By now you should have a fairly good idea of what a Facebook ad is, how it works and what it looks like. You should also understand the distinct advantages that Facebook advertising has over other forms of advertising online and you should know how to leverage those advantages for your own ends.
So there’s just one thing left to do… and that’s to get creating your ads!
Getting starting with ads
So step one of creating your Facebook ads is to select the goal of your ad. When you click ‘Create Ad’ through your account, Facebook will ask you: ‘What kind of results do you want for your ads’.
You then select from:
- Page post engagement
- Page likes
- Clicks to website
- Website conversions
- App installs
- App engagement
- Event response
- Offer claims
This will then define the type of ad that you will be creating so you don’t have to worry too much about all the different types we listed earlier (though this is very good to know).
Selecting Images and Editing Texts
The next step will be to create ad images. This will mean uploading an image from your computer that you will have either created yourself or commissions someone to create.
We’re not going to go into in-depth detail here on how to create images – but do bear in mind that an image is absolutely crucial for getting that initial attention, as well as for getting people to like and share your content.
Here’s a strange truth that you might not have immediately realized about page post links: when people share or like these, they will very often do so without actually clicking on the link and seeing where it points! So they are essentially promoting something you shared without seeing it themselves. Why? Because they make a quick snap judgement on the content and then decide whether they expect to like it and to want to share it. After reading, they will normally want to get on with other things, so looking interesting is just as important as being interesting.
You can hire people to create professional graphic design from sites like UpWork (formerly oDesk), Elance and even Fiverr. Alternatively, if you have some vector software (such as Adobe Illustrator) then you can try creating your own high definition
images. Learning photography and getting a good camera is also a good way to make your own images.
Another option is to find images in the Shutterstock database which you will be able to do when creating your ads. These look a little generic sometimes but they will also be guaranteed to be professional quality and to look like they belong as part of your ad campaign (which is important).
Here’s the thing though: you must never use an image that you think is just ‘good enough’ or you might harm your brand and you’ll at the same time be wasting time and money on ads that won’t perform for you.
Make sure you are highly confident in the image that is with your ad and you think it can help you to get more clicks, more likes and more shares.
Luckily, Facebook knows how important this part of the process is and has provided a feature to make it a little easier. That feature is the ability to create ads and to test different pictures with them. Actually, it lets you select anything up to six different images and it will then try showing each of them for a brief amount of time in order to ascertain which one performs best for you.
For those reading who have ever tried selling a product through a landing page or squeeze page, this idea may be familiar – it’s basically split testing. This means running small experiments to see what gets you the results you want most efficiently. It’s worth making the most of, so make sure you’re adding at least two or three pictures at this stage. Don’t see it as an excuse to upload sub-par images though: everything you add should be something you would potentially be willing to use.
Ad Copy
Now comes the difficult part – adding the ad copy. This is what is going to be used to really sell your product, service, brand or page and it will be your best chance to tell people why they should care about what you’re offering.
When you create your ad copy, you’re going to be working with just a few fields. Those fields are: the headline, the text and the news feed link description (which is for those ads that appear on the news feed).
A little more information on each:
Headlines: These are 25 characters long and are essentially the titles of your ads. The main objective here is going to be to get people’s attention and from there you want to get them to read further. This should be a little bombastic but should also explain in brief what your ad is selling.
Ad Text: This is 90 characters long. This is the body of the ad that will explain a little bit about what you’re selling and why people should click to read more, like the page or do whatever else. You want to say something like: Yes, we’re really selling these beautiful shirts for just $9.99. But hurry and buy while stocks last!
You can also add a ‘call to action button’ depending on the type of your ad. These have been shown to increase conversion rates, so if there’s one that’s appropriate for your campaign – use it!
News feed descriptions: If you are paying for a news link ad, then you can add a little more text – or another 90 characters to be precise. This is the part where you talk to your audience and say something like: ‘Check out our great offer, for fans only! Like our page for more’. Or alternatively, you might use this section just to say a little about your brand.
Because this section is only available in the news feed ads and you get a lot more space for your image, these are generally the best choice for the majority of campaigns.
As for how you write your ads, bear in mind that you only have a very limited number of words to work with and that your audience will have only a very limited amount of attention: they didn’t come here to be marketed to. As such, you need to make sure you keep your text short and sweet: get to the point quickly and try to choose your works efficiently so that you can say as much as possible with as few words as you can.
While you only have a few words, you still need to follow the advice that you normally get for promotional copywriting. We’ve already mentioned AIDA and this is certainly an important tool. You should always start with Awareness because you need to make sure your audience knows what it is you do – being obtuse never helped anyone.
