6 Rare Ingredients To Whip Up The Best Facebook Ads
When you think of the best Facebook ads, what comes to mind?
To me, it’s ROI-positive business benefits. Like: Speed. Immediate lead generation. Consistent sales. Long-term branding. Value.
Seriously, give me a choice and I, Jeremy Johnson, would most likely choose Facebook as the best place to market online.
I mean Facebook averages 1.09 billion active users everyday. That’s insane.
Users love the site and continue returning. And they’ll continue to click and engage with your content and pay-per-click ads if you’re making the right moves to use this platform.
Now you may be wondering what makes facebook ads the best to grow your business’ bottom line. And you may even be weary because facebook advertising is a foreign concept to you. Or you winged it before and lost more money than you want to admit.
Have no fear, we are here to tell you the key ingredients to whip up up the best Facebook ads.
Truly Know Your Niche
You can’t run a profitable Facebook ad campaign if you don’t first know your target audience to the core.
This goes beyond identifying who your product benefits the most. Knowing your niche is like knowing more about their behaviors and interests than they understand about themselves.
So before ever running your ad, you need to answer the following questions:
- Who is your audience and their demographics?
- What is their problem?
- What’s the best solution to their problem?
- How can you position your product or service as the bridge to take them from their current problem to their desired solution?
The ad needs to address why it benefits your customer. If there is no clear value, the customer will not take any further action.
No actions taken means no link clicks, no sales, and a whole lot of wasted ad spend.
There are a few methods to determining your target market:
- Custom: You decide who your audience is based on your product and people that typically engage with your business
- Location: If you are a small business, you might find it to be beneficial to target based on location
- Gender: If your business sells products for one gender or separate products for genders consider targeting based on gender
- Interests: This provides you with a broader audience and targets people in the same genre/industry as your business
- Behaviors: This method allows you to target people that have visited your page before
- Connections: This method also provides you with a broader audience because it targets people that are friends of people that like your page
Just like the best businesses are customer-focused, not internally-focused, the best ads are customer-focused.
You want to write your ad specifically for your audience and no one else. It should be clear it’s for them and not the right fit for everyone else. Also, a specific headline improves conversion rates by 73%.
Specificity encourages your audience to view your ads because it is addressing a problem they have. And it saves you money if you do a cost-per-click performance because you won’t have confused people click the ad for more info, only to discern it’s not for them after all.
Just by looking at your ad, your audience should be able to tell you understand their problem and have a solution that will benefit them.
For products, it can be sense to be upfront about the price and clearly advertise any sales related to the product. For services, it’s better to wait to discuss pricing until they’ve read the long-form landing page or watched a webinar.
That focus on understanding your audience can improve conversions by 20-30% alone. Check out the next ingredient in your recipe for the best facebook ads.
Long-Form Copy
For the text part of the ad, you have two choices: short-form copy that’s often cute and conspicuous, or long-form copy that’s informative and clear.
Sometimes product ads do better in short-form copy, but for most Facebook advertising cases we’ve found that long-form copy outperforms short-form.
Why’s long-form so powerful? Put simply, you have more words to connect emotionally and logically with your audience.
That extra content gives you more shots at getting your prospect to click to the site and buy your offer. Your relevance score is naturally higher, and this leads to higher Facebook engagement with the ad.
It’s not just our experience. In a study done by AdEspresso, different variations of an ad were tested to determine what the overall preference of ads were.
The results showed that the variations that were considered long-form performed the best.
So what do you write in this long copy?
Consider finding pain-points from your target audience that your product provides a solution for. Then draw these out in detail, using both emotional and logical claims. This method increases specificity which then increases the likelihood that people will engage with the post.
You can also use the comment section of previous posts to spark ideas for long-form copy. Your ad should be solely for your audience so what better way to get engagement on a post than using their questions to create an ad.
Relating your product to a common experience that your audience understands can sell products like nothing else.
For example, if your product is a new pair of fuzzy slippers, you could compare them to walking on a cloud. This is a feeling that people can understand because they know what clouds are like and know what things that are typically related to that phrase feel like.
If your company is in an industry that sells a common product, utilize what makes your company unique. People won’t click on your site and check out your product if there is nothing that makes it different than the 20 other stores that sell it. Don’t be afraid of what makes your company different, embrace it.
Next up we’ll use media to finish the perfect ad.
Use Realistic Ad Visuals
It’s my professional opinion that the ad visual is less important than audience and messaging.
Though there are some pro tips to improve your ad images and videos.
First, what not to do.
One of the easiest mistakes you can make that will cause your ad to tank is using unrealistic visuals. Avoid using stock photos, red borders or drawings on top of pictures.
That’s cheesy at best, unprofessional at worst.
When you’re selling a product; embrace it and show it off. Do everything you can to show the actual product used in realistic situations to get the consumer to envision themselves using it in the same way.
