Facebook Marketing Tips for Advertising on Social Media – Facebook Ads Hacks
Facebook, as a social media and advertising platform, is kind of a mixed bag.
On the one hand, it’s no secret that Facebook’s organic reach has declined rapidly over the past few years. Also, we all know how Facebook has lost its popularity as a social media platform in recent years.
However, there is a reason why Facebook is still the preferred place for 97% of marketers to run paid social media ads campaign. It is still the biggest social media platform, with over 2 billion active users.
However, running a Facebook Ads campaign is not easy. In this guide, we will share Facebook marketing tips for advertising on social media, starting from the beginning: your campaign’s objective.
Figure Out Your Facebook Advertising Objective
Facebook Ads is actually very versatile, as it offers 11 possible objectives with your Facebook Ads campaign, namely:
- Reach: display your ads to as many people as possible to reach new audiences
- Brand awareness: introduce your brand or product/service to a new audience
- Lead generation: Capture more prospects by integrating Facebook Ads in your lead generation strategy
- Messages: Encourage people to engage with your business via Facebook Messenger
- Catalog sales: Integrate the Facebook Ads with a product catalog so that you can show specific products an individual user is most likely to buy
- Conversions: Get people to convert (purchase your product/service, sign up to your newsletter, sign up to your free trial period, etc.)
- Store traffic: For local businesses, drive nearby customers to your store
- Traffic: Encourage more people to visit a specific landing page, app or Facebook Messenger
- Engagement: Increase post engagements (Likes) by reaching a wider audience, a common approach is to promote a special offer for people to claim
- App installs: Promote your app so more people might install it
- Video views: Promote your videos to more people
So, decide on a Facebook Ads objective according to your marketing or business goals. Also, an important factor to consider is that for objectives related to conversions (conversions, likes, etc.), you can pay per action (you only need to pay when people convert). However, for objectives that are exposure-focused (traffic, views), you will need to pay per impression (basically, you pay every time the ad is displayed).
Optimize Your Facebook Ads Targeting
The main idea of advertising on Facebook (and now, Instagram) is to take advantage of its huge userbase. So, it would only make sense to show your ads everywhere. However, Facebook ads aren’t exactly cheap, and so it’s very important to show your ads in front of the right people at the right time to maximize cost-efficiency and ROI.
Here are several ways you can do to improve your targeting:
Target Your Competitor’s Audience
The best way to do this is via Facebook Audience Insights:
- Open your Audience Insights here, and select ‘Everyone on Facebook’
- You can now use your basic targeting like age, gender, location, etc. to build your target audience.
- Next, click the ‘Page Likes’ tab. Here you can gain information about which pages your target audience has engaged before in the past – export (or copy-paste) this list into a spreadsheet.
- Do a bit of competitor analysis and make a list of your competitors’ Facebook Pages. Then, go back to the ‘Create Audience’ tab, and type the Facebook Page Names in the ‘Interest’ box. You can also type in your competitors’ brand names or product/service names.
- For those that come up as interests, check out the demographics information on the right side of the screen and check additional audience insights. There might be some additional information you can use to further improve your targeting.
- Create a new audience based on this information, and to make sure, test it against your existing audience list. Don’t forget to Save your list.
Remarketing
Remarketing is a powerful feature in Facebook Ads (and also on Google Ads), where you only display your ads on those who have already shown interest in your brand or product/service.
You can do this by using Custom Audiences targeting options and set your targeting rules such as those who have recently visited your website or certain page. You can be quite specific, such as remarketing only to people who have looked at particular products. Also, you can exclude people from the list; for example, you might not want to include people who have recently purchased your product/service.
Facebook will then provide you with a Facebook Pixel that you can install on your site (as cookies) so Facebook can gather data of your visitors.
Lookalike Audiences
Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences feature allows us to build a new list of potential customers that are similar to another existing list. This list can be people who already purchased from you, an existing email list, and so on.
To create a Lookalike Audience, simply go to ‘Audiences’ within your Ads Manager, and then click ‘Create a Lookalike Audience’ and follow the step-by-step guide. Make sure to have a source audience ready (the list of audiences whose characteristics you want to match).
