You’ve opened up Facebook Ads Manager… Now what? How can you turn a social media advertisement into a business revenue generator?
Facebook Marketing is a lot like funnel marketing, where you have the ability to move your audience from cold to hot through the content that converts. It’s not about one ad being the key to your Facebook ads success, it’s an ecosystem of paid advertising that serves your business goals.
Starting with Objectives and choosing the right Facebook ads objective for success. Once you’ve discovered the type of objective that your audience is most likely to complete, you can then match this with the advertising format that is right for your business.
How to Choose a Facebook Objective
According to Facebook, the objective is the end game a.k.a “what you want people to do when they see your ads”. Many either overthink this step, or ignore it completely, and wonder why the results aren’t matching with the campaign creative.
Facebook created each of the campaign purposes to target a different stage in the sales funnel; essentially, they’re encouraging you to use the advertising not to just sell, but it cultivate relationships that will lead to sales.
Facebook Objective: Awareness
The majority of people on Facebook, including your audience, don’t know that you and your business exists. The first step to creating an advertisement is to choose a marketing objective; at the very top of the funnel, your ads should be building brand awareness, interest in your venue, and connection through storytelling.
Types of Awareness Ads
- Brand Awareness: reaching people and showing your advertisements to them through their interests.
- Reach: showing your ads to the maximum amount of people.
Facebook Objective: Consideration
You’ve piqued your audience’s interest. They know about you, your brand and your value. Facebook uses the Consideration objective as an extension of your content marketing. It’s another piece of the marketing strategy pie; you can use these objectives to share your blog posts, video marketing, testimonials, email newsletters.
Types of Consideration Ads
- Traffic: get more eyes on your website. Direct your audience to your most recent blog posts, your upcoming events, and more information on your business.
- Engagement: think more page likes, event responses (great for brick-and-mortar businesses) and offer claims (2-for-1 cocktails).
- App Installs: have an event coming up with an app download? This is the objective for you.
- Video Views: increase how many people are watching the video content you post to your feed.
- Lead Generation: capture information from your audience using this objective. Within Facebook, you can ask for a name and email address to grow your email list or promote your offers to.
- Messenger Ads: advertise to your audience in their Messenger or WhatsApp. Send event reminders or prompt a response to start a conversation.
Facebook Objective: Conversion
This is where the magic is, but only after you’ve moved your audience through the Facebook ads funnel. Conversion Facebook ads are created to encourage your audience to make a purchase, book a table, or register for an event.
Types of Conversion Ads
- Conversions: using the Facebook Pixel, the Ads Manager has the data to target these ads to your audience most likely to make purchases of your products or services.
- Store Visits: promote your business to people who are in the area. To do this, you need to add the geographic location of your business to the Facebook Ads Manager.
How to Choose a Facebook Advertising Format
Facebook Advertising: Video
At the top of your advertising funnel, video marketing is an amazing way to introduce new and potential customers to your brand. Video currently, and will continue to, dominate Facebook -- a HUGE 100 million hours of video is watched per DAY on the platform (TechCrunch).
Similar to the video format, Facebook offers Slideshow ads or “video-like” advertising to bring together photos and video without the cost of production.
Facebook Advertising: Photo / Carousel
The Photo ad format are the easiest to create if you’re lacking time and/or budget. They simply appear as a link would in the feed, with an image, an action for someone to take (i.e. Learn More), and a link to your website. Single image ads can be made up of a branded image or an image from Facebook’s Stock Library.
Another way to display your branded imagery is through Carousel ads. You can showcase your business/venue story with a range of images (between 2 and 10 images of videos that your audience can swipe through). Each slide has a call-to-action that supports the overall ad objective. Learn more about how to create carousel ads.
Facebook Advertising: Canvas
Facebook calls them “Instant Experiences” as they’re ads that are fully-immersive and combine all the formats that a regular website allows (without navigating out of the app): photos, videos, GIFs, text and buttons.
Facebook Advertising: Dynamic
Dynamic Facebook ads are completely personalised to your audience, and work best when used with the Facebook Pixel. Your offers can be shown to people who have visited your website, in your app or anyone else on the internet, and encourage the actions to be taken that you care about (i.e. buying tickets to an event).
Facebook Advertising: Instagram Stories
More and more people are interacting with Instagram Stories over content in the news feed, meaning showing advertisements in Stories can appear to be organic. In a recent study, Facebook found that after seeing an advertisement in Stories, that 56% of users browsed the brand’s website for more information, and after than 34% visited the physical premises to check out the product or service.
Between the sales funnel and choosing the right Facebook Advertising format for your business, we can sort it out the strategy and implementation.
