Facebook is huge and is no longer a NEW platform (been around since 2004). Consequently, it has grown and matured tremendously, and like most other publishing platforms, their primary profits are driven through advertising. Facebook is home to over 219 million US users and over 1.9 billion monthly users worldwide, which is a HUGE network of people that see Facebook ads every day.
For brands, posting on Facebook alone isn’t enough anymore — especially for ones just starting out. Sure, you can throw money at your efforts to drive people to your Facebook Page and send them to your website, but that only works if you’re smart about it.
One way to do just that is to create optimized Facebook Ads targeted at the right audience. Optimized ads can help you spend your PPC budget wisely and see a positive return on your investment.
So, what does optimized Facebook advertising actually look like? If you’re looking for some great examples, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll quickly go over the three overarching formats for Facebook Ads: right column, desktop News Feed, and mobile News Feed. Then, we’ll show some case study Facebook Ads, each with real-life examples — along with some insights to apply to your own Facebook marketing.
Before we dive too deep, we’d like to cover what we consider that 4 Components of Successful Facebook Ads.
It’s Visual
Visual content is treated more favorably in the Facebook algorithm, more likely to be shared and remembered than written content and Facebook puts strict limitation on how much text you can have n your image. No matter what type of ad you create, your image needs to be visually appealing.
Facebook Ads look slightly different depending on the results you want. This sizing guide includes recommendations to help make your Facebook Ads look their best wherever they’re seen. https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/
It’s Relevant
Relevance is critical for success when using Facebook advertising. Remember, you are spending money when someone views or clicks on your ad (depending on the settings you use). If you’re showing ads that aren’t relevant to your target audience, you’re wasting your time and money and will likely not see success with any kind of advertising.
Back in February 2015, Facebook launched a feature in the Facebook advertising platform that rates your ads and gives you a relevance score, similar to Ad Rank in Google AdWords. The more relevant your ad image, ad copy, and destination page is to your audience, the higher your score is — and the more favorably Facebook will treat your ads.
It Includes an Enticing Value Proposition
A value proposition tells the reader why they should click on your ad to learn more about your product. How is your product or service different from any other? Why should the viewer click on your ad to see your website?
Your value proposition should be believable. For example, saying you have the greatest sandwiches in the world will not make people come to your business’s Page, but maybe offering 20% off will. Or, perhaps adding social proof will help — something like, “Sandwiches loved by over one million people every year! Come try yours today and get 20% off your order with this coupon.”
It has a clear call-to-action
A beautiful and relevant ad is great, but without a call-to-action (CTA), your viewer might not know what to do next. Add a CTA like “Buy now and save X%,” or “Offer ends soon” and add a sense of urgency to your viewer. Your CTA should encourage people to click on your ad now.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s review the process of getting ads set up, running and driving new leads.
Check out some examples of successful Facebook ads we have published for our clients:
Step 1: Understand Your Audience
Before we get started, we need to understand exactly who we’re trying to target, what they might be interested in and how they might respond to certain things. It’s unlikely you’ll know exact answers but it’s just to give us a starting point.
Additionally, understanding Facebook’s advertising policies and guidelines is very helpful to ensure you are not wasting time making ads and getting disapproved…or even trying to advertise something on Facebook they don’t even allow. For a detailed breakdown of all policies and guidelines for Facebook ads, follow this link: https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/
Step 2: Ad Creation
You need to feel comfortable. It’s vital that you are happy with the language we’re using; the ad copy and the images we’re using. Sometimes odd combinations and weird, out of the box ideas are the most effective but we’ll never run anything against your wishes.
Step 3: Start Running Ads
We will get going as soon as possible, then add more campaigns over the coming weeks. The idea behind this is to get you used to the traffic, the email volume and the level of inquiries. Once we have run some initial ads, we will start to gather data such as impressions, website clicks and purchases or inquiries.
Step 4: Ongoing Revisions and Management
There’s a concept called “ad blindness”. It’s where you see the same ad again and again and as a result, you start to tune it out. It might even help you massively and be exactly what you’re looking for but for whatever reason, your brain ignores it.
For that reason, we keep recycling the ads. The majority of the ad will stay but instead of saying “Get Your Free Report” we might change it to “Free Checklist: Get Yours”. Same idea, just visually looks different.
Step 5: Going Forward
Over time, we’ll start to notice which types of ads, markets, platforms and targeting is actually producing customers. You never know this from day 1.
Eventually we can start shutting down the ads that aren’t as effective at producing customers and double down on the ones that are.
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At Search Control, our team is extremely proficient in designing, optimizing and running Facebook Ads for our clients. Let us help you drive more traffic to your website and get more attention to your business today! Give us a call and mention this post to receive 50% off the initial setup, design and optimization of your first Facebook Ad campaign!
