It’s easy to get confused with Facebook advertising. From behavioral targeting to pixel tracking, Facebook offers a bewildering number of targeting options, advertising best practices, and ad formats.
In this article, you’ll learn the five elements of successful Facebook ads. I’ll walk you through each step. These lessons are based on things we’ve learned at Hootsuite running paid social advertising campaigns.
1. Create a simple CTA with one clear action
The perfect Facebook ad is clear about the action it wants the prospect to take.
Every campaign or ad format in the world can be boiled down into two types: ads designed to engage your prospect’s attention and ads designed to drive a direct action such as sale, app install, or lead.
In a perfect world, your campaign does both. But in most cases, you’ll either get one or the other. Brand awareness is valuable. It’s a smart strategy that builds your business over the long-term. But too many campaigns try to mash brand awareness and direct response together. Unless you’re a marketing genius, it rarely works.
As such, creative brand awareness campaigns are better served with CTAs related to content consumption such as following your Facebook page, subscribing for more content, or collecting email subscriptions. And direct response ads are better served answering common buying objections than trying to engage or entertain.
An excellent example of a direct response ad comes from the company AppSumo. As you can see below, the ad has one clear goal: get you to immediately buy the product.
The ad doesn’t waste time—it tells what the product is, what the deal includes, and uses a timed offer to give you a compelling reason to buy right away.
Mailchimp is the undisputed champion of brand advertising. Their genius is that they let brand awareness campaigns simply build the brand. Their Facebook ads never try to get you to watch one of their weirdly brilliant videos AND sign up for a free trial. It’s not that Mailchimp doesn’t do product-specific ads, either. Lots of their ads aim to drive sales or get customers to try a new feature. But they keep these two worlds—brand awareness and direct response—completely separated.
Conversely, an ad that tries to do both is is likely to fall flat. If you have ad copy that speaks to the core value of your product (brand awareness), don’t ask people to buy or sign up right away. Instead, use your CTA to encourage people to take a smaller, more location action such as “watch a video to learn how the product works.”
Decide on one simple action you want people to take. The easiest way is to focus your ad on one section of the purchase funnel. Pick one from Hootsuite’s social media marketing funnel:
- Awareness, affinity, and consumption: stick to first handshake CTAs such as boosting followers, reading other pieces of content, or subscribing to your email.
- Conversation: focus on engagement metrics such as boosting shares, increasing comments and tagging, or generating positive mentions.
- Intent: focus on next step CTAs such as “learn more” or driving content downloads.
- Conversion: focus on actions that lead directly to revenue such as adding products to a cart, requesting a sales demo, downloading an app, or signing up for a subscription product.
2. Use an audience targeting strategy that helps you refine over time
The perfect Facebook ad doesn’t blindly combine audience targeting. It uses testing to refine targeting precision over time.
Facebook offers an endless list of audience targeting abilities. It’s easy to get confused. And even easier to just give up, adding random interest and behavior categories and hoping that Facebook will magically match you with customers.
You can save a lot of money and time by being intentional in your audience targeting.
The trick to audience targeting is to improve your insights into what works over time.
Here’s a simple path to start.
Begin with a lookalike audience.
Lookalike audiences are powerful because you can use existing data (such as…
