Facebook is a thriving platform for anyone looking to boost brand awareness. With 2.6 billion monthly active users, it’s currently the biggest social networking platform...
Facebook is a thriving platform for anyone looking to boost brand awareness.
With 2.6 billion monthly active users, it’s currently the biggest social networking platform worldwide. Spreading the word about your business on the platform is endless—from videos to paid ads, you can get your message across to hundreds of thousands of people.
Facebook is so much more than just a branding tool, though. Thanks to a string of ad and targeting features, it’s a proven selling tool for brands in every industry.
But this isn’t to say that using Facebook ads is like fishing with dynamite. As much as Facebook offers advanced targeting capabilities, most brands fail to use them to their advantage and end up with a negative ROI.
We’ve handled countless Facebook ad campaigns in the past, and we’ve learned how to create ad campaigns that drive conversions the hard way. With this guide, we hope to provide clear direction if you feel like you’re spinning your wheels so you can rake in more sales.
Keep in mind that not all Facebook ads are designed for conversions. There are three marketing goals for your ads: awareness, consideration, and conversions.
This article will focus on conversion-driven ads, which inspire audiences to take profitable action. With this objective, you can:
Whether you want to boost page visits, ramp up email registrations, or push customers to make a purchase, the end goal is to make your customers buy from you.
You could call this stage bottom-of-the-funnel marketing. Bottom-funnel content moves solution-aware customers into product-aware customers. This means that your goal is to position your product as the best solution to the problem.
But this type of ad content only works if your customer is on the right stage of the marketing funnel. For instance, there’s no point in throwing out an awareness ad to someone who’s trying to choose between you and a competitor.
So conversions ads only work if you truly understand your audience.
Conversion is a key element in your paid search strategy. With conversion rate optimization, you can maximize every dollar spent on your campaign by finding the sweet spot that convinces your prospects to take action.
A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who complete a desired action. This could be buying a product or filling out a form. By keeping track of conversion rates, you can:
Data shows that the average conversion rate for Facebook ads across all industries is 9.21%. Basing on this number alone, however, isn’t a useful yardstick to measure the success of your Facebook campaign.
We suggest that you establish a baseline that reflects your current rate. For good measure, aim for a 2% rate before you shoot for the stars. At the end of the day, it all boils down to setting a realistic goal on where you want to be for the next 30 days, six months, and year.
As long as you’re able to hit your goals and achieve a rate beyond your current one, then you’re on the right track.
When it comes to Facebook—and social media, for that matter—you can’t adopt a build it and leave it approach to marketing. Your true success lies in adopting a holistic approach that covers all the bases.
The thing about Facebook is that it’s a dynamic platform where one day a strategy works, and the next day it doesn’t. And this could potentially dissuade businesses looking for immediate results to their campaign.
Our team keeps up with these rapid changes by making swift, data-driven decisions. Executing this approach properly means testing things out until you get a handle on what works for each industry.
So when you’re tracking ad performance, make it a point to stay on top of the new trends, tools, and techniques for campaign optimization. But more importantly, you’ll need to track events via advanced pixel implementation to map the customer journey on your site and pass the values on to Facebook.
You’ll also need to keep a close eye on daily performance, before and after customers click on your ad.
We’ve run hundreds of Facebook ad campaigns for our clients. Through a lot of trial and error, we’ve managed to put our finger on what works, and we’ve decided to put together a list of some elements that make our ads successful.
With this guide, we hope you can adjust your strategy and start delivering ROI for your business.
Facebook ads can have a potential reach of over 200 million people. As great as it may seem to get your brand out to more people, it’s impossible to drive conversions unless they’re the right people.
In fact, poor targeting is one of the main reasons Facebook campaigns deliver a negative ROI.
The first step is to create a unique buyer persona and incorporate one of their pain points into your ad. Some info to include in your buyer persona include:
Here’s one of our Facebook ads that incorporates one of the pain points of our customers for Full Suite: the hassle of handling licensing, administrative, and legal tasks. FullSuite takes away the pain of tedious tasks by helping people focus on running their business.
As long as you understand the problem you’re solving, it’s much easier to design your ad copy and image to highlight the benefit you offer.
Without a goal for your ad, there’s no clear way for you to measure its effectiveness.
The great thing about Facebook Ad Manager is that it lets you track important metrics related to the goals you’ve set. For instance:
Your ad’s design and delivery will depend on what you’re looking to achieve. After all, the best ads are the ones that deliver on their promise.
Tenderbites isn’t just your ordinary meatshop. They provide premium meat cuts delivered to your doorstep. For this ad, we capitalized on the needs of at-home cooks craving a fancy steak night. After all, it’s possible to prep your own steak without dining in an expensive steakhouse.