Interest comes next, then desire and then your call to action. In this case, we can break this down into each of the categories:
The headline: Awareness The ad text: Interest
The post text: Desire
The call to action button: Action
(This isn’t a strict rule but can be useful as a basic structure)
The tough bit is getting your readers to be interested in your product and then to desire it in just 90-180 words.
To do this, you should again think as you would in any copywriting and focus on what is known as the ‘value proposition’. The value proposition simply asks the question: where is the value in this product or service? Or to rephrase: how will the buyer’s life be better as a result of buying/using this product? When doing this, you also need to ensure you are focusing on the emotional element and creating a real image in the mind of the reader.
So if you were promoting a binary options broker, what would be your value proposition? The simple answer is that your users would gain value because they would be richer as a result of using the service. Thus you might try to paint an image of them living the kind of lifestyle that they dream about: you can do that with an image of a luxury yacht, or you can do that with a piece of text saying: ‘Your friends will be jealous of your seafront mansion!’. Now you have desire.
Another trick is to try adding in some kind of time pressure or another element that will convince them to buy more quickly. Insinuating that you have limited stock, or that your
offer is about to run out will encourage people to act on impulse and to click the ‘buy’ button. This is important because actually the vast majority of things we buy that we don’t absolutely need are bought on impulse. They are purchased as a result of emotions we felt at the time and if we’re given time to go away and ‘think about’ the item, we will often come to the conclusion we don’t need it. So get them to act fast by saying your product is available for a limited time only.
And remember too what we said earlier about sometimes not wanting everyone to click. If you are trying to make direct conversions, then think as well about how you can filter out the people who might not really be interested in buying.
Ad Position
Ad this stage you will also be able to choose your ad position. This is important as it is what will allow you to add more text if you choose a news feed ad and because it will drastically impact on the appearance of the image and the way the ad will be viewed.
Targeting your audience
The next step is targeting your audience. We have already touched on this a fair amount but to recap: this is the process of witling down the people who will actually see your ad so that you are directly targeting the people who are the most likely to buy.
This is easy to understand in theory but when you come down to it, you will find that you actually have a number of choices and you need to think carefully about what you select for each one.
So to start with, you are going to choose ‘demographic targeting’ which means looking at the precise demographic.
To help you with this, try to imagine your ‘ideal customer’. Ask yourself: who is most likely to want to buy your product? How old are they? Where do they live? Are they male or female? Write up a profile for them and imagine they’re a real person.
Location
The ability to target your audience by geography is one of the most powerful features of Facebook advertising and is something you should use in a big way.
Of course the main types of businesses to benefit from this aspect will be the highstreet stores, restaurants and other businesses that can only be used ‘in person’. E-commerce stores can sell to anyone in the world but if you’re a hairdresser, you will only be able to work with customers in your area code. As such, why would you want to pay to advertise to anyone else?
Another big advantage of targeting by location is that it allows you to reduce the competition. If you are advertising to everyone on Facebook, then that means you’ll be competing with a ton of other global brands. If you specifically focus on one area though, then you’ll become a big fish in a small pond and your ads will be more likely to show up for a lower CPC.
For this reason, some companies will even decide to take a local approach to their advertising even if they can ship internationally. This way, they can focus on one area and become well known for that particular audience and then branch out later once they already have a strong foothold with a portion of the market.
The great thing about targeting by location this way as well, is that you can choose the area you want to target and then also choose how large you want the radius to be. How
far are people likely to travel for your service? How far do you want to deliver? And how niche do you want to be?
Other Demographics
There are a ton of other demographics you can use on top of location for precisely targeting your audience. Two obvious ones are age and gender. Here you can think about the age of your most typical customer as well as their gender and then advertise to them directly.
But bear in mind too that you might think about this differently if you have different goals. For instance, you might not be so interested in selling to your ‘typical buyer’ but may instead want to increase the awareness in your other demographics in order to expand your audience. In this case, your question may be ‘how can we better appeal to X demographic’? Or ‘which demographic are we missing out on’? You may specifically decide to target elderly customers or women and create an ad campaign based around this intention.
Advanced Demographics
Facebook goes a lot deeper than just letting you target by age and gender though. At the same time, you can also target your audience by a lot of much more specific criteria and this can be a very powerful tool. Just click ‘More Demographics’ and you’ll get the option to look at:
- Political leaning
- Life events
- Religion
- Ethnicity
- Job title
- Marital status
And more! This is an incredibly powerful tool because it means you can target a very specific kind of customer. Particularly useful for instance is the ability to target by job
title: this will then allow you to sell tools that might be particularly useful for certain careers but at the same time it also gives you the ability to reach the ‘decision makers’ for companies. That means you can target executives and managers and use this to sell B2B services. Targeting by job title also gives you a relatively good indication of salary and you can use this to ensure you are reaching people who can afford what you’re selling.
