How to Make a Good Facebook Ad to Promote Your Business
Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the world, holding over 2.2 billion user accounts and ranking first in terms of traffic in more than 100 countries. It’s a must-have tool if you want to improve your business’s digital marketing performance.
No matter how amazing your website is or how popular you are in your local area, you need to know how to make a good Facebook ad if you want to keep growing. Ads are what introduce you to potential new customers and keep you relevant in the minds of people who have already bought from your before.
To get the most out of your Facebook business account, use the following tips.
Target, Target, Target
Before you get into the ins and outs of Facebook ads, you have to understand your audience. Who is your ideal consumer? What is their age, gender, level of income, and amount of disposable income?
Think about the things this person is interested outside of what you offer, but that could be related to your services. Try to picture what this person’s buying process looks like and the barriers to purchase that might come up for them.
Pay attention to your secondary market, too. The more you’re able to define the real people who use your products and services right off the bat, the better you can reach them as online users when your ads are ready for scheduling.
Facebook’s Ad Manager helps you turn this information into clear ad specifications. It allows you to choose from various settings including:
- location
- income level
- age range
- home ownership
- life events (engagement, pregnancy, graduation)
These options should sound familiar, and remember, you can mix and match all the settings for different audiences within your market. You can even specify desired user behaviors and interests to further target your ad.
Create Strong Content
You can’t set a location for an ad or define the habits and interests that match it without having an image and copywriting prepared. Identifying your audience from the start does help you create these things, though.
Here are some other things that make the process more efficient.
Building Your Photo Library
If you’re scheduling a photo shoot every time you need to make new Facebook ads, you’re wasting a lot of time. It’s better to schedule one or two days every quarter to shoot all the images you need, then take the best shots and create a photo library out of them.
This gives you instant access to strong material when you’re putting all the pieces together. A photo library makes you more productive without compromising the overall quality of an ad.
Fine-Tuning Your Copywriting Skills
You need interesting copywriting to match an eye-catching photo. Being talented at one and half-hearting the other undermines the whole ad.
Small businesses usually rely on one person to do both. But, if you have the funding and office space for it, consider building a digital marketing team of various people with multiple talents working together. Or, see if there’s a company you can outsource the creative process to.
Running Tests and Making Edits
Whether you’re making all your content in-house or relying on an external resource, it’s worth running a few tests before you make a Facebook ad go live. Put two possible ad ideas together and compare their strengths and weaknesses. See if there’s a way to combine all the best attributes into one new ad, or, get a second opinion from other people in your office.
This ensures you’re always giving your audience the absolute best content possible. It takes a little bit of extra time, but it’s worth spending a few minutes to compare and contrast different ads if it means better results overall.
Set a Budget
There’s the matter of spending time to create a strong Facebook ad, then there’s the matter of financial funding. Some businesses throw money at their Facebook ads without paying much attention to the ROI they receive.
If you aren’t getting the click-through rates or other interactions you’re looking for, you need to think about advertising on Facebook tips in terms of money. Stop wasting funds on ads that don’t work. Instead, tweak your content and targeting and set a new budget, too.
For more effective funding, set a limit on how much you want to spend every day. This means you will have enough finances to run an ad for a whole week or even for a whole month. Otherwise, you risk spending all of your ad’s budget on the first few days, which hurts the performance of an ad for the remainder of its scheduled time.
Schedule and Plan Ahead
Speaking of scheduling, always try to think ahead as much as possible.
For example, fashion companies tend to plan ads and products two seasons in advance – if it’s spring right now, they’re coming up with ideas for fall. A pool and patio remodeling company, on the other hand, should capitalize on their audience in the spring and summer since not many people need work in the fall and winter.
Regardless of your industry, though, the key is to have your sights set on the future. If you’re in peak season right now and just beginning to create the ads for it, you’re playing catch up. Make sure you’re always one step ahead of the competition by having your ads ready to go well ahead of time.
This means you have to anticipate shifting trends in your market, understand the desires and behaviors of your consumers, and prepare the necessary content well before you actually use it. It takes a lot of planning and coordination to get everything right. But, the better you get at scheduling such things, the less stressful the whole process becomes.
How to Make a Good Facebook Ad: Engage!
Engaging with your audience is the last thing to think about when learning how to make a good Facebook ad. In other words, you can’t just schedule an ad and rely on it to do all the work for it.
You also have to schedule good, relevant content to post on your business profile and connect with users as they like, comment, and share the things you create. You have to monitor your Facebook inbox and pay attention to your online reputation as a whole.
For more Facebook tips and other digital marketing insights, click here.