Facebook is a powerful tool for businesses to reach new customers. But when organic posts reach their limit, Facebook Ads are the way to go.

At the end of 2016, 2.8 billion people were using social media and in 2017 that number is growing. Facebook stands apart with the most users and the highest engagement.  With 1.65 billion monthly active users EVERY business should be thinking about how to reach customers on that platform.

Facebook organic posts do well, but if you find traction with your organic post you might want to consider putting a little cash to increase the engagement or conversion. Whether you are recycling an old ad or creating a new one, you will want to know how to get the most bang for your buck.  

Know Your Goal

What do you want to measure: traffic, likes, conversions, video views, etc.

The first question Facebook asks when creating a campaign is “what is your marketing objective?” Facebook buckets objections into 3 categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Knowing your goal from the beginning will not only allow Facebook help you optimize your campaign, but will also give you a clear goal to create ads around. 

If your goal is to create awareness about your business, focus on targeting new audiences for which your product or brand serves as a “solution.”

If your goal is to increase purchases of a handbag you are pushing, then write copy that creates urgency to act and consider installing the Facebook pixel on your site to track conversions. 

Create Highly Targeted Demographics

Be specific about who you want to reach.

Most social media platform will capture a user’s age, sex, interests, and zip code. However, Facebook captures much more information, giving businesses an opportunity to better narrow down their target audience and get the right ad to the right user. 

Broad Targeting is to reach a large audience in an efficient way. If you want to cast a wide net, and don’t have much time to create different segments this is the way to go. Just keep in mind, unlike Google Adwords, Facebook will charge per impression. So broad targeting may cost you more money for poorer results. 

Precise Interest Targeting allows you to target users based on information they set up in their profile including their likes and interests, the Pages they like, apps they use, and other profile (timeline) content they’ve provided. When creating precise interest target, your groups may be smaller than expected but they will be highly targeted and more likely to convert. 

For example, if I wanted to target the “hip hop” community, I can choose from hip hop as an interest, included in a job title, as a field of study, a school type or a type of business.  

Create Powerful Ads

Strong ad text, a clear call to action and impactful imagery.

Now that you know your goal and your audience, how will you connect the two? Creating powerful ads with strong ad text, a clear call to action and impactful imagery will be the key to converting your target audience.

• > Create custom ads for each target demographic – don’t think one ad fits all.
• > Every ad should create relevancy, enforce credibility, and inspire action. Think about what your audience will find valuable, why they should trust you, and why should they buy it now? 
• > One clear call to action – don’t leave it up to the user to decide how they want to respond to the ad. Just give them one option.

Continuously Monitor and Test Your Ads

See how people are responding to your ads.

Creating ads are just the beginning, the real learning happens when your ad goes live.  Facebook will send you a recap at the end of the day, of the results of your campaigns. However, I recommend checking your ads twice a day depending on a number of ads and intended reach.

If your ads aren’t performing well, there are a few edits you can make to try to increase their effectiveness.  Change up text or images of ads that aren’t performing well. You can also change the target demographic. Changing each ad or ad set daily is not advised. You should give your ad some time “live” in order to really test if it is effective.  

Facebook just introduced Split Testing which is similar to A/B testing ads. You can test different versions of your ads on the same target group or test the same ads on different demographics.