How To Create A Successful Ad Campaign On Facebook

1. Choose the right campaign objective

The Facebook Ad campaign structure consists of three levels: a campaign, an ad set, and an ad. The campaign is the first level and thereby it’s the basis of your ad. Creating a campaign on Facebook starts from choosing the objective which is the action you want people to take after they’ve seen your ad. Facebook has 3 objective categories called Awareness, Consideration and Conversion and there are 11 advertising objectives which fall under those categories, which you can see on the below image.

The campaign objective you choose depends on what you want to achieve. If your end goal is to generate sales, you should select Conversions or Catalogue Sales objective. If you would like to boost engagement on your post, choose the Engagement objective, if you would like people to download your new App, go for App Installs, and so on. Make sure to figure out what your objective is before you begin planning your ads.

2. Build the most relevant audience for your campaign

The second stage of building a Facebook Ad campaign is creating an ad set which allows you to choose the timeframe, bidding strategy, placements of your ads and your targeted audience. Choosing an audience is a very important aspect of your campaign and it will have a huge impact on performance of your campaigns.

On Facebook, you have a couple of targeting options available:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Language
• Interests
• Behaviours
• Demographics
• Custom Audience (People that interacted with your business in the past)
• Lookalike

When choosing your audience, make sure it aligns with your business’s buying personas and the goal of your campaign. If you’d like to focus on increasing awareness of your brand, you’ll most probably want to target people that are not familiar with your business yet. To do this, choose who you’re going to target based on the following attributes: location, age, gender, interests and behaviours. If your goal is to achieve as many conversions as possible, you’ll probably choose to target users that already know about your business and interacted with your website before. To do this, you can create a custom audience on Facebook such as Customer List, Website Traffic, App Activity, etc. See below for all options that are available on Facebook.

There are a couple of things you can do to make sure that your audience is the most relevant:

• Exclude previous converters/ buyers from all campaigns (unless you want to specifically target them for upsells, cross-sells etc.)
• Exclude any remarketing audiences from your prospecting campaigns
• Create a 1% lookalike audience using your top-spending customers as the seed audience
• Create an audience of people who added to the cart but didn’t purchase and present them with a relevant message and an incentive to complete their purchase

Once you’ve created your audiences, you can analyse them using the Audience Insights tool to find information about who you’re targeting. This could help improve your ads and make them even more relevant and successful.

3. Create an ad with a strong offer

Creating an ad is the last stage of building an ad campaign on Facebook. This is where you choose an ad format, news feed text, call to action button and website URL and it’s what your targeted audience will see on their device whether it’s a desktop, mobile, or a tablet.

Facebook offers a couple of ad formats such as single image, video, carousel, canvas or collection. Some campaign objectives constrain which ad formats you can use (e.g. Video Views), however, most of them allow you to choose any ad format. Our recommendation is to create multiple ads with different ad formats for split-testing to see how they perform against each other and to see which ads deliver the desired results.

Once you’ve decided on which ad formats to test, you’ll need to come up with a creative image and ad copy to catch user’s attention and convince them to use your service or buy your product. There are a couple of tactics you can use to ensure your ad is effective:

• Make the ad copy relevant to your target audience

You already know their location, age, gender, interests, etc., now all you need is to use this information to write the copy that’s relevant. People are more likely to engage with the content they can relate to.

• Apply emotional marketing

Emotions have a profound impact on our decisions. They create lasting first impressions and inspire us to follow the same pattern of action in the future. That’s why implementing emotional marketing can help your brand become memorable and stand out amongst the rest.

• Ensure your creative is eye-catching and unique

Create an image or a video that will make people stop scrolling. It has to be something interesting, eye-catching and different. Ensure you’re using bright colours, high-quality images/videos and people’s faces. People’s brains are hardwired to recognise faces, so including a face will make your ad more noticeable.

• Use a relevant Call To Action

Facebook offers a fair amount of options when it comes to CTA buttons. Some of the most popular ones are: Learn More, Contact Us and Shop Now. Make sure that the call-to-action you select, best suits your objective.

• Offer an incentive

A great way of turning a visitor into a buyer on Facebook can be offering an incentive. This could be a Free Delivery, a discount code or a free item with their first purchase.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you found this guide useful, and the above advice will help you with creating an effective ad campaign on Facebook. Everything starts with a plan, so make sure to have a good strategy in place and define your goals, before planning the specifics of your ads.

If you need any help with your social media advertising strategy, feel free to get in touch with our team and we will be happy to help.