And that’s one of our ingredients to a great ad—it should offer a practical solution that makes your customer’s life easier.
At its core, a value proposition is a promise made to a customer that you’ll deliver something they want. It should answer the question, “Why should I bother clicking this ad?”
A blunt way to put it would be the benefit of doing business with you minus the cost.
Your value proposition could be anything, as long as it’s a benefit that your product or service offers. But when crafting your value proposition, you’ll need to keep in mind that throwing every possible benefit at your customers is akin to giving them nothing at all.
Audiences want something personal, not generic. So keep it as simple and straightforward as you can.
In this campaign, we highlighted FullSuite’s unique selling point: they help start-ups and SMEs take care of their day-to-day financial recording.
Since we know how much of a headache DIY-ing your own finances can get, we used phrases like “save yourself from worries,” and “peace of mind” to emphasize the convenience that FullSuite offers.
Our brains are hardwired for visual content. In fact, we can process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
This is more important in this day and age of social media, big data, and global internet access. Everyone is faced with volumes of content, and visuals alone are uniquely poised to cut through all the static.
When crafting your ad, use eye-catching visuals that will hook your audience and tell them about what you have to offer. Visual elements can help you establish an emotional connection and make your customers feel like they’re missing out.
Take this ad as an example. Everyone’s familiar with the hype for the MCU. It’s everywhere on our News Feeds, from screencaps to memes.
In this campaign for Anotoys, we drummed up the hype for the next film of the franchise, striking at the heart of Marvel figure collectors. We used actual photos of action figures for Dr. Strange, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the Infinity Gauntlet to encourage collectors to check out Anotoys’ inventory in anticipation of the next installment of the MCU.
Data from Hubspot Research shows that more than 50% of consumers prefer videos over other types of content, trumping emails and blogs. It has proven itself as a useful medium throughout the entire flywheel because of its ability to connect with people in conversational, actionable, and measurable ways.
With the growing popularity of TikTok and Instagram stories, it’s no surprise that videos help grab customer attention.
One of our clients, WordRake, offers an in-line editing software for professionals. Using the tool helps people edit for clarity and brevity. For this ad, used a video to show how inefficient the editing process can get without the software. We decided this would be the best approach than using words to explain the benefits of the software.
Promising a benefit relevant to your target audience could push them to learn more about what you have to offer. By putting benefits front and center, you’re making the ad about your customer and not your brand.
You get bonus points if your ad communicates that you can deliver benefits without the problem.
Get the meat you want, how you want it. One of our clients, Tenderbites, provides top-quality cuts prepared by skilled butchers and delivered to your doorstep. For this ad, we incorporated three different elements to create a hard-to-resist offer:
Some of our best Facebook ads incorporate these three elements and they’re great for driving profitable action.
You probably recall this famous line uttered by Don Vito Corleone to aging singer Johnny Fontane in The Godfather. It teaches us an important marketing lesson: you can’t just be 10% better than your competitors—you’ll need to completely blow them out of the water.
Sometimes, you’ll need to make a “mafia offer.” And no, we don’t mean sending a hitman or putting a horse’s head on someone’s bed like in The Godfather.
Rather, this type of offer is something that’s twice as good as everyone else’s. And you’ll need incredible visuals and a well-crafted CTA that your customers will be left no choice but to click your ad.
Here’s a great example of how we made this happen for Anotoys. Our goal was to encourage collectors to participate in the last day of Charity Fundraising, where some items were available at up to 40% off.
Through our clever wordplay, “Buy a hero and be a hero to our COVID-19 heroes,” we turned toy collecting into a cause. Who wouldn’t want to get a discounted figure and make sure their purchase goes to helping our medical frontliners? It’s a well-timed, cleverly crafted ad that drove significant results.
If you’re a brand that’s just starting out, you’ll need to leverage the power of social proof to get people to pay attention to you. Even more so if you’re in the healthcare sector where garnering trust is a must for conversions.
After all, only 96% of consumers trust ads. This means you’ll need to line your ducks in a row to show your prospects that you’re the real deal.
Consider including these useful info into your ads:
Be wary of sounding too opportunistic, though. Avoid sounding hacky, self-serving, or inauthentic unless you want to erode the credibility you’re trying to build in the first place.
In our Facebook campaign for WorkRake, we put the results of the software in the heart of this ad—Impress Your Clients with Your Documents.
By using the editing software, customers can tighten their writing and enhance the quality of their draft. And with better writing, it’s easier to impress clients and get your message across.
Facebook ads let you generate targeted traffic from active and engaged customers. Setting up a successful Facebook campaign entails partnering with the pros who can amplify your reach and help you connect with people ready to convert.
Maximize your impact and partner with Growth Rocket. Get in touch with us today.
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