4 Tips to Creating a Great Facebook Ad Campaign

Facebook can be a successful, cost-effective channel on which to promote your business, and these tips will help you create a great Facebook Ad campaign.

We see Facebook Ads every time we log into the social network. They may not always be captivating, and you may not always notice them, but they are always there and always trying to grab your attention. But more often than not, they are not achieving the goal of converting eyes into clicks.

Facebook Ads may be easy to use, straightforward and simple to monitor, but there are a few key factors that distinguish your average-performing Facebook Ads and great Facebook Ad campaigns. Below are four tips that should help take your Facebook advertising to the next level.

Do Some Research

The first time you put together an ad campaign on Facebook, you are going to be eager to get your content out there and watch the “Like” counter shoot up. Unfortunately, without at least a little bit of research, you are not going to see the results you are hoping for.

Look through your insights, study engagement levels and develop a campaign that both fits the brand you’ve created on Facebook and appeals to a specific audience. If you are trying to target everyone, you might end up reaching no one. (Don’t worry – that makes more sense after you see the next tip.)

Target a Very Specific Audience

When you first start building your ad and you see your options for targeting, you might be excited by the prospect of potentially reaching upwards of 150 million people (and that’s in the United States alone!). But the reality of the situation is, if you are not creating an ad directed at a targeted audience – namely, one based on the research you did before you got started – there is no telling who will see it, and you will likely miss out on opportunities to reach engaged audiences as opposed to a broad audience of uninterested persons.

To put it in perspective, if you are trying to attract people to your page about food and dining for female college students, a broad, unspecific audience might only show your content to middle aged professional men. The result? A lower-than-hoped-for conversion.

Create an Appealing Ad

Sure – it sounds like a no brainer. Why would you do anything else, right? Well, it is not as easy as it sounds. The key to a great Facebook Ad campaign is appeal. People should be intrigued by the content in your ad – and you don’t have much of it considering it might be as small as a little image and text on the right-hand column of someone’s news feed or timeline.

This is where you need to let your creative juices flow. The content and images in these ads should not simply be your logo and a brief description of your company. Leave that on your page. Share a fun fact, an interesting quote, an curious question or any other engaging bit of content. People should feel compelled to see what else you are offering when they see your ad.

Though it has been done by plenty of businesses, let’s look at the “abs of steel concept” we often see floating on the right of our Facebook screen. It might be for a personal trainer, a mail-order program or a diet, but they are showing a picture of a killer six pack and asking something along the lines of, “Do you want abs that look like this in 60 days? Then click here and get started today!” Even the skeptic is compelled to click, just to see what the offer is. Go for something irresistible and your click-through rates will be much higher than average.

Try, Try and Try Again!

There are a billion accounts on Facebook and your first campaign is not going to reach them all. In fact, you might be disappointed in the results of your first campaign. What went wrong? Were you targeting the wrong audience? Was your content not as great as you thought it was? That’s all part of the learning process.

You might find after a few tests that your most engaged market is nothing close to what you thought it was. That’s a great lesson and can translate into a lot more business, and it is not particularly expensive to figure out; your ads can be budgeted very modestly. Testing is the best way to turn your trials into great Facebook Ad campaigns.

Apply these tips and you’ll see your Facebook marketing take off in no time. Once again, one in every seven people on Earth is checking Facebook multiple times every day. Why not try and talk to them with a carefully laid out strategy in place?

What other tips can you think that help build great Facebook ad campaigns? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!