7 Tips to Get the Most Out of Facebook Advertising

Why do you advertise?

The ultimate goal is to maximize profit. When it comes to advertising on Facebook, this end goal is often overlooked, as people get lost in the “more likes, more fans” mentality, but if you don’t have the final ROI on your mind, you are doing it wrong. The road to profit is not straightforward though, especially on Facebook, which divides the campaign goals into multiple categories, with each of them representing different steps in converting users to customers.

These are a few tips and tricks, from general to specific, that can greatly help you with getting the most out of Facebook advertising (or cost you dearly if you disregard them) across all of these steps, so let’s jump right in:

Best tips for making your Ad Campaigns successful on Facebook

1. Understand the campaign goals

   Facebook divides Campaigns into 3 categories: Awareness, Consideration and Conversion. When you talk marketing strategy and which of these campaign types to use, it’s not an either/or situation; rather, it is a question of which is suitable for which step. Nobody will consider buying your product or services without knowing about you first, and very few people will make the jump straight from knowing about you to buying from you without first considering their options. This is where the campaign categories come in: when reaching out and building a fan base for your brand, it would be wise to make use of the brand awareness campaign. When the fan base is strong, you should consider engaging them and bring them to consider what you are selling. Then, you have to fight for their attention, so that you are the first one they think of when the time is right and they are on the market to buy something that you sell. And if you already have a great and engaged base, you can start with “hard-sell” conversion campaigns, pushing for direct conversions.

2. Fine-tune your content in accordance to the campaign goal

   Why are you doing this exact Facebook campaign? What is the first thing you want your audience to do? Like your page? Engage with your ad copy? Visit your website?Whatever it is, you have to plan the whole campaign content accordingly. Facebook provides you with suggestions to help you choose between different ad formats and other things to make the most out of your advertising campaign, but this needs to be in synergy with your actual goal.If it’s brand awareness, make informative posts about your business with strong branding. If it’s post engagement (likes, reactions, comments), publish posts that promote discussion, inform about topical events or have strong statements, evoke strong feelings etc. If it’s traffic, include link posts that lead to your website with good content.

3. Start with page likes

   What if you are new to Facebook advertising? Clearly, you may not necessarily know what goal you should set. Then, you should start with increasing the number of your page fans. Those who like your page will become your audience, and they will have a good chance of seeing the content that you publish, if it is regular and engaging enough.As more people like your Facebook Page, more and more of their friends will start seeing it on their feed – this is a good opportunity to publish posts with compelling content that will make them like the page.After you get enough page fans and you you get familiar with other Facebook advertising campaigns, you can set other goals and objectives.

4. Boost successful posts 

   There are two ways you can promote your ad content on Facebook: creating ads from scratch (so-called dark posts) and boosting existing posts that are published on your Facebook page.Boosting posts is a very efficient way of running your campaigns, as you kill two birds with one stone: you can have good organic content on your pages, and take the best of them and boost them, so a different audience also sees them. You will encounter terms such as organic and paid reach in this category. Organic reach is the amount of unique users that see the post that you have published on your Facebook page, and paid reach is what goes after that, when you pay for the post to reach more people. Generally, you want to boost the posts that have the best organic results, be it reach or other metrics, depending on your goal.It’s not always easy to pick the best performing posts because even though you can schedule posts, you have to manually check how it performs and then boost it. Luckily, there are automation tools for situations like this. I prefer this one that’s pretty cheap in comparison to some of the big all-in-one solutions – It’s called Boosterberg and it provides complete Facebook post boosting automation, with a lot of advanced features like time delaying, keywords, stopping ads based on ads performance metrics etc.

5. Use compelling images that go with the Ad Copy

   I have seen people wasting their money on Facebook advertising by using mismatched images in their ads. People get weirded out about that and even though it may give you a ‘ha ha’ reaction, nothing else will happen, other than your content losing credibility.There is also another hidden restriction connected to images that you publish. Sometimes, you want to have text directly in the image to convey the message better, in striking design. This is all good and well with posts that you simply publish, but if you want to promote (boost) them, Facebook can block the ad when it sees that more than 20% of the image is covered in text. In this case, make sure that you instruct your designers accordingly.

6. Add a Call-to-Action button to your posts 

   You may advertise for brand awareness, you might want better engagement on your posts, but you can’t go wrong with a simple Call to Action (CTA) button. At least some percentage of users that see your are interested to learn more but won’t go the distance and click through to your Page, so help them and get some conversions on top of other goals straight away.A good ad copy, coupled with an appropriate CTA button can do wonders in turning over random feed-scrolling users into customers.

7. Use numbers creatively

   If you have a product that you sell that some customers would want to buy, make it seem like a special offer – people love discounts and rebates, they like to think that they just saw a limited special price that they can jump on and feel good about their luck.You can also show the number of customers or reputable clients if you have them. People like to follow others, so many people who bought this already can’t be wrong.

Wrapping Up

There are many ways to do Facebook advertising effectively and many useful practices that you can learn, from general rules and ideas all the way to specific niche tricks.

Many of them, you will have to learn on your own, as they will be specific to your campaigns and your audience.

Feel free to share your own Facebook marketing tips in the comments, and until next time, may your profits exceed your budget by a reasonable margin.