How to Create and Promote a Great Facebook Ad

Published on May 3, 2017

More and more businesses are putting Facebook to work as a paid channel for advertising; in fact, as many as 80% of industry leaders are planning to place a paid ad on social media this year, and 38% already have some sort of paid social media advertising campaign in place.

Are you using Facebook Ads for your business? It’s an unbelievably powerful and easy way to broaden your reach and generate conversions – all for less than the cost of many other digital marketing avenues, including search engine marketing.

Whether you’re an old pro or just getting started with Facebook Ads, here are the four keys to creating successful ads for this social media marketing giant:

Engage With Your Image

A picture is worth a thousand words – and, perhaps, even thousands of dollars’ worth of your Facebook Ads budget. Optimizing your image is a great way to ensure that your ad is working at peak efficiency, drawing in Facebook users and encouraging them to click through to your landing page.

With that in mind, don’t skimp on your visual content! High quality, unique, professionally-done images will always be more attractive than low res shots or bland stock photos, which read as unprofessional and untrustworthy to plenty of audiences.

When selecting a photograph, or designing a unique illustration or graphic from scratch, focus on contrasts; bold juxtapositions have been proven to garner more attention and capture readers’ eyes more readily than more one-note images. Experiment with multiple colors, unified fonts, and an ample mix of positive and negative space. When it comes to those colors and font choices, remember to keep them in line with the rest of your branding, so that users can easily identify your brand when they follow your ad through to your landing page.

One last pro tip? In the image itself, use as little text as possible; Facebook’s platform much prefers images to text, so focus on brevity. We’ve been dinged for overloading on text before. Instead of packing dense language into your picture slot, focus on finding a striking, appealing visual and leave the writing for your body copy. Speaking of which…

Convince With Your Copy

While images are the key to garnering attention, your written copy can play a huge role in encouraging clickthrough and conversions. Don’t let this space go to waste; instead, use your copy to encourage users to act.

For best results, keep it concise, and don’t be afraid to frontload your copy. Facebook recommends always putting your most important messaging first; this includes your call to action, which Facebook suggests putting within the first 90 characters of your ad copy.

To get the most out of that call to action, use strong, action-oriented verbs (get, receive, try, see) and cultivate a sense of urgency. And don’t feel like your copy needs to be staid, or that you should always play by conventional marketing rules. Remember, this is social media – the place where plenty of users go to let their hair down. Don’t be afraid to get experimental! You might want to consider using emoji in your body copy, for instance, or else using a testimonial, a personal story, or some other type of user-generated content as ad copy.

Last up – but certainly not least – remember to focus on your headline, or the text that directly follows the image on a traditional Facebook Ad post. In many ways, this bolded text is actually some of the most important copy on your ad – indeed, some 80% of people never make it past your headline, according to a study by CopyBlogger. Maximize your headline’s impact by focusing on clarity and brevity. Remember that, in this space, the what and the why are all-important – use numbers, emphasize the benefits of your product, encourage action, ask a vital question, and do what it takes to really pique a reader’s interest.

Keep It Fresh

Don’t let “ad fatigue” set in! When your Facebook Ad feels tired – specifically, once your core audience has seen it in their timelines multiple times – it can stop generating results.

Rather than letting your ad sit and gather dust, take a dynamic approach to your Facebook marketing by revisiting and revamping your ad copy and images every one to two weeks, sharing and promoting different posts, or targeting fresh audiences.

When it comes to determining the efficacy of your ads, it helps to know what works and what doesn’t in terms of advertising for your brand. In these matters, A/B testing is your friend. Run multiple ads for set periods, then closely monitor and compare your results, focusing on clickthrough and conversions. You may also wish to look at more extensive data; looking at your ad results for a full year, for instance, may help you determine what traits your most successful ads all have in common.

Finally, you may want to consider new ad formats every so often. In addition to Facebook’s more traditional advertising methods, such as image-based ads or promoted posts, there are now other options available to the enterprising marketer in search of new content opportunities, including carousel ads (which feature multiple images) and video ads.

Fine-tune Your Targeting

More than anything, it is Facebook’s powerful targeting tools that help it stand out in the crowded social media marketing field. With a massive potential audience of built-in users and sophisticated capabilities for reaching out to your ideal consumers, Facebook Ads offers remarkable opportunities to not just drive up total traffic, but to get the traffic most likely to turn into hot leads and conversions for your brand.

With that in mind, it’s important to know how to use Facebook’s targeting tools correctly! This is going to take a lot of experimentation and hands-on trial and error, since every brand’s audience is going to look and behave a little differently.

Some general advice to keep in mind as you get started with targeting? Remember, first, that a warm audience – one who already knows about your service or product – will be easier to convert than a cold one. The most effective way to reach out to these people is with Facebook’s remarketing capabilities, which allow you to target a custom audience of users who have already logged time on your site. You can also build up your custom audience by manually providing contact information to Facebook (perhaps via your email marketing opt-in list) or else by creating a “lookalike” audience, designed to match your marketing with users who fit the profile of people who are already engaging with you.

The other way to ensure your marketing is reaching the right people? Be sure to exclude as many irrelevant groups as possible to reach your ideal audience; for example, if your services can only be applied locally, it doesn’t make sense to spend money garnering attention from people on the other side of the country.

Have any more questions about putting Facebook Ads to work for your brand? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line today to keep the conversation going.