Imagine a goldfish. It’s perfect and beautiful and very, very bright. Unfortunately, that goldfish shares its pond with a million other equally beautiful goldfish. In order to get fed, it has to clamour and slop over every other fish, gulping and gasping for air. Your online advertisements can sometimes feel like that goldfish: pushing and shoving over spots on Facebook to get clicks and conversions. Since 2010, Facebook is a fishpond that’s grown over 680%, meaning that $8 billion is spent on Facebook ads. The reason why?
Facebook has over 1.94 billion users who are active on a monthly basis.
We’ve honed in on the best ways to utilise Facebook ads for immediate and effective results. This post will break down what effective ads look like and how to recreate them yourself. Rather than sweating it out for Facebook, make Facebook do the legwork for you!
Know your Audience
Build up information about the people who visit your site on Facebook or who are interested in areas similar to your business. Learning about who visits your business page will help create a buyer persona.
Buyer personas pick out the key features common to the majority of your audience. Learn the age, wage, life stage of your audience. For example, if you sell staff management systems, you’ll likely be targeting HR departments. Your buyer persona might look like the following:
Jill Bloggs, a 42-year-old HR manager of an IT firm, hates long sales pitches, manual data entry and clunky payroll systems. She is married with two kids.
Those key features your buyers are interested in will be the foundation for your advertisements, so pay careful attention to this step. If you’re advertising to the wrong audience, no one will buy your product. It’s like if your fish was looking for food at the wrong end of the pond.
Nail your offer
Knowing your audience is one thing, but making your product attractive to them is a whole other kettle of fish. Think about the problems your product fixes for your audience. One hot tip to consider is that people buy things as a means to fix their problems or make life more convenient.
Jill wants a more streamlined payroll system so she can spend more time teaching her son Tommy to ride a bike.
Your staff management system can solve Jill’s problem, but let’s take it up a notch. Make this an even more attractive product by throwing in a free trial or a discount code. Bonus deals transform your advertisement from a problem-solver to a game changer.
Effective Design of Facebook Ads
Facebook often rolls out different ad formats to add variance and flexibility for their advertisers. Be sure that yours suits your audience and the product you’re selling. Test out the designs on offer and tailor them to create unique ads.
Even though you know how great your product is, potential customers will likely be a bit more cautious. New customers will want to know that the product they’re buying delivers. Help them out by including testimonials from previous customers. Feature reviews and comments in your ads and your click rate will increase.
Images are another awesome way to engage with users and audiences. Make sure your photos are engaging and tell a story. Action shots, interesting objects and fun concepts in high quality are far more attention grabbing than a bit of clip art.
Videos Get Views
It’s true. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a video can have subtitles. Your ad should speak volumes, even when your viewer is watching on mute. Colour, composition and movement should really shine in your videos.
Write a great script that’s punchy, minimal and suited to your brand. Reading the subtitles on a video, your viewer should get the look and feel of your product, and get excited about it. Appeal to the reader’s emotions rather than their practical needs. Make your message clear and precise. If you’re not great with words, get a copywriter to write it for you.
Just do it!
Creating a sense of urgency can push readers to action. Imperatives and short phrases are great for calling the reader to action:
“Act now!”
“Limited time only!”
“Don’t miss out!”
Phrases like these drive traffic to your site and get people looking at your great offers. Be sure that your ad links directly to the product you’re advertising. Clicks won’t convert if you just lead viewers to your website homepage.
Experiment with phrasing and try different formats that will engage with your target market. In the end, it’s what they think that will determine whether or not your fish gets fed.
Measuring Results of Facebook Ads
How do you know if your ad is working? Monitor the changes in the following areas:
- How many people “like” your page
- Online sales or generation of leads
- Post-level engagement
- New opt-ins for your newsletters
- Website click-throughs.
These are just some suggestions, but will largely depend on your marketing strategy. Larger, established online businesses will likely want to monitor leads converted, rather than the number of “likes,” which a startup company might prefer to know. Just be consistent in your measure of success.
One Final Thing…
Although you’re looking to use Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website, think about your business’ engagement as well. Learn a bit about Facebook algorithms and you’ll see that traffic is driven to businesses and pages that engage more with the social network around them.
Let your users know you and they’ll be more likely to trust the product you’re selling. Posting photos of your staff doing some activity, or a cool fact about your niche product will all contribute and add value to the ads you’re campaigning with. If you’re a beautiful goldfish with a personality, not only will you get fed, you’ll continue to grow.
About the Author:
Energise Web Design is a small agency based in Whangarei, New Zealand. They offer a range of services, including; internet marketing, website design and search engine optimisation.