Why use Facebook ads?

With upwards of 1 billion users daily, it’s a no-brainer why advertisers would want to build their brand by placing ads on Facebook. Facebook is a perfect platform for the core aspects of your 2018 marketing strategy—social media marketing, influencer marketing, and content marketing. 

Since social media is also a medium for self-expression, users constantly fill their Facebook profiles with tons of personal information—their place of work, their income, their hobbies, lifestyle choices, political orientation, and more. That’s why industries across the board advertise on Facebook. Facebook grants incredible exposure and profit potential, and it allows for an unparalleled degree of targeting. Clients can sort through a wealth of demographic information and create custom campaigns using Facebook’s native ad platform. 

Since Facebook aggregates every possible detail about its users, some information is going to be more relevant to you than others. In some cases, launching a campaign can be challenging because there are numerous ways to advertise on Facebook and it’s tough to know which tools best suit your needs.

Harness the power of Facebook’s existing campaign tools

Facebook provides a platform that naturally has high engagement and it has tools that will help structure your advertising campaign, including:

• Facebook bidding options allow you to select what kind of engagement you’re paying for. Do you want landing page clicks, impressions, post engagement, unique reach, or a pay-per-click program? Make sure to select your bidding option according to your campaign’s goals.
• The Custom Audience option is one of Facebook’s defining features. Not only can you target your ideal audience based on any number of categories including income, geographical location, interests, and occupation, but you can also create audiences based on previous engagement with your ads. In other words, you can follow up with your audience, move them along in the marketing process, or remind them about a form that they may have started to fill out and then forgotten about.
• If you’re having trouble determining your custom audience, it might be helpful to make use of Facebook Audience Insights, which gives information about the people that like and mention your company including age, gender, location, activity, and previous purchases. This existing data should help you understand who to tailor your campaign for.
• Frequency caps can help cut costs by necessarily limiting the exposure of your ads—avoiding saturation and keeping your audience fresh.

Use these tools to define and shape your campaign from the ground up. Success on the Facebook advertising platform comes from providing as much detailed information as possible about what kind of campaign you want to run and what target audience you have in mind. Of course, making use of these campaign tools is only half the battle—your ads also need to be succinct, subversive, and visually engaging in order to flourish in the highly competitive News Feed.

Optimize your content for Facebook Ads

Success on Facebook’s advertising platform begins with innovating within its existing ad formats. Facebook allows for different ad formats, each suited to different types of content:

• The video ad is one of the most successful types of Facebook ad. When you run a video ad, make sure to tailor it to Facebook’s requirements. Most videos are watched on mute and only for a few seconds, so make sure to represent essential information visually and quickly.
• Photo ads are also popular since Facebook favors visual content over textual content. Bright colors, white space, and bold typography will make your advertisement stand out from the crowd.
• Multi-product ads, which showcase multiple products allow for less customization but are useful if your company is marketing multiple services at the same time. Make sure to use consistent formatting in your images and captions.
• Local ads will show up only for users in close proximity to your business. Use this option if you’re trying to increase real-world visits to your organization.
• Offer ads act like coupons, showcasing limited-time-only deals. These ads are great for increasing the urgency of your viewer.
• If you’re incorporating live events into your marketing strategy, make sure to use the event ad format which makes use of Facebook’s events platform and offers direct linking to affiliate ticket vendors.
• Finally, boosted posts do not use the Facebook Ads back-end but rather use the same news feed post format that users have access to. Boosted posts are a great way to advertise subtly since your posts look more or less indistinguishable from those by friends and regular pages. The downside with boosted posts is that you lose access to analytics, targeting, and bidding options and the useful information that comes along with these campaign tools.

Content tips

It’s crucial that you pay attention to what format your ads are taking on Facebook. However, Maria Dykstra of SocialMediaExaminer offers these tips that can be followed pretty much across the board:

• Use emoticons in your content to break up text and to make your headlines feel more dynamic.
• Avoid excessive use of hashtags as they can compromise legibility and come across as disingenuous, leading to less overall engagement.
• Include a distinct Call To Action to compel your viewer to continue to your own domain or landing page.
• Be sparing with text in images. Facebook favors photographic and illustrative content because on average, they produce more engagement. Text-heavy images drive the cost up and do little for your brand. If you are going to use text, consider overlaying it.

Facebook’s advertising platform is both sprawling and powerful. However, by making use of its native campaign tools, being cognizant of the various formats available to you, and most importantly, running visually striking, clever ads, success on Facebook’s advertising platform is just a few clicks away!