Did you know advertisers spent $50.30 billion on Facebook last year? And that number is expected to increase to $58.11 billion dollars this year. While it’s a social media platform that might not seem as trendy or hip as Instagram and Tiktok, the numbers don’t lie. For advertisers, it’s a gold mine. Facebook has almost 3 billion users, making it the world’s biggest social media platform. It provides a significant reach for advertisers and marketers extending across every single market or niche. However, you definitely do not want to advertise to all Facebook users; it would be very costly. This is where Facebook’s extensive data about its users become extremely valuable. It allows for micro-targeting. As a user, you might be wary of the vast amount of information Facebook can gather from your profile. As an advertiser, this is a major advantage that enables you to curate the type of audience you want to reach, down to their interests and behavior. Facebook even has Lookalike Audiences, which allows you to see the people that share similarities with your most profitable customers and connect with them.
While it’s difficult to definitively say which social media platform is the cheapest when advertising, Facebook offers a relatively affordable avenue for advertisers. In addition, it offers a great feature that allows you to set your budget from the beginning. The “budget” has two types: campaign spending limit and account spending limit, which help ensure you don’t overspend on marketing. But at the end of the day, you are spending your hard-earned money. This means that you need to be able to see results through clicks and conversion rates that would benefit your business.
To optimize your Facebook advertising strategy, here are 7 tips for making high-converting ads on Facebook.
1. Segment Your Traffic
You wouldn’t want to go straight to the sale for people who’ve never heard of your brand. Instead, you’ll probably want to introduce your brand first, tell your story, and try to build a relationship. In the same way, you don’t want to irk repeat customers by re-introducing your brand repeatedly. That’s why you segment your traffic so you can make more targeted ads relevant to the customer’s familiarity with your brand or product. Customer traffic is often divided into three segments:
Cold Traffic
Those that belong in the cold traffic have probably never heard of you. They know nothing about you, your brand, or your product. Therefore, you have a low chance of converting clicks into sales. (But never zero!) The aim is to introduce your brand and build a relationship to convert these leads to sales later.
Warm Traffic
Those in the warm traffic have heard of your brand. They’ve engaged with your brand or product in some capacity, like visiting your website, following your accounts, or being part of your mailing list. Or maybe they tried your product out at a friend’s house and wanted to learn more. Now, these people are easier to convert than your cold traffic. But why aren’t they buying? They need convincing, which can be done in several ways like tossing in a special promo for first-time buyers, providing content to build trust, and a host of others.
Hot Traffic
These people are those who have already bought something from you, which means they know your business and your product well. You either want them to upgrade, repurchase items, try new items, or re-engage with customers who haven’t bought anything in some time.
Knowing which traffic your specific customers are can help you design ads that would better suit their likelihood of buying your product or service.
Another way you can segment your traffic is by breaking it up into prospecting, retargeting, and remarketing. This works best if you’re running a campaign with lead generation as the main goal or if your product or offer is free. Because these products are free, there is minimal value in sending a new offer to past leads.
2. Establish Consistent Branding
Thanks to the internet, we can reach a large audience of potential customers. One downside, however, is that the audience can also see exactly what your competition is doing. What they’re selling, how they’re pricing it, how they’re marketing it, etc. So, how do you stand out?
One word: Branding. You need your customers to recognize your products wherever and whenever they come across them. It’ll create a sense of familiarity and that they know your company. We hear “branding” in social media, but it is often limited to the aesthetics of a certain company. However, branding goes beyond that and includes company values and the message your company wants to convey.
Let’s take a look at Apple, for example. When you see an Apple ad, even if you happened upon it when you can’t see the logo, you know it’s Apple. It looks hip and affluent, both tied to the company presenting itself as young and creative with the tagline: Think Different—sleek and classy styles amidst a stark, plain background. Simplified published an article about Apple’s Branding Strategy & What Marketers Can Learn From It.
If you want to see how branding affects real companies, check out Strikepoint Media’s case study on the Rebranding & Website Design of the Laguna Beach Community Clinic.
3. Be Concise & Convey Value
A good rule of thumb to consider when crafting Facebook Ads is to keep your ad short and sweet. What value are you offering? What do you want your customers to know? As a nod to the previous guideline, you can also include your tagline to be recognizable and stick to a certain tone or writing style with all your ad copies.
If you’re scrolling through your feed on social media platforms, what type of ad would make you stop scrolling? You’re not only competing against other brands but also with hundreds of thousands of posts dedicated solely to entertainment. You need something that would catch their attention and keep them hooked.
Here’s a guide for Facebook ad sizes & specs by Sprout Social.