Obviously, these are not the only strategies available for a more effective Facebook Ads targeting. Keep experimenting, and fine-tune your targeting with every single campaign.
Layered Targeting
Facebook Ads is certainly famous for its versatile targeting options. You can technically ‘filter’ audiences based on three main options: behaviors, interests, and demographics data, but you can further fine-tune each of these categories.
For example, you can choose a target audience based on the job industry or whether they are single or married, which can be useful if you want to sell certain products/services.
Now, you should make the most of these features by combining these different layers of targeting. For example, you can choose to target parents of toddlers who are also interested in traveling. You can also add another layer in behaviors by targeting frequent travelers. Each time you add another ‘layer’, you can click Narrow Audience/Narrow Further, and the further you go, the more specific your targeting will be.
Optimize Your Ad Creatives
Obviously, your ad creatives will play a significant role in your Facebook Ads campaign’s success. Here are some tips on how you can improve your creative:
Whenever You Can, Use Video
It’s no secret that everybody is consuming video at the moment. Video content is especially effective in improving awareness as well as engagement, and Facebook now has shifted its algorithm to prefer video format.
The main advantage of using videos is that it is very effective in stopping scrollers in their track and can significantly improve your ads’ conversion rate.
Effective CTA
Remember that ultimately you want those who see your Facebook Ads to convert, and you’d need a compelling call-to-action (CTA) to encourage direct actions. An effective tactic here is to create a sense of urgency with your CTA, for example, by offering limited-time or limited-quantity offers.
Design With Your Audience in Mind
This one might be obvious, but when you start working on your ad’s design, keep your target audience in mind. Try to engage them emotionally through the visuals featured in the design, and use images that your target audience actually cares about. The faster you can catch their attention, the more likely they will click the campaign and convert.
Communicate Your Benefits Clearly
Remember that people are not clicking your ads for the ads itself, and they are not actually purchasing your product or service, but rather the benefits tied to them. So, try to show how people can benefit from using your product, as opposed to simply showcasing your product or service. Also, remember that it’s about communicating benefits and not features.
Be Clear and to the Point
People don’t pay too much attention when scrolling through their Facebook feeds, and so make sure it’s as easy as possible for your audience to understand the message of your ad creative. Since people have very short attention spans on social media, being clear with your visual design is very important. Also, keep your copywriting short and to the point and make sure they can clearly understand the values you are offering.
Maximize Your Cost Efficiency
Below are several important Facebook Ads tips you can try to optimize your campaigns’ cost efficiency further:
Split Test Your Ads
Split testing your Facebook Ads campaigns is very important to maximize your conversion rate and cost-efficiency. Split-test all possible elements of your ads from visuals/images, copy, CTA placement, and so on. Keep testing and fine-tuning your ads, and remember that this is not a one-off process.
Keep Your Ads Fresh
You need to update your ads and also publish new, fresh ads regularly. No matter how good your campaign is, it’s going to lose its impact eventually.
You can keep the same audience with new ad campaigns, but change your visuals, copy, and offers. Use the data you’ve cultivated from your split tests to improve your next Facebook Ads campaigns further.
Maintain a High Relevance Score
Facebook keeps tracks of what they call ‘relevance score’, which examines how relevant your ad is to your target audience. Your ad’s relevance score will be high when you receive healthy levels of engagement (likes, comments), clicks, and conversions. The higher your relevance score, the lower your ad’s cost will be, so it’s crucial to maintain a high level of relevance score.
End Words
Hopefully, these Facebook marketing tips we have shared above can help you in creating an actionable Facebook advertising campaign if you’ve been struggling with marketing on the platform.
Targeting the right audience is the key to Facebook advertising success: the more specific you target your audience, the better you can optimize your conversion rate, and thus, maximize your ROI.
About the Author
Mike Khorev is an SEO expert and marketing consultant who helps small and mid-size companies generate more leads and sales and grow revenue online. He also offers expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based digital marketing, web design, SEO, social media, search engine marketing, and many other online practices.
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Being an entrepreneur and digital marketer, he loves to share his knowledge and experience in topics related to internet marketing, SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, branding, entrepreneurship, and many more.
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