Note though that as you do this, there is a fine line to be walked. This is the line between being highly specific about who you are targeting versus still reaching a broad audience. Of course you don’t want such strict criteria that only one person in the world is likely to see your ad!
Interests
Another way you can target your Facebook ads is by interests and this is again immensely powerful. Of course, when you target by interests, this means that you can pick only people who have actually expressed some interest in what you’re selling.
Are you selling an album? Is it electronic dance music? Then look for Facebook users that have listed ‘electronic dance music’ or ‘EDM’ as their interest. Are you selling tennis rackets? Then look for someone with an interest in tennis!
Again you should write the profile of your ‘average’ customer. What are their hobbies and interests? What do they spend their weekends doing? What are their goals and ambitions?
Interests also gives you some other interesting possibilities. For instance, you can look for users that are fans of your competitors’ products. It’s a little sneaky perhaps but it’s also genius!
Think as well about what interests might lead to an interest in your product. For instance, if someone is interested in virtual reality, they might also be interested in drones – seeing as they’re both examples of quite advanced technologies.
It’s worth doing a little research before you start filling out this section. Again, you don’t want to go for obscure interests that no one actually has – so look around some profiles and see what broad categories of interests come up often. When choosing interests, Facebook also gives you the option to click ‘Browse’ and from here, you can look through the suggestions that they have to offer.
Behaviors
People aren’t always entirely honest about their interests. If a guy is interested in ‘My Little Pony’ he may well not include that on his Facebook page. What’s more, you might have forgotten to remove ‘rock climbing’ from your list of interests, even though you haven’t been for 10 years. And anyway, just because you’re interested in playing the drums, that doesn’t mean you can and it doesn’t mean you’ve ever bought a drum stick.
The point I’m getting at here is that interests, though useful, can be misleading. That’s why Facebook also offers the ability to look at ‘behaviors’. Behaviors include things like purchase history, intent, engagement and more. This is even advanced enough to allow you to target – for instance – people who are just about to go on holiday and who are currently browsing flights. This might be incredibly useful if for instance you run a hotel and you want to find people that are in the market for somewhere to stay!
Connections
Connections is another very interesting option that this time allows you to target people based on their connection (or lackthereof to you). So for instance, you could use this method to target people who are friends of your Facebook fans, or who aren’t yet fans of your page.
One potential use of this is that it lets you try and expand your audience and gain new likes for your pages from people who may be more inclined to like them. This can also be an interesting way to potentially sell your items as gifts. For instance, if you sell branded t-shirts and your fans buy from you regularly, then marketing to their friends around Christmas may not be a bad strategy.
Another useful advantage of marketing to people’s friends is that it means you have social proof. In other words, the people seeing your page will see that their friends like you and as such they will be more inclined to want to buy from you – thinking your products must be good!
As you can see, each of these different settings has a clear and obvious use – as well as numerous others.
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences is a fantastic tool for any digital marketers. Essentially, if you have a list of e-mail addresses and/or phone numbers, then you can upload this list to Facebook and then create a ‘custom audience’ to market to based on that list.
This is incredibly powerful for anyone who has spent time building a mailing list through their website. Normally a mailing list is used for direct e-mail marketing, which has the potential to be incredibly powerful. By using this feature though, you can advertise to your mailing list as well – giving you an entirely new way to reach them that will be more visual and that will mean you have the ability to ‘be everywhere’.
Mailing lists are great because they are highly targeted. If you’ve been collecting e-mails through your blog, then everyone who has added their e-mail address will probably have enjoyed your content and will want to hear more from you. Thus, when they see an advert appear on Facebook offering them a special offer for a short-time only – they’ll be quite inclined to click!
Creating a Facebook Page
If you’re going to be using page post links and page post likes, then you need to have a good Facebook page in order to tie everything together. This will allow you to gain a larger audience to market to and it will ensure that when someone does go to your page, they will have only positive experiences.
Creating a Facebook page is very similar to creating a profile page for yourself personally and you have many of the same elements: such as information, a profile picture and a cover image.
One tip here is to make sure you have strong branding that comes across in your page. A great logo makes a world of difference here so if you haven’t already, invest the time and/or money into creating a good one. Likewise, consider using a writer to fill in your details and make sure that your writing style matches the tone of your business.