4. State Your Price
Being upfront with your prices on your ads can be a highly polarizing topic in the marketing world. Should you state your price or not? Yes. And no. There’s a debate because no one can settle on an answer. Siding on either side can make or break your campaign; it’s important to consider your product, the competition, and the price itself. Not including your price may be a good option if you only want to drive traffic to your website.
You’ve probably heard of the “foot in the door “ technique. You want your audience to comply with a smaller request with the hope that you’ll be able to steer them towards complying with a bigger request later on. When advertising online, your goal might be to steer clients to visit your website or to sign up on your mailing list. In this case, you may not include your price. However, you need to remember that Facebook is a Pay-per-Click marketing channel. You have to pay every time someone clicks on your ads, in addition to additional charges based on certain metrics. This means that it would be preferable for customers who are willing to take you at your given price to be the ones clicking on your ads.
5. Include a Specific CTA
Ever wondered why we’re taught to point to a specific person when calling 911? People are more likely to do something when they’re specifically told to do it. If you were to call out to no one in particular, no one would likely comply. Let’s take that into marketing. You have an ad with attractive visuals, a valuable product, and a good justification. What then? What is the customer supposed to do? This is where CTAs come into play. They help your customers in deciding what to do next. They (sometimes) none too gently force them towards action. An action, of course, that would benefit your business.
Although the end goal of a CTA is sales, some CTAs are only meant to encourage your customers to start or progress their way down the sales funnel. For example, CTAs such as “Subscribe today so you’ll never miss a post” do not directly convert to sales but help build relationships with your audience. Again, it depends on what type of engagement you want to achieve in a specific ad copy.
Hubspot made a very helpful compilation of 50 Call-to-Action Examples You Can’t Help But Click.
6. Create Urgency Or Imply Scarcity
In a previous post about creating compelling YouTube Ads, we’ve included a psychology hack that involves including countdown timers to create a sense of urgency. When the supply for a certain product or service is limited, people tend to want it more. Urgency and scarcity in marketing might be closely related, but as Alex Hormozi succinctly put it, “Scarcity is a function of quantity. Urgency is a function of time.”
Scarcity limits how many people can have access to a product. Supreme is one of the more recent brands that have greatly banked on the power of scarcity. Many of their products sell out within seconds of launching! This is because the supply is extremely limited. They have a set schedule for dropping new products, and loyal customers have developed a habit of checking their website on the set schedule. It’s also very rare for Supreme to restock items. When it’s sold out, it’s sold out. Because of this, the resale value of the brand is also extremely high, which, in turn, also increases the demand.
In the case of urgency, Black Friday sales are such good examples. A buyer might think, “I don’t need this new smart TV, but the sale only runs for one day. I might as well get it.” The mindset that this opportunity might never come their way again is to your advantage. Adding a deadline can greatly improve your conversion rate. A sense of urgency can also be created by aggravating the problem. Leading with the problem can persuade your audience that there is a problem that needs to be solved now, and you have the solution.
Alex Hormozi’s “$100M Offers” comprehensively defines and shows different ways of using the power of scarcity and urgency in marketing.
7. Testing. Testing. Testing.
While researching your target audience and reading articles on how to write an effective ad copy can be very helpful, nothing beats actually seeing how a specific ad is performing. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, no one specific marketing formula works for all businesses. You’ll never know how a strategy will work until it’s launched and you can see the numbers. Luckily, Facebook allows spending a relatively small amount of money to test run your ads. You can make minute changes to an ad and compare and contrast different versions without breaking the bank. Wordstream published a comprehensive guide on doing experimental ad copy on Facebook.
At the end of the day, Facebook is a social media platform, making it very easy to measure success through vanity metrics like reactions. Because businesses can have different goals when advertising, it can be difficult to identify which metrics can be useful; ask yourself: Does this metric give me information to help improve my campaign or business in any way? You should toss that metric and focus on what matters if the answer is no. If yes, the information you gain can be a basis for an actionable plan to improve your performance.
Legendary marketer Neil Patel identified 5 Important Metrics of Facebook Ad Campaigns. These metrics are numbers you can turn to for reliable insights into the performance of your campaign. If these numbers are performing well, odds are, your funnel is converting well too.
- Total number of conversion rates.
- Frequency
- Spend and ROAS
- Cost per Click (CPC) and Click Through Rate (CTR)
- Cost per Action
So What Next?
Let’s face it; online advertising is extremely saturated. During Facebook’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call, the CEO’s speech acknowledged that 200 million small businesses are using Facebook tools for their business. This means that it’s now more important than ever to stand out and to know what would make your target audience stop mindlessly scrolling through their Facebook feeds and take notice of an advertisement that costs money and requires considerable effort. And not only that but also to make ad copies that actually convert.
Need more resources on Facebook advertising? Here are some related posts from the Strikepoint Media Blog:
