While using Facebook to advertise, it’s important to stay up-to-date on your target market and what the people in that sector are interested in. Facebook has a variety of different targeting options that you could use so that you can better find your target market and target your ads to fit those specific people. You can target by demographics, such as education, financial, different life events, interests, hobbies, and behavior when they were recently married, their political beliefs, when they recently traveled, if and how frequently they travel, etc. Here, we’ll reveal how to optimize your Facebook Advertising to get the best results for your business.
1. Targeting and Tracking
Analytics are important! Not only is it vital to target through Facebook interests, you can also use other audiences through a pixel that’s placed on your website. This is a simple way to expand your reach and get in front of the right people. You can track your past website visitors and target people who have already been to your website, versus targeting a cold audience.
Another way to make sure you’re reaching the right audience is through testing. While creating your Facebook ads, a good practice is A/B testing. A/B testing is when you make two or more copies and test out creatives to see which version performs better. In doing this, you’ll be able to determine what your potential customers actually want to see. This can provide you more direction in what types of ads and content you should be creating to get the most conversions.
2. Get Creative!
Not only is your targeting important, but it’s also vital to have great creative. People generally have a low attention span when scrolling through social media, so video works better to attract the most people. Scrolling through Facebook in 2019 means scrolling through videos and seeing a lot of interactive photos. You rarely ever see articles nowadays. It’s important that your ads are eye-catching and stop-scrolling worthy if you do decide to go the image route. There’s a lot of content out there, and you need to stand out.
3. Videos Are Best
If you are going to advertise through a video, you want to make sure that your advertisement is less than one minute long and the first three to five seconds have a great call to action. They should be unique, grab the viewer’s attention and engage them immediately.
When using a video ad, you want to make sure that those first few seconds are really eye-catching, have a lot to say, and get the story out right away. The video itself should revolve around an interesting topic or relevant trend — in short, it should be exactly what your target market wants to see. Consider adding a bit of music to set the tone and engage the viewer.
You should use the highest quality of video and images that you possibly can in Facebook advertising, because the higher quality video and picture, the more professional you look while advertising. This can help you come across as a leader within the industry.
4. Check Your Copy
The copy you’re using on your Facebook advertising is important to the campaign’s overall success. The text should be very specific and explain the product or service you’re advertising. Nowadays, people don’t want to read a big paragraph in an ad. It’s important to limit your characters, avoid cliches, and make sure that the call to action is obvious in your copy.
5. Try Carousel Ads
In addition to using video ads, another popular ad is a carousel ad. These include different images in one ad where you can flip through and see different items, like clothing items, products, or different types of services that you offer. It’s a great way to showcase multiple different images.
In Summation
Optimizing your advertising on Facebook is one of the best ways to make an impression with your customers. When creating Facebook ads, remember:
- Use your websites pixel and other data from Facebook to help focus on specific customers and people that have previously come in contact with your business.
- Make sure you don’t get missed! Put out content that is stop-scrolling worthy.
- Videos should be less than 60 seconds long and feature a strong CTA in the first 3-5 seconds.
- Testing and tracking your advertisements allows you to reap the benefits.
When advertising, make sure that you stay up to date on the best Facebook advertising practices in order to have your ads perform at an optimal level. Contact Ballantine to help manage your advertising and boost your outreach today!
*Note: This is an updated version of a blog post published July 2017. Read the original post below!*
The social advertising platform on Facebook offers a unique opportunity: the ability to target viewers based on interests and hobbies that they’ve self-selected.
Unfortunately, though, it’s becoming a high-clutter environment, so it’s not enough to simply upload an ad and forget about it.
In this article, we’ll show you 15 ways you can optimize your Facebook campaign to ensure that you’re the talk of the town. Let’s get started.
- Professional vs Casual. Mix up your language. Does professional third-party language work better than casual “you” and “I” language?
- Illustration vs Photograph. Have you tried both types of images as your hero shot? Illustrations can often stand out against a field of product photography.
- One color vs another color. Use a colored background on your image. Try multiple colors.
- High contrast/high brightness vs low contrast/low brightness. Ramp up the brightness and contrast in your images. This can make your image shine bright among a bunch of other contrast-neutral ads.
- Border vs no border. Consider a thick black border to bound your image to make your ad stand out. Try a thin red border to contrast with Facebook’s blue UI elements. Try an image with a background that matches the site’s background color so that the ad easily blends into the site.
- Regular border vs false border and dropshadow. Another border option you can try to make your ad really pop is to add a false border with a dropshadow. This gives the illusion, especially on sites with a flat design, like Facebook, that your image stands off the page.
- Clear image vs blurred image. While a clear image can be a sharp representation of your product, a blurred image makes the eye shoot over to the image in order to make out what’s being blurred. Readers love a puzzle to solve.
- Ugly vs sex appeal. Sex sells, but for your audience, maybe the opposite is true, too?
- Professional stock photo vs amateur informal photo. Sometimes, your professional stock photo site will be your best friend. Other times, you’ll want to use your smartphone to grab an amateur shot of your product or model. A lot of Facebook users are turned off by stock photos because they don’t match the vibe of the site: friends informally posting pictures.
- Straight lines vs curved lines. Instead of using square cornered elements in your ad, try rounding corners or adding unique curves. These stand out against Facebook’s spartan blue colorblock.
- Upright photo vs angled. When you rotate your stock photography by 45 degrees, you make it stand out without looking strange. Give it a shot in both directions.
- Mirror image of your original image. Simple — just flip your image horizontally in any image editor. This matters because the motion of the image can lead readers into your ad or away from it.
- Headline calls to action. Finally, we’ve reached the section covering changes to copy. It’s all the way at the bottom of the list because, as much as we’d like to believe that our features and benefits drive our sales, the image drives the vast majority of clicks on your image. Nonetheless, try various calls to action.
- Positive vs negative attitude. Use your best judgment here, but sometimes the promise of adding a positive is not as strong as the promise of removing a negative. Modify your copy to suit.
- Relevant to time period ad is running or generic. Since you can schedule campaigns and change them in real-time on Facebook, there’s nothing to stop you from running an ad that says, “Limited Time: May 1st Only!”
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
