7 Best Facebook Advertising Strategies to Spark Business Growth
Using the best Facebook advertising strategies will help your business leverage the largest social media platform to profitably grow your business. It is important to set a proven process for Facebook campaign management that focuses on reaching targeted audiences, A/B testing, and developing a funnel strategy.
The 7 Facebook Advertising Strategies to Boost Your Business Growth:
1. Optimize How You Reach Your Audience
It is no secret that Facebook incentivizes advertisements with higher amounts of likes, comments, clicks, and shares, with more impressions. Reaching your audience effectively through strategically managing targeting is imperative to maximize the performance of your campaigns.
Though, you may ask which audiences are most ideal for me to target on Facebook? Demographic targeting options will allow you to target an audience based on the characteristics which may include, but are not limited to, age, language, gender, education, and location. You may want to choose to target a custom audience, which could be website visitors, a customer list, or email subscribers. Then, you can target a lookalike audience, which is a group of people who have similar characteristics to your custom audience. Retargeting previous website visitors will help you build credibility and market special offers to people who were previously interested in your business.
However, Facebook’s dynamic advertisement prices change the number of estimated impressions they deliver based on the targeting you have entered and the supply and demand of the overall audience that you target. As you change the targeting of your campaign, we highly recommend that you check how the volume of your expected impressions changed.
Sometimes, you can improve the level of impressions and engagement delivered by choosing a similar category or removing the targeting element. However, a specific targeting element may be required to effectively reach your customers. Therefore, running an A/B test can help you understand the overall impact on results given a change in targeting criteria. Do note that Facebook automatically optimizes campaigns depending on the goal that you choose, so running experiments for longer periods of time will generally provide more accurate results on what is the most ideal strategy.
Choosing the right ad objective is critical to achieving as it will define what you are paying for, and will heavily influence how far your budget will go. Facebook will automatically optimize your campaign based on what you choose based on the wealth of data it has. For example, Facebook will show your ad more often to people who engage with videos when you choose video views. It will charge you based on link clicks if you choose traffic should you want to build brand awareness. Facebook will show your advertisements to people who have submitted forms more often in the past when you choose lead generation.
2. Embrace Using Different Ad Types
Fully explore how different ad types are beneficial to your specific Facebook advertising campaign.
Video ads tend to get the most engagements and shares. However, many people tend to view them with the sound off, so you would want to make sure that they have subtitles. Most businesses do not create video content because they believe that they do not have the ability to make polished ones, but there are many alternatives to consider. It can be tempting to hire actors and producers to make custom, highly polished videos, but this can be very costly and time-consuming. For businesses that are looking to run advertising campaigns on a relatively larger scale, the investment can be worthwhile. Though, creating animated videos is a more economical option route that can still drive great results.
Carousel ads tend to be cheaper and have a higher conversion rate. You could showcase five different products that you would like prospects to learn more about and purchase. Otherwise, the ad can be designed to detail five features of a specific product.
Mobile ads are important as more people view Facebook on a mobile device than on a computer. Therefore, it is important to resize images for mobile-specific ad formats to avoid unintentional cropping and write shorter copy for these formats. Consider testing other mobile-optimized ad formats, such as Story Ads and Collection Ads.
Messenger ads are a great way to reach customers instantly by allowing them to initiate a conversation on Facebook. In turn, messenger ads feature an increased response and conversion rate and traditionally feature a “Send Message” button on ads. Once you have initiated the conversation with leads generated through these ads, you are more likely to close a deal because you are engaging with them faster. You can even send a sponsored message to advertise a highly relevant offer crafted for each individual user directly into their inbox. Furthermore, studies show 53% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands they can message.
3. Strategically Use A/B Testing
Testing small variations of your Facebook ads will help you understand how best to dynamically respond to changing Facebook advertising strategies. You could focus on switching around specific words of your advertisement.
For example, these call-to-actions are worth A/B testing:
“Get our widget now”
“Buy our widget now”
“Get our widget today”
“Buy our widget today”
Customizing Facebook ad messaging to appeal toward different geographical areas depending on the exact characteristics of your business. For example, you may want to advertise a sale nearby a store location that is celebrating a grand opening that you may not want to display in an area of existing store locations that are not honoring the same offer. Consider the characteristics of your product or service offering may vary in different areas depending on the exact demographics of your customers. You may want to consider adding emojis to add personality aligned with your target demographics.
4. Display High-quality Photos
It is imperative to use clear, high quality, relevant, and engaging photos when creating Facebook ads. You want to post photos that do not contain too much text because you may receive fewer impressions if you do. Ensure that you also use high-quality photos for your profile and cover pictures as this enhances your brand image.
5. Deploy a Marketing Funnel
Businesses can find immense benefits in setting up a marketing funnel to improve the lead generation capabilities and further the benefit of their Facebook advertising strategies.
The way to think of this is that people naturally buy from people they know, like, and trust. Now, most people will tell you the time if you ask them for it. However, if someone walks up to you and tries to sell you popcorn at a park, you will probably decline. Now, if the popcorn vendor talked for you for an hour, or if you already knew the popcorn vendor, you would be a lot more likely to buy from them.
Marketing funnels achieve a very similar dynamic to this. A business provides free content today to build trust and solve some of your problem. However, you then follow up with a prospect and provide escalating offers to solve more of that problem to build a relationship. Then, the prospect will be much more likely to convert into becoming your client!
Businesses can enhance their ROI by utilizing marketing automation to better convert visitors by tracking the actions of each user to arrive at a lead score which would show the level of purchase intent each individual has at any given time. Don’t forget to deploy the Facebook Pixel to track the volume of conversions that you receive.
Syncing your content marketing strategy through offering a free article to entice users to provide their contact information on a lead magnet is most ideal. You could also get the attention of users by offering a special offer. Once the user has submitted their information, you could then create higher-value follow-up offers. Afterward, you could send a sequence of emails over time to keep in touch with prospects that decide not to proceed to the next step in the marketing funnel. Additionally, you could send emails to “ascend” your new customer up the value ladder who has purchased something from you.
6. Use Retargeting Ads
Deploying Facebook retargeting ads helps you reach customers that have already expressed interest in the products and services that your business offers. Some people may perceive retargeting ads as magical, but they deliver the highest ROI for advertisers. To further this strategy, you could offer them free shipping, a special discount, or highlight specific offerings of interest to re-engage their audience.
Likewise, it is very effective to pair up your Facebook retargeting strategy with a search engine advertising strategy depending on the scope of your campaign. You can use Facebook to retarget users that clicked on your more costly keywords within your Google & Bing campaigns. This is a great way of controlling the cost of advertising as it is much cheaper to retarget people through Facebook ads rather than to obtain a new audience through search engine ads. After all, it usually takes people about 7 interactions with your brand before they build enough trust to buy from your business.
7. Don’t Forget the Emotional Appeal
It’s important to keep a warm, emotional appeal with Facebook campaigns to ensure you are convincing your audience to take action. Define what problems you solve for your audience and don’t forget to include them in your advertisement. Keep in mind potential objections your viewers may have, and address them within the ad if possible.