13 strategic steps to create profitable Facebook Ads

We can’t ignore the other fact – and that is that one of the coolest ways to promote your brand online is through Facebook. Every time a user logs in and scans through his or her timeline, there your brand advert is, catching their eye. Doesn’t it even sound exciting?
But does it work? You bet it does. That’s why Facebook has become the 2nd biggest organisation in terms of value and almost all its revenue is coming from the advertisement.

60 million businesses are advertising on Facebook – this sort of number can’t be wrong.

However, advertising your business on Facebook and creating an awesome, attention-grabbing, mind-blowing Facebook Ad are two different things.

• The social media giant offers a ton of targeting options for you to show your ads to a specifically defined audience; demographic, location, behaviors, etc. wise.
• Facebook has over 1.1 billion users who are accessing the Facebook app on a daily basis, so you have the opportunity to entice a large mobile audience every day.
• They let you see your conversion rates and other social media metrics through clearly laid out analytics and reporting tools.
• Facebook users check their newsfeed multiple times each day giving your preferred audience repeated exposure to your ads.
• They keep improving their advertising tools and business resulting in steadily increasing Ad CTR.

Now that you know the above, you should also know – it may all sound as simple as signing up for the Facebook Ad program, but it’s not! There are a lot of things that can go wrong with Facebook Ads and cause your investment to go to the trash just like that. You may be wondering, what’s wrong with that? You are only losing some advertising money. But the biggest loss would be not able to create profitable Facebook Ads rather your opportunity to grow your business using one of the most effective marketing channels. To nail Facebook advertising, you must do it right, and that’s the centre focus of this piece. Below, we’re sharing with you 13 steps that you should put in your checklist to create your Facebook Ads. If you can nail these, you will make a profit from your Facebook Ads – it’s pretty much confirmed.

Are you ready to grow your business using Facebook as a platform? The following will give you quite a lot of details to follow.

As a consumer, ask yourself this question, would you be convinced by an advertisement that tries to simply sell you something?

The answer is, quite emphatically, a big NO – correct?
Everyone is advertising on Facebook. Remember, it’s the coolest thing to do and the potential is huge – everyone knows it. But do you think every business is doing it correctly? If yes then there wouldn’t be a business that is not successful. You need to find a way to be different from the rest.

Success with customers depends heavily on providing a solution to their problem. If a product or service can make a problematic scenario easy, consumers are quite likely to buy or enroll for it. So focus on the most important thing first before creating a Facebook Ad.
You must be asking what that is. The answer is- An offer; which shows your customer that your product or service can solve a problem in their life. Make the offer so irresistible that a user can’t help but sign up and doesn’t bother about paying for it. If you can do that, you’ve gone more than half the way to closing the deal.

Here’s an example of a limited time subscription offer by New York Times:

It is critical to know who you’re selling to before you start selling. Unfortunately, most businesses out there don’t have a clue as to who their real audience is. That’s why you see very generic ads floating around on Facebook every now and then. The primary reason businesses don’t know their customers is because they don’t take the effort to install some simple tools to get reports and insights on their customers. Even when they do, they are too scared to dive into the data and derive insights from it.

Google Analytics is a free tool and you can install it on your website very easily. If you only analyse the data coming from Google Analytics and action on the insights gained from it – you will go well ahead of your competition. Most websites do have it installed because most of the times, businesses do it as a tick box activity. The thing that will make you different is ACTUALLY taking the time and analysing the reports on a regular basis.

The significance of knowing who the right customers are for your product and focusing on pleasing them is paramount to nailing the Facebook Ad success factor.

• Learn about your customers using the analytics tools (Google Analytics is just one option, there are 100s of these out there),
• Create your buyer persona (read here for more on buyer persona) and then
• Target those customers with your products using Facebook’s targeting mechanism.

A marketing funnel encapsulates the techniques you employ to convert prospective customers into paying customers. There are multiple funnel models out there and most of them work great. But not every model is suitable for every business or product. You will have to test, tweak, and optimize different funnels until you get the right one for you. And you should know that most funnels remain unprofitable for a couple of months, so this is a long process. You have to be patient and persistent to make your Facebook advertising campaign profitable by constantly working to raise the conversion rate.

Look at the above image. Ask yourself – what is your number one target? Do you want new customers or retain existing customers with your Ads? Based on the answer, create your Ads.
If you are wondering how to create a marketing funnel, you can look at this link here, which gives a very good step by step guidelines. Note, that this is just one source. There are plenty of sources available online that can help you.

While ‘spying’ seems like a negative term, ‘taking inspiration’ is more sophisticated. And by taking inspiration we are not suggesting that you copy your competitor’s ads or format, but you can learn from their strategies and try to come up with your own ideas. To legitimately check 

your competitors Facebook Ads:

1. Go to your competitor’s Facebook Page
2. In the right sidebar on their Facebook Page click on “see more” on the Page Transparency widget
3. Click on “Go to Ad Library” at the bottom
4. Change filter by to “All”

Remember, your business is unique and people who will find your business as a good solution are also unique. So make sure you bring that uniqueness to your communication. As mentioned earlier, be “inspired” by the competitions’ methods and ideas but then make it better for your business. If you just copy someone successful, know that you have lost the battle already because you have lost the uniqueness that you could bring to the table.