A realtor running Facebook ads should show the actual house they’re selling, for consistency.
If you’re a coach or info product seller, use real-life shots of you speaking. Other service-based businesses should have visuals that show the professionals in the act of working or with customers for optimal results.
Do everything you can to showcase the product or service as it’s meant to be used.
Since the media often makes the ads first impression, it must support the text related to your product to market it.
One way to fully utilize photos is to format them in a slideshow. A slideshow formats the ads to show multiple visuals. This allows you to either market multiple products in a campaign or to show a product that has multiple uses.
And a video can be used to tell a story, like long-form copy, or can be used to show the product in use. These can both be effective to increase engagement and to clearly show the value of the product.
Consider all your options with photography and videography to get creative with how to use it to effective marketing.
Hubspot has templates for various formats of visuals on their site. Their templates feature actual companies that had ad campaigns that worked due to their effective visuals. Consider looking through some templates to get inspiration for how to format your ad.
Now that we’ve discussed some of the technical aspects, it’s time to reveal the rest of the ingredients that make up the best facebook ads. Execute the following so you’re never feeling stuck with Facebook ads not converting.
Bridge The Gap
I like making money for my customers.
To accomplish this, we run ads that convince the audience to pay money to solve their problems.
This sales process works best when the ad works as the bridge from their current situation to their desired future, aka helping them walk across “the bridge” to a better life.
This is the part of your advertisement that takes it from just another product to something they absolutely need, right now.
The way you present this message will determine whether or not your product becomes “the bridge” or not.
You can increase your odds of getting the sale by sharing case studies or testimonials. This way your audience will be convinced they need what you’re selling to get similar results.
This is also why it’s crucial that the benefit of your product is clear in the advertisement. You need to make the connection between their present situation and their possible future. If that’s not clear, they will not be compelled to take further action.
If your product doesn’t catch their eye and intrigue them, they will continue scrolling.
Again, knowing your target audience and their pain points will put you at an advantage to creating a product that acts as “the bridge”.
Once you have successfully bridged the gap, your ad only needs a couple more ingredients to become one of the best facebook ads.
Make One Call-To-Action
If you don’t have the courage to ask for the sale, it’ll never happen. We’re not running ads and producing content for the sake of doing it.
We want to generate profits from these activities, and we will if we give the audience an action, like click to our website to buy.
An ad isn’t effective unless it increases sales and gets the word about your product out. A call-to-action ensures that people will take that step to make a purchase.
A call-to-action can exist in the ad copy and as an extra button on facebook that takes you to buy the product.
I went through my own facebook to look for some examples and almost immediately I found this ad for fabletics leggings. The call-to-action on this ad is the button in the bottom right corner that says “Learn more”.
Once I clicked that button it took me directly to the page that had the “two leggings for $24”. Fabletics made the entire process easy for me. They showed why their leggings would benefit me over other leggings and when I was convinced that I wanted to buy them they took me directly to their sale.
Their landing page was easy to navigate. I didn’t have to search through multiple links to try to find the campaign they were running.
The goal is to make the process as simple as possible for the customer. This encourages to return to your business to buy products and to tell their friends about your products.
A call-to-action can also lead the customer to view the rest of your website and purchase even more products.
There’s one final step..
Test Your Ad, And Revise
You can’t just release your ad and leave it as it is.
You need to test your ad and make adjustments to get the most value from it.
Testing your ad can consist of: releasing your ad and seeing how the public responds, testing multiple ads and seeing which works the best, and using facebook features, like relevancy, to make sure your ad is interacting well with your target audience.
You want to get the most bang for your buck and just running one campaign can hinder you from making improvements that will increase your sales.
No ad will ever be perfect but actually testing it and taking data on your tests are what separates good facebook ads from the best facebook ads.
Data you collect from testing ads now can also be used when you’re creating ads in the future.
Differences in ads can be as little as wording something differently to completely changing the ad.
The ultimate goal is to get people to visit your site and buy. If you’re going to spend the money to run a Facebook ad, you might as well put in the effort to make sure that it’s going to be effective.
Or you’re doing the equivalent of piling your money up and lighting it on fire.
Test short-form and long-form to see what your audience responds best to.
Try using videos for one ad and photos for the other to see what one outperforms the other.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to take a good ad campaign to a great ad campaign.
Facebook Advertising Wrap Up
You now know all the ingredients that make up the best Facebook ads.
It’s time to take these steps and apply them to your own ads.
The numbers prove that people take time out of their days to check Facebook and you want a place on their News Feed.
You just have to execute, and your business will produce a record year.
Now if you are concerned running these ads yourself, consider hiring a PPC agency like Robben Media to create these campaigns and their landing pages for you.
Regardless, it will take a couple tries but after you run multiple tests and determine what works and what doesn’t, you will be well on your way to generating quality leads and customers via facebook ads.
Many fortunes have been made with this marketing strategy, will yours be next?