For small- and medium-sized businesses, simply posting on Facebook is just not enough anymore, especially for those just getting started on the social giant. Whether your business goals are to boost brand awareness, increase sales, encourage action or drive website traffic, Facebook Ads can help you get there. But, like most marketing efforts, there’s an art to making them effective; throwing money at your efforts will only get you so far.
There are more than 1.86 billion monthly active users on Facebook. Your audience is clearly there, but connecting with them isn’t always easy. Strategically creating optimized Facebook Ads for the right audience can help you spend your digital marketing dollars wisely and see a positive return on investment.
So, what makes a successful Facebook Ad for your business?
6 Simple Social Media Marketing Tips
Putting it simply, these six social media marketing tips will set you up for success.
1. Get Moving
It’s no secret that visual content is more likely to be remembered and shared than text, but it’s also favored in the Facebook algorithm. Your image should be visually appealing, or better yet, moving. It’s no secret that video gets more attention than photos; it naturally gets more engagement, which leads to increased visibility. But did you realize that people look at video for 5x longer than static content when using Facebook and Instagram on mobile? Don’t be afraid to experiment with short video clips or GIFs to get (and keep) more eyes on your ad.
2. Make it Relevant
Back in 2015, Facebook launched a feature on its advertising platform that rates each ad and applies a relevance score, similar to Google AdWords Ad Rank. Higher scores are given to those with relevant ad images, ad copy and destination pages. If you’re creating ads that aren’t relevant to your target audience (click bait), you’re tossing money and time out the window. Sure, you want to capture the hearts (and wallets) of consumers, but be mindful of style. Keep it real: authentic lifestyle imagery with quality copy that inspires action works best.
3. Entice the Audience
How are you different (better) than the competition? Include an enticing value proposition to tell the audience why they should click on your ad. Why do they want to learn more about your product or service? What makes YOUR business the unicorn of your industry? Your message needs to be tempting, yet believable with a clear call-to-action. Show attention-grabbing images of people using your product to make your ad feel more like a seamless part of your customers’ social feeds—and less like spam.
4. Split It Up
Once you create your ad, rephrase the copy and change the image to see what works best. Split testing can help businesses optimize Facebook Ads to make sure they’re reaching the right people, at the right time, in the right place (and at the right price). It allows you to test different parts of your ad across devices and browsers and offers measurable results so you can make informed changes to your campaign along the way.
5. Extend Your Reach
With Facebook’s Audience Network, businesses can extend campaigns outside of Facebook to deliver ads to a wider audience on mobile apps and websites. The results are real and leverage the same powerful tools as Facebook advertising to help businesses accomplish their goals. Currently, Audience Network supports campaigns that are created with the following objectives: clicks to websites, website conversions, mobile app installs, mobile app engagement, dynamic ads and video views.
6. Hop on the Instagram Train
Instagram is a very visual way for small businesses to deliver results and revenue. And since it’s owned by Facebook, you can create an Instagram ad the same way you create an ad on Facebook.
Valuable interactions, however, start with a valuable strategy. Understand your audience and you’ll be able to better refine your ad strategy. Inspire action with photo ads, create a powerful immersive experience with video ads or bring an additional layer of depth to photos with carousel ads.
Last month, Instagram hit a record 8 million business profiles and more than 1 million active advertisers. If you’re not advertising on Instagram, you can bet that your competition is.
Start Your First Successful Facebook Campaign
If all of this seems overwhelming to you (or you simply don’t have the time to manage it all), turn to the social media marketing professionals at CMDS. We’ve helped businesses of all sizes and across many industries create Facebook advertising that helps them to finally reach their social media audience, and their marketing goals.