“The first impression is the last impression”. Ever heard of that saying? Well, in terms of Facebook Ads, it is literally true. Your advert headline is what people read first and thus, it is one of the most important parts of your campaign to lock your customers’ attention from the get-go.
Crafting the perfect headline is actually so intricate that nearly 45K+ people share a post just by reading the headline. It has the potential to make a huge difference in the click-through rate and the cost-per-click of your Facebook Ads. If you need help creating headlines that people will click for sure:

• Be clear, precise and concise
• Use actionable terms such as “Get” and “Try”
• Emphasise on the advantages of your product or service

Here’s a great example of a catchy headline by SaneBox:

Source: https://klientboost.com/ppc/facebook-ad-examples/

You could add client logos to your ad images, include testimonials, and even include numbers describing your customer base.
A great example of displaying social proof by SumoMe:

When you’re employing such great measures to make your ads a success, you wouldn’t want to fall short in terms of content. Ultimately, the only way to influence people is through words. The content of your offers and the way the copy is structured is the biggest factor that can turn your conversion rate around. And if you have previous experience in curating awesome content, that’s great. But if you’re in doubt, we suggest you hire professional copywriters to do your Facebook ads. You’ll see the difference.

“A picture says a thousand words”, literally! Just including the right picture in your Facebook Ad can make a huge difference. Researches indicate that 75% of an ad’s ability to draw attention is because of the picture it includes.

Take an example of Facebook status updates. As opposed to text updates, aren’t photographs more noticeable? Images deliver more information in a single second than texts. It can make it easier for people to find ads they like by simply looking at a visual image.
This cool photo ad by NatureBox explains this better:

And here is an example of Video and how the text has a storytelling style.

FOMO or the Fear of Missing Out, is what drives customer actions the most. Think of it like experiencing the panic of missing a flight!
If you make it sound like your customers are missing out on something great by not clicking on your ad, you are sure to get more clicks than ever. You can make your readers think that everyone else is already using your product and they’re the last ones out. By including a question that makes people think they’re the only ones left out, your ad will definitely get more clicks than a similar one without the FOMO. After all, no-one likes to miss out on a great offer.
Here’s an example of Scoro’s Facebook Ad to prove our point:

To catch your user’s eye, your ad needs to be different than the others. Use vibrant colours that demand user attention. The ad designs that tend to work best are either the ones with a nearly white background and very light images or the ones with strong colours and high contrast images. Anything in between will just disappear from the user’s memory. While you’re at it, use carousels to get up to 10 times more clicks compared to static posts. With carousel ads, you can include up to 10 images and headlines in a single post which is an excellent method for telling a story.

Here’s a great carousel ad by TYME

Create multiple ads and show it to your customers on different days. By doing so, you can keep your customers from getting bored and show them a new side to your product or a new benefit every few days. The simplest method to rotate multiple ads is to create a campaign with a single ad, copy the ad group and then create two separate ad groups with different ad images under the same campaign. Then set up a custom schedule to show different ads on different days. Also, keep your ad frequency under control to avoid people from getting tired of seeing your ad over and over again. This can make your click-through rate go down and ad costs increased.

You might wonder what we mean by saying ‘let Facebook help you’. Most of us know from experience that these big giants are always there to get you in a sneaky way. But for Facebook’s case, it doesn’t have the luxury to apply those tactics simply because they can’t meet their revenue target by grabbing your money only once. They need to thrive by making you succeed in your advertisement. More successful you are, more money you will be throwing at them. So they have some cool tools to help businesses get better in their advertisement.
Here are a few (not going into too much detail, conscious of the length of this article):

• Facebook analytics/reports: Their analytics and reports are very powerful. Make sure you check them regularly to find out what is working and what is not.
• Install Facebook Pixel: Here is the definition of Pixel by Facebook – “The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. You can use pixel data to make sure your ads are being shown to the right people. Build advertising audiences”. Set this up using the steps mentioned here.

Let’s finish it up by mentioning few things that you MUST stay away from doing

• Do not ever invest more money than $5 in your first Facebook Ad. The key with Facebook Ad is “testing”. There are so many things going on in the background that it is difficult to come up with a winning formula right away. So, you need to create at least 2 versions of an ad. Put $5 for each. Find the winner. Do the same with another ad. Make sure you have a clear view on what you are trying to test – is it your target audience or the copy or the image/video? Keep testing and find the winner from each test. Then pitch those winners up against each other. You will soon find out what works for your business. Then invest more on the winner(s). You are likely to get at least $2 for each $1 spent. If you start achieving that then why wouldn’t you go ahead with full swing, correct? But don’t invest too much before you apply the above testing strategy.
• Do not target the same people who have already taken the desired action. All businesses have a limited marketing budget. Spend yours effectively. If you have advertised to a customer segment and some of them have taken the action (like a purchase or signing up to your email list), don’t show them the same ad again. You would be spending money for no reason. So create custom audiences based on the Pixels that you have set up already. Below is a screenshot of how you can create an audience. Once you create one/few, make sure you use those in your inclusion and exclusion rules.

Hope these hacks will help you bring about some serious Facebook advertising profits. Do keep experimenting with different strategies to find the right one to suit your business.
If you have found the above useful and would like to speak to us regarding your business, how to implement some of the above-mentioned points or maybe even getting your marketing strategy correct – please go ahead and book a 30 minutes FREE consultation session with us by clicking the following link.