Facebook Advertising Update: Are you Gaining what you Need?

So, you’ve spent hours creating some fantastic content for Facebook and yet no one has seen it? It’s a story we hear all the time. If visitors aren’t coming to your Facebook page, then you need to take your page to them in the form of adverts.

Ultimately a successful Facebook ad is created through: Great design that attracts your viewers’ attention and focused advertising aimed at your target audience.

In this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can create a successful advertising campaign on Facebook.

Choose your image very carefully!

This is the first thing that your audience will see hopefully what grabs their attention, so it needs to be eye-catching. It doesn’t have to be a picture of your product; it just needs to grab your viewer’s attention. You can add text to your image but it can’t contain more than 25% in text (so no sneaky extra advertising on the image!).

Try to follow your branding throughout the advert to provide continuity to your business and to help your audience recognise you. If you can choose an effective image, then the hardest part is done.

Include a call to action

It’s important to include a call to action in your advert. This means telling your audience what you want them to do next e.g “Find out More”, “Contact Us” or “Book Now”.
When you viewer clicks on your advert, they will know exactly what they need to do to get the great things you’ve told them about. A call to action will help to improve your overall conversion rate and decrease your cost per conversion.

Create shareable content

The key to a successful advert is to identify the content that your audience engages with and to promote it for better performance. Monitor your Facebook insights and see what type of content is the most effective with your target audience. Whether that is motivational quotes, videos or product advertising, identify it and promote it.

Sponsored competitions and giveaways create very effective shareable content however they must be used with caution. They will help to boost your statistics for a short period but often the followers you gain will only be interested in the giveaway rather than buying your products.

Use video

Video consistently produces the highest engagement from an audience out of all types of advertising media. Consider using video to advertise your product instead of just an image and text. Animations can be produced for next to nothing or you could invest in a professional video to be filmed.

Narrow your target audience

Facebook allows you to advertise directly to your target audience by filtering by various demographics. You can build an audience by targeting age, gender and location and then narrow these audiences to include interests and even their behaviour. For example, if you’re selling baby clothes, you could target your adverts towards women aged 20-40, who live nearby and have previously been searching for maternity clothes.

By creating a specific target audience for your adverts, you will produce higher quality results from your Facebook Ads.

One of the best features of Facebook advertising is that you can create a set of different adverts aimed at completely different audiences. For example, you could create a second audience of women aged 40+ who have been searching for children’s toys and then produce another advert aimed at grandmothers who want to buy clothes for their grandchildren.

By producing multiple adverts for different audiences, your customers will feel as though you’re appealing specifically to them and therefore be more likely to click.

Try different designs

It’s important to test a variety of designs when creating an advert. Experiment with pictures, font and layout and then run each ad for a short period to see which gets the best response. Once you’ve trialled your adverts, invest more money into the most effective one. You can also test out your audience targeting in the same way.

Testimonials

People are often afraid of buying from a new company because they’re scared of losing money or investing in a bad product. Testimonials help to reassure your audience that your product is great value for money and that buying from you is the right choice.

Testimonials can be shown in a variety of ways which make them more engaging to your audience. You could create an image with a quote on a website such as www.canva.com or even film your customers leaving you wonderful feedback.

By promoting your testimonials, more people will see them and gain trust in your business.