of corporate executives, using a brief holiday video message or funny photo can hook your viewers and entice them to share the ad with others. If you create a video from scratch, your next ad campaign can build on the previous one using the same formula, characters, and plot to reduce production time and other related costs. A word of caution, re-using a campaign formula that just barely broke even on the cost ratio may not be as effective as creating a new ad with a fresh approach.

Media Quality Matters
Whatever type of ad you choose and whomever reads or views it, your audience is likely to pay more attention to better quality pictures and videos than those that are granulated, boring or irrelevant. This usually means professional grade media. We realize part of the reason you may have bought that expensive latest and greatest iPhone or Samsung is it has the capability of taking excellent quality photos. That is true as long as you know a lot about photography. Taking pics for commercial purposes can be tricky for professionals as so many variables have to be considered such as the lighting that may blow out the picture or make it too dark, the colors and patterns in the background or the piece of hair that is falling in front of someone's eyes. Likewise, if you know how to keep your videos from bouncing around, you understand about lighting and backgrounds, and you can edit your footage without too much added work, then your mobile device can do the job of filming your ad at home. For those who are not pro photographers or videographers, using subscription services such as Adobe Stock, Depositphotos, or Animoto can be worth the extra money and should be factored into the cost of your ad campaign.

There are some exceptions to this rule. The audience may, for instance, be attracted to and retain interest in your jumpy out-of-focus 1980's footage you found of your younger brother doing something extraordinarily funny or unbelievably talented. The bottom line with media is looking for images and videos that will catch the eye of the viewers and then keep them focused long enough to act when they see your call to action (CTA). 

Content Should Be Simple, Interesting, Relevant & Purposeful 
Beyond the visual component, you can use your content to grab your audience's attention and walk them down a clean path to your clear CTA for the ad. The content in any type of ad should always be simple, interesting, relevant and purposeful. Assume your audience knows very little, if anything at all, about your products and services. People in sales generally have an elevator pitch where they practice explaining the reasons someone should want to buy their products in less than the amount of time it takes to ride in an elevator. The more concise and entertaining, the better!

Just as the recipients of the elevator pitch can learn more details by asking questions or setting up an appointment with the sales person, which is the in-person version of a CTA, your Facebook audience can learn more details about your products by clicking on the CTA button or link and checking out your website or catalog. The idea of the content in your ad is to nudge the audience to consciously click on that link. This is true with any form of CTA, including buttons that lead to your website and social media links that direct your viewers to like your page, share your post or write a review for your company. Our advice for in-house creations is to write out the script and edit it a few times at least after showing it to friends who said they would definitely elect to click on the CTA before launching your campaign. 

We at Architechs for the Web believe you can create a Facebook ad campaign that will meet or exceed your expectations by following these guidelines. That said, just deciding the type of Facebook ad you want to use can be an overwhelming process before you start to piece together the media and content components. Additionally, the time and effort you need to pour into social media marketing can be overly expensive, and hiring a professional company to create and manage your ad campaign can be much more affordable than you think. If you are considering incorporating Facebook ads as part of your online marketing strategy, contact us to learn more about all the ways we can help save you time, frustration and money while achieving the results your want.