ads

Facebook offers a range of advertising tools that can be extremely helpful for businesses of all sizes. With more than 2 billion active users per month, Facebook ads have a reach that would be difficult for most brands to achieve through traditional marketing channels.

By Rae Steinbach

While access to this large user base is one of the primary advantages of advertising on Facebook, the best value comes from narrowing your audience to its most relevant segment. This post will look at some of the ways a Facebook marketing agency and other businesses can use the tools available on Facebook to get the most from their budget.

Research Your Customers

If you want to create effective ads, you have to know who your target audience is. What do they look for when they shop for the type of product or service you sell? What are their pain points? What kind of experience is most likely to engage this group of customers? Once you know the answers to some of these questions, it will be much easier to develop ads that encourage purchases.

To get these answers, you are going to need to perform a little consumer research. If you have an existing customer or email subscriber list, you could reach out with a survey. However, there is more to designing a good survey than just asking questions; you have to choose the right ones to ask. Consider  offering some incentive for participation.

Check Out the Competition

If you want to find some winning strategies, look no further than your top competitors. They’ve likely spent time and money researching the best strategies and testing various ads against each other. If you see a particular type of ad that is having success for a competing brand, you might want to launch your efforts by following the successful strategies of your competitors.

Make Your Ads Hard to Resist

Your ad is competing with other content for the time and attention of consumers. To get the best results from your Facebook advertising efforts, you have to develop ads that move your audience to action.

There are several strategies you can use to get customers to click on your ads. You want your ads to demonstrate the value of taking action. You should use them to address the consumer’s pain points, and consider using tactics like urgency and scarcity to inspire action. People are more likely to act quickly on offers that are only available for a limited time. You could also consider something like giving a bonus to the first 500 customers that click through.

Target Your Audience

Facebook has a lot of users, but you don’t want to just send your ads out to widest audience possible. The best value comes from finding the audience that is most likely to act, and then advertising to people in that group. With Facebook, you have a wide range of targeting options that include everything from age and gender to location and interests.

If you already have customer information, you can use it to target clients you already know. You can use Facebook custom audiences to send ads to people who have visited your website in the past, subscribers on your email list, users that follow your Facebook page, or visitors that have taken specific actions on your site.

Test Different Audiences and Ads

You don’t want to assume that any one audience is the best or that any single ad is the most effective. If you want to have the greatest impact with your marketing budget, you will need to do some testing.

Create audiences that are slightly different from one another to see how the distinct groups respond to the same ad. You should also do A/B testing to find the different elements of ads that have the most success among each segment of your audience.

Make Your Links Relevant

You don’t want your links to take people to your homepage or to your Facebook page. You want to take them somewhere that is the next step in completing a purchase. Instead of sending customers to your home page, you should send them to a product or  landing page that was designed specifically for that ad campaign.

If you just send people to your homepage or a generic landing page, there won’t be a clear next step for them to take. When the link is relevant to the content of the ad, the customer will be more likely to move on to the next stage because it is designed to encourage the desired action.

Retargeting

After you have run some campaigns, you will see that some people clicked on the ad but failed to convert. This could be due to any number of different reasons, but you can recover some of these lost conversions with retargeting.

With Facebook ads, you can retarget customers that clicked on the ad, but did not move on to complete a sale. Since these customers showed some initial interest, there is a high chance that you can convert a good number of them. Instead of sending them the same ad again, display a new ad that reinforces the value of your product. You may also want to consider increasing the urgency of the ad and offering additional incentives.

Rae Steinbach is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing (of course).

Facebook stock photo by IB Photography/Shutterstock