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8 Steps To Create a Really Good Facebook Ad

Being able to create a really good facebook ad for your business is key for many small businesses in New Zealand. Yes, you can get a marketing agency like us at Identify to do it for you – but if you are either not ready to outsource your marketing to an agency, or you’d like to be able to learn how Facebook advertising works for yourself, this guide will help you

We’re not huge fans of BOOSTING at Identify. Yes we know boosting has a place, but for us, a really good Facebook Ad is NEVER a boosted post.

You will need to have ad manager to run the type of ads below. 

1.Set Your Goal

If you don’t know what you want to achieve, you’re going to struggle to get the right result. So what do you want the ad to give you in terms of results?

Here are some things you can consider:

  1. Getting them to join a mailing list (get them off facebook)
  2. Warm them up to you (it’s unlikely anyone will buy anything on the first impression)
  3. Taking them to the website means you’ve got their data and can retarget them.

2.What Type of Facebook Ad?

There are three main types of Facebook ads

  1. Conversion. This helps you drive people to make a purchase
  2. Engagement. This helps people find and like your page
  3. Traffic. This helps send people to your website so you can then retarget them.

The key is to remember you need to warm up your customers before they buy. So conversion ads need to be used alongside engagement and traffic ads to create an effective sales funnel. Most people will need to have some interaction with your brand nine-thirteen times before they buy. So you need to put the groundwork in!

3. Start Pinpointing Your Audience

Before we look at targeting, remember to us any data you already have to improve your opportunity. Load up your mailing list data into Facebook. Make sure your facebook pixel is collecting customer data from every web visitor. And use connections to your facebook page (or exclude them to get a brand new audience

4. Targeting the Correct Audience is KEY for a Really Good Facebook Ad.

To do this, you need to define who they are.

It’s simple enough to determine gender, age and area

But also look at other demographics and what behaviours you can attribute to your audience to help find them.

For instance – what type of shops may they frequent? What online stores will they like? Do they listen to a particular type of music? Are they parents? What is their relationship status?

As you plug in each attribute, you need to check you haven’t either widened the audience too far or made it too narrow.

For some, this may mean only adding in one or two different targeting demographics. And for others, the list may be very long

5. Set the Budget

We prefer to set a lifetime budget rather than an open-ended one. Set it for a set range of dates.

As you set it, think about what you want to get for that spend.

Do you want ten leads for a fifty dollar spend? Or two purchases valued at $100 for the same spend?

As you test the cost and measure it against the result, you’ll be able to set bigger goals, with bigger spend.

So if you do get ten leads for fifty dollars, if you spend one hundred, you will probably get twenty.

6. Create Compelling Copy

There are whole books on this topic along but here are a few simple pointers

  1. Put the most important information first
  2. Use words that compel action, and create emotion. For instance, want, need, love, deserve -these all work.They make people feel better.  And verbs such as buy, create, experience all help people act.
  3. Use spacing, and try to use as few words as possible OR create a long-form ad that tells a story.
  4. Always consider what you are solving for your audience.

7. Attention Grabbing Images

We love using Canva.com – even if you are using your own images, it ensures you are creating images the correct size.

Ensure your images are on brand, and align with your website.

Image size changes depending on the type of ad you are doing, so check that before you start designing.

Makes sure you include no more than 20% text in your image (Our preference is to avoid it all together, the vast majority of the time.

Step through the ad and create it.

8. And now the work begins

Of course, this is only the beginning of creating a really good facebook ad.

The next step is to watch your ad very carefully and watch its performance. If it’s not giving you results early on, pause it, duplicate it and rework parts of it using this guide.

Allow both ads to run together and see which one performs better. Delete the poor performer, then duplicate the remaining ad again, tweak and again run them together.

If the ad is still not performing, it might be a whole range of things – your landing pages need work, your target market is off, your offer is not something people need,  your audience is too cold.

Creating effective advertising is both an art and an experiment. And it’s most definitely something you get better at the more you do.

If you are committed to doing your own digital advertising yourself, we strongly recommend our online digital marketing course – it leads you through each step above and provides screenshots and detail to help you become confident.

And if you read this and it looks like a huge amount of work – well we’d love to chat about helping you out with that. We LOVE creating facebook ads, as part of our outsourced marketing services.

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