How To Place an Ad On Facebook (that actually works).

Let's talk about why

Why are you thinking about Facebook ads? What do you want to get out of this? Have you thought about your business goal?

The first step to a successful Facebook campaign is understanding the right objective, or ad type. Facebook advertising, like any marketing, will only work when you have a goal-focused plan. This also gives you something to measure against, so you can assess, analyse and adapt as you go. That's right. This is not going to be a set-and-forget thing.

There are three main types of Facebook ad campaigns. Hint, it's all about your marketing funnel.

Brand Awareness

These are top-of-the-funnel objectives that help generate interest in your business. You can choose from a brand awareness campaign that aims to lift brand equity or reach which helps you get in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

The important thing here is not expecting the audience to take an action. If you get engagement, epic. If not, it's not what you came for. The main goal here is to get people interested in your brand and warmed up for more sales-driven messaging later on.

The brilliance of marketing through Facebook is being able to target people throughout the buyer journey (more on that later).

Consideration

These are middle-of-the-funnel goals that help people learn more about your specific offers, services and products. Choose from six campaign types: traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation and messages.

This is a really great way to encourage interactions between your brand and your potential customers. While clicks to your site, app installs and leads gathered seem like major actions, at this point what you really want is to get fixed in their minds and leave them wanting more information.

Conversion

We're at the bottom-of-the-funnel now with objectives that lead to the most valuable actions for your business: purchases, registrations and even physical visits. In this phase, you can pick from conversions (on your website), catalog sales or store traffic (to a location in person).

These goals push your audience from potential to new customers.

Make sure your audience is actually warmed enough to hit with such end-game advertising. A cold audience will drive your costs up significantly, making each action less profitable.

You need to get your objective right, not just because it's important to match your business goals but because of the algorithm that's going to work its magic on your campaign. When you set a particular type, you're telling Facebook how to optimise your ad campaign, whether that's delivering to people more likely to click or people more likely to download a mobile app. Set the wrong type and you'll end up wasting dollars on users engaging the wrong way with your ad.

Target with a laser-focus

To build a Facebook ad campaign around the appropriate phase of the funnel, you also have to know who you're targeting. Each campaign should speak to a specific audience because you can't please everybody.

The beauty of Facebook ads is their precision targeting.

First, you've got the basics - demographic and psychographic. Narrow down your target audience based on everything from age to interests. Some really standout options fall under the 'behaviours' category, where you can do things like target engaged shoppers, and connections, where you can find people based on pages they follow.

On top of that, there are some really cool platform-specific options.

Custom audiences

You can build your own target audience with a contact list from your own database, information captured via the Facebook Pixel on your website, or through your app or game. Those are real people who've already engaged with your brand.

Total game-changer.

Lookalike audiences

This taps into the powerful knowledge of custom audiences and allows you to scale with accuracy. Facebook will expand your audience to people who are as similar as you like to your most loyal customers, hunting through similar characteristics and behaviors and matching users to your list.

Are you going to show them your best?

An optimised Facebook campaign is only half the mission.

Before you craft the perfect ad, think about where you're sending people. You have one chance to make the right impression with potential customers and illicit the right action. If you fail to grab their attention immediately, you've lost.

Imagine if you click on an ad for a specific book and you end up on a catalog page with hundreds of books. How annoyed would you be? In fact, you'll probably click away and Google for the book, purchasing from someone who'll actually make it easy for you.

Always align your landing point with your ad, giving people exactly what they wanted when they clicked. Fail to do that and you'll drive them right into the arms of your competition.

Make sure they're loving what you're serving

Conversion tracking. Two little words, massive power.

Facebook ads manager will actually demand you have this set up for conversion ads but really, you should be tracking for every campaign when you're expecting people to click through off-platform.

Let's break it down.

The main way to do this is by installing the Facebook Pixel in your website code, leaving it there to passively collect information on all visits to your site.

Someone sees your Facebook ad, gets totally blown away, clicks on the link and ends up on your website. Then they change their mind, they're gone.

With conversion tracking, you can find them, get them back, have a second chance to impress. That's called retargeting and Facebook advertising is uniquely clever at doing this. Conversion tracking also allows you to track specific actions on your website so you can see what people do once they land.

If they add something to a cart, make a purchase because of your ad, give your business a call or anything interactive, you'll know.

You can also follow new customers back on to Facebook and implement a strong customised remarketing strategy to continue building the relationship with them and convert them into loyal fans.

With that data in hand, you can analyse the relationship between the target audience, your ads and your brand, to see where you can make adjustments to optimise.

Talk to them, not at them

Good marketing is a conversation. You don't want to be screaming your message at potential customers, you want to engage in a two-way exchange. Give and take.

Get your messaging right. Talk to the target audience like they're a real person, right in front of you.

This comes down to three main things.

Messaging

The most persuasive writing revolves around pain and desire. The language you use in your ad copy should convince them that using your product or service will take them away from their pain points and closer to pleasure. Purchasing is almost always about emotion. People could have a hundred reasons to get something, but at the end of the day they have to want it and that comes down to how it makes them feel. So tell them.

Offer

A great way to coax action is an appealing offer. Which makes sense. People are much more likely to click when there's something in it for them.

Especially when it comes to prospecting for new customers, an introductory offer could convince them to give it a trial, getting you in the door to continue building loyalty.

Call to action

Understand what you want and make it clear. Don't leave the audience guessing what to do next and make sure this is consistent on your ad and your landing page. A personalised statement that implies what they're about to experience will help boost your click-through rate.

Get ready to launch

If you've been sitting on the fence thinking, does Facebook advertising really work, stop asking yourself that. The answer is yes.

Facebook campaigns are an excellent opportunity to grow and scale your business, even with a smaller ad budget. The ads manager builder is comprehensive, easy-to-understand, flexible and detailed, helping businesses put together and optimise their Facebook ads with ease.

But it takes work. To really excel at Facebook advertising, you have to spend time making sure you're putting the right comms out there. From ensuring your ad type matches your business goal to speaking to the customer in their language, there is a great deal of planning to do before launching.

Want help getting it right? Talk to the experts.

It's a lot. The wrong strategy will drive up your costs and you'll lose precious dollars. But finding the right strategy takes time, patience, testing and sometimes failure.

Don't worry. We do this every single day. We've done the learning so you don't have to.

If you want help pulling together winning Facebook ads, talk to our specialists. As Facebook Marketing Partners, we work closely with reps from the platform to bring you the latest insights, newest resources and best practices ahead of the game.

To get started, jump on a call with us today on or send through an enquiry.