Over the last decade, Facebook has become one of the biggest marketplaces on the internet, not merely a social platform. Many brands include Facebook ads in their digital marketing plan in order to keep exposing themselves to massive users. But sometimes you might feel confused about the poor ads performance even though you’ve spent so many hours setting up Facebook ads. In this article, you’ll learn how to build a winning Facebook ads strategy that gets users to visit your business instead of your competitors.

Why Facebook Ads Strategy is important

Despite a wide range of social platforms available, Facebook is still a preferred place for many marketers because of its massive user base. With roughly 2.96 billion monthly active users, the platform gives businesses access to one of the single largest digital advertising networks. Its ability to reach your target audience is also a major reason you need to advertise on this platform. Facebook has the most advanced targeting options available, enabling you to narrow down your target audience for every ad you run. Most importantly, Facebook ads are generally considered affordable for most businesses. If executed well, you can still maintain a positive return on ad spend with low cost.

However, advertising on Facebook can be frustrating especially when you see your ads aren’t not performing well. Without a clear strategy, you may fail to get the right results from your efforts. A Facebook ads strategy can guide your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing.

5 Types of Facebook Ads

Before running your Facebook ads campaign, you should understand what types of Facebook are available and which one will be most effective for you. Depending on your campaign objective, your choice of ad formats differs, which affects how your audience engages with you. Facebook Ad Manager offers many different ad options, including:

Image ads

Probably the most familiar and common ad type. With image ads, you can use a single photo and optional footer to show off your product, service, brand, or deliver a simple message. With engaging images and call to action, they are effective in driving visitors to your site. Their main advantage is that they are very easy to create. Just find a stunning image, add a few lines of copy, and you’re almost done with your image ads.

Video ads

Video ads tend to be more engaging than image ads because they can capture the audience's attention quickly and express ideas clearly, making it a perfect option to illustrate how your product works and tell a story. When creating Facebook video ads, you can choose from a variety of different ad placement including feeds, stories, in-stream, reels and more. The ad specifications vary by ad placement. You should learn more about the video requirements based on the type of placement you’re looking to run, such as aspect ratio and video length.

Carousel ads

Carousel ads allow you to use up to 10 images and/or videos in a single ad to highlight your products and services, and add headline, descriptions, landing page URLs and calls to action buttons for each card. They are also suitable for various business types and needs, like showcasing real estate, service offerings, events. Sometimes it is just hard to resist the temptation to swipe left. So Including more creative elements across cards or telling a story through your images gives you a chance to generate a high engagement rate.

Collection

This ad format is mobile only, allowing Facebook users to browse and purchase products and services from their mobile device. When users click on a collection ad, they’re seamlessly taken to a fast-loading, full-screen Instant Experience ad consisting of a cover image or video with multiple products shown underneath. There are three templates for collection ads including Instant Storefront, Instant Lookbook and Instant customer acquisition, both of them can help you drive mobile conversions.

Lead form ads

Lead ads are designed to collect contact information of potential customers and build email lists. With just a few taps, your prospects can fill in a form and submit their contact information, such as name, email address and phone number, without leaving the Facebook app. You can also add custom questions to your form to help you better qualify your leads.

What makes a good Facebook Ads Strategy

Copywriting

Writing a high-converting Facebook ad copy is hard. But the golden rule is to keep it short and sweet. It is because users don’t read every single feed in detail. You should clearly summarize your product and messages quickly, and tell your audience what you’re offering.

Another reason you should keep your ad copy straight to the point is that there are character limits (or text recommendations) for different Facebook ad formats. For image ads, the primary text should be up to 125 characters. You can include more than 125 characters, but viewers need to click “see more” to read the full ad copy. The headline and description should contain no more than 27 characters. Text longer than 27 characters is allowed but may be truncated. For other ad formats, you can take a look at Facebook Ads Guide to learn more about ad specifications.

Visuals

Visuals are a simple but powerful way to help you differentiate your brand while communicating your message clearly and quickly. Research shows that visual content is 40 times more likely to get shared than other types of content on social media. It is important to share ideas using visuals for engaging with your customers.

The image you use determines your Facebook image ad performance, so make sure to use the highest quality images possible to help your ads look their best. For image ads, the resolution should be at least 1080 x 1080 pixels, and the recommended aspect ratio is 1.91:1 to 1:1. When including text on your ad image, prefer to use a thick font and a color that makes the text stand out from the visuals so that your audience can find out the message on your image quickly.

While you can use different ad formats to meet different marketing objectives, creating a strong visual identity across your visual assets is key in establishing brand association with your audiences and making your brand memorable. Bear in mind, always stay consistent on social media.

