It’s easy to be confused with Facebook ads. From behavioral targeting to pixel tracking, Facebook offers a surprising number of targeting options, ad best practices and ad formats.
In this article, you’ll learn the five elements of successful Facebook ads. I will guide you every step of the way. These lessons build on what we learned at Moyens I/O, which runs paid social advertising campaigns.
1. Create a simple CTA with one clear transaction
The perfect Facebook ad is clear about the action the prospect wants them to take.
Every campaign or ad format in the world can be divided into two types: Get your potential customer’s attention and designed for advertisements take direct action like sales, app installs or leads.
In a perfect world, your campaign does both. But in most cases, you get one or the other. Brand awareness is valuable. It is a smart strategy that builds your business in the long run. But too many campaigns try to combine brand awareness and direct response. Unless you’re a marketing genius, it rarely works.
Therefore, 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. Direct response ads serve better by responding to common purchase objections rather 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 a clear purpose: to get you to buy the product right away.
Advertising wastes no time; It tells you what the product is, what the deal includes, and uses a timed offer to give you a compelling reason to buy now.
Mailchimp is the undisputed champion of brand advertising. Their genius is that they let brand awareness campaigns just build the brand. Facebook ads never try to get you to watch one of their weirdly awesome videos AND sign up for a free trial. Nor can it be said that Mailchimp does not make product-specific advertisements. Most of their ads are aimed at increasing sales or getting customers to try a new feature. But they keep these two worlds (brand awareness and direct response) completely separate.
Conversely, an ad that tries to do both is likely to fail. If you have ad copy that describes the core value (brand awareness) of your product, don’t ask people to buy or sign up right away. Instead, use your CTA to encourage people to take smaller, more location actions like “watch a video to learn how the product works.”
Decide on a simple action you want people to take. The easiest way is to focus your ad on one part of the buying funnel. Choose from Moyens I/O’s social media marketing funnel:
- Awareness, proximity and consumption: stick to first-handshake CTAs like increasing followers, reading other pieces of content, or subscribing to your email.
- Speech: focus on engagement metrics such as increasing shares, increasing comments and tagging, or generating positive mentions.
- intent: focus on next-step CTAs such as “more info” or increasing content downloads.
- convert: focus on actions that generate direct revenue, such as adding items to cart, requesting a sales demo, downloading an app, or signing up for a subscription product.
2. Use an audience targeting strategy that will help you refine over time
The perfect Facebook ad doesn’t randomly combine audience targeting. It uses tests to improve targeting accuracy over time.
Facebook offers an endless list of audience targeting capabilities. It’s easy to get confused. And it’s even easier to give up by adding random categories of interests and behaviors and hoping Facebook will magically match you with customers.
You can deliberately save a lot of money and time in your audience targeting.
The trick to audience targeting is to develop your insights into what works over time.
Here’s a simple way to get started.
Start with a lookalike audience.
Lookalike audiences are powerful because on Facebook you can use existing data (like people who bought a product on your website) to target similar potential customers. This gives you a solid platform to start testing and refining your audience.
How to create a lookalike audience on Facebook? Follow the steps below in your favorite Facebook ad tool.
- go to: Mass section of your ad manager.
- click Build a Lookalike Audience.
- To choose create a custom audience and then select customer file.
- Later customers can add an Excel file; for example, your email list or a customer list from PayPal.
- Select the country where you want to find a similar group of people.
- Select your desired audience size with the slider.
- click Build Audience.
If your goal is to target the most likely leads, you should create lookalike audiences that target one to two percent of a country’s population, rather than targeting the 10 percent. For best results, remember to exclude custom audiences of people who have already converted.
If the above steps are confused here, here is an article with more information on how to build a lookalike audience on Facebook.
Then refine with fine-grained targeting.
After you publish your first campaign, you can adjust your audience targeting strategy by adding the following tweaks. Add them one at a time to see if they make an impact. This article from AdEspresso by Moyens I/O explains how targeting works on Facebook.
First, select the target location. Then add to interests. Then demographics. Narrow your audience by adding the necessary categories like the user is interested in X and also likes Y or Z. Experiment with behavior as well.
Under Behaviors, you can target specific device owners, such as people who have an anniversary in the next two years, or users who have recently made a business purchase.
Another approach is to start by testing large audiences and then add more detail as you progress, resulting in a more refined, higher-converting audience each time.
3. Write a clear and understandable title
The perfect Facebook ad doesn’t bother people with its boring benefits or anxious pitches. Use a conversational tone and relax in the sales numbers.
At Moyens I/O, we’ve found that headlines work best when they’re clear and understandable. This minimizes annoying people with explicit ads in their personal feeds.
Sometimes a good title is a clever statement. Other times, it’s a simple product benefit. There are no real tricks to writing headlines. And even the old advice that headlines should contain benefits, not features, is nonsense, as the British say.
My advice is to follow the brands that have really mastered the aesthetic and social codes of Facebook and Instagram. A few personal favourites: Chewy.com, MVMT, and <>. You’ll notice that these brands tend to take a more conversational approach to headlines rather than traditional utility-driven text.
As an aside, your headline in a Facebook ad is usually the “text” field in the ad builder, not the “headline” field. Zuck and I see eye to eye on many things. But it’s clear that Facebook ads are created by engineers, not copywriters.
As you may have noticed in Facebook’s ad builder, the ‘headline’ appears in the third position in the ad below the image. This makes the headline the second thing you read in the ad, so it’s not a headline.
If you enter a copy in the “Text” field, treat it as your title. It’s the first thing your potential customers will see, and the “headline” works more like a subheading for additional information.
4. Use an image with creative tension in the title
The perfect Facebook ad has a clever or creative tension between art and text.
Amateur advertisers on Facebook make a predictable mistake. The visual and the title do not have any creative tension. For example, if the title is “make money in your sleep,” you’ll see a stock image of a person dressed in pajamas and holding a handful of cash. Or if the title says “become a social media jedi”, you’ll see a social media manager disguised as a jedi.
Here’s a helpful rule of thumb for stronger art direction. If the copy is real, make the image fun. If the visual is fun, make the copy immutable. This creates contrast and interaction between art and copy.
For example, there is an abstract image of Slack’s famous campaign. The title is the text describing the metaphor. It would be a very different campaign if the image were also simple and realistic, like someone in the office getting a high five. What makes the ad interesting is the tension between the image and the headline.
Another example comes from Zendesk. Imagine how awful it would be if the ad below was replaced with a friendly support team. A real headline and a real image for the inanimate ad.
If you need visual inspiration, you can use AdEspresso’s free advertising tool. It allows you to spy on your competitors and find successful examples of Facebook ads.
If you can’t afford a private photo shoot, here are 21 free stock photography sites.
5. Use the description field to eliminate friction for your CTA
The perfect Facebook ad knows that asking people to complete an action always creates buyer anxiety.
Your final step is to write a description for your CTA. This is the News Feed Link Description. Use this field to estimate general purchase objections.
For example, if your CTA is “Download your report,” a common objection might cause the audience to question the value of the report.
As you can see below, Dollar Shave Club uses the description field to respond to common objections to subscription packages.
So you can add some specific details like a teaser of the content. You can mention free shipping or return policies if you want direct sales, such as adding items to the cart.
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