Objective

When you create a Facebook ad, you’ll be prompted to choose a campaign objective that’ll influence who Facebook will show your ad to. The Facebook campaign objective is the way to tell Facebook what your campaign goals are and what action you want people to take after they’ve seen your ad. Based on your campaign objective, the platform will analyze who are most likely to take that action and deliver your ad to people within the target group. You can choose between 6 campaign objectives including:

Awareness

The awareness objective aims to reach the largest number of people who are most likely to remember your brand. This objective is ideal if you want to introduce your brand to a broader audience or stay top of mind with current customers.

Traffic

Use it when your goal is to redirect your target audience to an online destination outside Facebook. Your ad will be delivered to people who are most likely to click the links. For example, you can send people to a blog post, landing page or an app. This objective may help drive traffic to those destinations.

Engagement

The engagement objective helps to increase engagement with your brand by reaching people more likely to like, comment, and share your content. You can also get more messages (via Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp), video views or event responses using this objective.

Leads

It’s helpful when you want to collect leads for your business via messages, phone calls or signups. This objective works best with users who have already known your brand and are interested in your products/services. An instant form can also be used to obtain contact information like name, email address and phone number.

App Promotion

This objective aims to get people to install or take a specific action within your app. For example, if you want to encourage people to make an in-app purchase or achieve a new level in a game, you can create an app promotion objective to target the best possible ROI (return of investment).

Sales

With this objective, Facebook will find people likely to purchase your product or service. The sales objective is designed to drive valuable actions on your website, in your app or in Messenger, like adding an item to their cart, making a purchase and starting a subscription.

Audience Segmentation

The ad failing to be shown to the target audience is one big concern for many brands. However, as one of the most effective marketing tools, Facebook provides a wide set of targeting options so that you can filter and segment important groups of users based on their browsing history, behavior and interests. You can target your ad delivery with three audience selection tools including:

Core Audiences

Allow you to define an audience based on criteria such as location, interests, demographics, behavior and connections. With this targeting option, you can reach a specific group of audience on Facebook. For example, you can choose people who are men, interested in both basketball and fashion and in the age range of 18 - 35. After narrowing down your target audience, Facebook will show the potential reach of your ads based on your targeting selections.

Custom Audiences

A group of people who have already shown interest in your business. There are three main sources of data for your Custom Audiences: uploading email lists of existing customers, data collected from Meta Pixel and app users (using Facebook SDK with app events). Custom Audiences are great for remarketing your products to the most interested people and increasing conversions. Ecommerce businesses are highly recommended to use this targeting option because they can create ads specifically for people who’ve visited their online stores, looked at specific products and or even added something to the shopping cart without checking out.

Lookalike Audiences

Facebook Lookalike Audiences help to expand your reach to new potential customers who share similar characteristics with your existing audiences. As they are similar to your existing audiences, they are mostly likely to respond to ads. To create Lookalike Audiences, you can use existing Custom Audience as your source audience. Facebook will leverage information such as demographics, interests and behaviors from your source audience to find new people who share similar qualities.

Budget Management

When you create your ad campaign in Facebook Ads Manager, you can set to control how much you spend on an ad at the campaign or ad set level. There are two types of budgets you can set: daily budget and lifetime budget.

Campaign Budget Optimization

If you choose to set a budget at the campaign level, you can enable Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) which leverages Facebook’s machine learning to distribute your money across ad sets to get the overall best results. With CBO, you only need to set one central campaign budget and let Facebook do the rest of the work. In contrast, if you set a budget at the ad set level, you will have more control over the amount spent on each ad set.

Daily Budget

A daily budget is the average amount you’re willing to spend on an ad set or campaign each day. Spending roughly the same amount per day helps you get consistent results and allows for much easier pacing of spend. However, on certain days where better opportunities are available, Facebook may spend up to 25% over your daily budget, and will balance out that spend on a lower traffic day. That means you won’t spend more than 7 times your daily budget.

Lifetime Budget

A lifetime budget is the total amount you’re willing to spend over the entire run-time of your campaign or ad set. When setting up a Lifetime Budget, you can select an end date for your campaign. Facebook will work within the budget range that you set for your ad set or campaign and never charge more than that. However, it may spend more on days where performance is higher, and less on days with lower performance. So at the end of the campaign, you will not be charged more than your lifetime budget you set at launch. Lifetime Budget is useful if you have limited aggregate budget and want to keep your ad budget on a leash.

Performance Tracking

Digital marketing is all about data. Every valuable action that occurs on your Facebook ad is recorded. Performance tracking is the most effective way to learn more about your audience and measure Facebook ad performance. Knowing what your audiences are likely to respond to gives you a chance to adjust your Facebook ads strategy and optimize your campaigns.

Not only creating ad campaigns, Facebook Ads Manager is also a useful tool for monitoring your ads throughout their lifetime. With more than 350 metrics and ad terms in Facebook Ads Manager, it's easy to get you confused with all that data. You can track these metrics depending on your campaign goals. Here are some of the top Facebook Ads KPIs to track.

Spend: The total amount your ads cost for the selected time period. It is necessary to keep an eye on this metric so you can ensure you stay within your budget.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR): The number of clicks compared to the number of impressions. Getting more clicks doesn’t mean your ad is performing well. If your ad receives 100,000 impressions and only 100 clicks, it is clear that your audience is not enticed by it.

Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors that convert from your Facebook ad compared to the total number of impressions. This metric tells you how effective your ad creatives and CTA are in driving specific actions. Impressions: Measure how often your ads were on screen for your target audience. A Facebook user can have multiple impressions of the same ad. For example, If someone saw your ad 2 times in a day, that counts as 2 impressions.

Impressions: Measure how often your ads were on screen for your target audience. A Facebook user can have multiple impressions of the same ad. For example, If someone saw your ad 2 times in a day, that counts as 2 impressions.

Reach: Measures the number of Facebook users who have seen your ad. If 100 users saw your ad 2 times in a day, your reach is still 100. Your reach can be affected by your bid, budget and audience targeting.

Guide to setup your Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads Manager is the starting point for running ad campaigns across Meta technologies, offering everything you need to manage your ads and deliver successful campaigns. The ad creation workflow is divided into three distinct levels: Campaigns, Ad sets and Ads. Each ad campaign can have multiple ad sets, and each ad set can include various ad creatives.

Campaign Level

This is where you set your overall objective for your campaign, such as awareness, traffic and engagement. To get started with your first ad:

Click the green "Create" button to open the “Create new campaign” window. In this window, Facebook Ads Manager will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign. You can also set an overall spending limit for your ad campaign to ensure that all the ad sets and ads in your campaign stop running once they've reached your spending limit. Some people may want Facebook to distribute budget across ad sets to get the overall best results, in this case, you may enable the Campaign Budget Optimization.

Ad Set Level

An ad set is nested under a campaign, where you can define the audience you’d like to reach, choose your ad delivery and placements, and set a budget and a schedule.

The audience for your ad can be customized based on criteria including location, interests, demographics, behavior and connections. You also have options to use a Custom Audience or Lookalike Audience. For budget and schedule, you can choose between a daily budget or a lifetime budget, and select the start and end date for your campaigns.

Ads Level

This is where you’ll customize the creative elements of your ad. You can choose your ad format, upload images and video, and add text, links and more. Before publishing your new Facebook ad campaign, preview your ad creative to see how your ad will look across different placements. When everything is okay, click the ‘Publish’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the page to submit your ad. It may take up to 24 hours for Facebook to review your ad, you can check the status of your ad in the Delivery column of Ads Manager.

6 Tips to develop a killer Facebook Ads Strategy

Make sure your landing page matches your ad

When you’re running a Facebook ad, make sure your ad keeps consistent with the landing page. Most of the time, users feel interested in your products because of what you’re offering in your ad. If your ad doesn’t accurately describe what you are going to offer in the landing page, this is undoubtedly misleading users which may lead to high bounce rates. Remember that, the more relevant your ad is, the more likely they'll generate results for you.

A/B testing

What you think is a good element on your ad is not actually good. Using A/B testing helps you which versions of an ad work best to your audience by changing variables such as ad images, ad text, audience or placement.

Use number

People want to know how much your product costs. Including numbers in your ad copy is crucial for convincing your audience to take action. Your ad should state exactly the price of a product or the discount amount such as “20% off!”.

Social proof

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people will adapt their behavior according to what other people are doing. It is an effective way to boost your credibility. You may use testimonials in your copywriting to encourage potential customers to further explore your business.

FOMO

FOMO stands for fear of missing out, which is a phenomenon where people fear missing out on something if they don’t take immediate action. You can play on this emotion by using ad copy such as “get up to 40% off today” or “one-time offer only”.

Using a clear call to action

A call-to-action (CTA) button describes the action you want the audience to take if they feel interested in your ad. So it is important to keep your CTA clear and to the point. You may use actionable words and phrases in your ad copy, such as “Sign up for free” and “Send me specials now!”.

How SDMC can help

Executing a proper Facebook ads strategy is vital for your business success. If you’re not taking advantage of this platform, you are missing out on potential customer and business opportunities. Start running Facebook ads today!

SDMC is a full-scope digital marketing agency in Hong Kong. We provide managed Facebook advertising campaigns for clients of all shapes and sizes across every industry. Our targeted solutions will help expand your reach and inspire profitable action.

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A Complete Guide For A Winning Facebook Ads Strategy