Facebook ads give you the opportunity to take your business’ online presence to the next level. Whether you’re looking to increase your effectiveness or just starting your first Facebook ad campaign, leveraging social media through paid advertising may seem overwhelming.
From ad creation and targeting to optimization and testing, the process can seem rather daunting. To stay competitive, it’s crucial to ensure your ad campaigns are set up for success. Here’s a checklist to ensure you’re ticking the right boxes when it comes to your Facebook advertising strategy.
1. Set Your Goals and Objectives
By the time your Facebook ad campaign is up and running, you need to ensure the final product blends in with your initial goal. As such, the first thing you need to do is goal setting. Doing so will direct your cause and give you a firm grasp on the big picture.
Ask yourself critical questions. Why did you launch the campaign? Is it to improve your brand awareness, generate more sales or stand out from the competition?
Setting clear goals, in the beginning, will not only inform the ad format and creative you choose, but also keep you from getting distracted by Facebook’s fancy analytics and metrics that can steer you further from your business objectives.
Enlist your goals and make them specific and measurable. That way, you can easily evaluate your success once the campaigns are live.
2. Have A Budget
How much should you spend? How much is enough? Well, those are relatively simple questions to answer, though it’s easy to be clueless. Once you’ve set clear and measurable goals, setting your budget should be a breeze. In other words, if your goal is specific enough, you should have a mathematical equation that will determine your budget.
With a measurable and specific budget, you can easily adjust campaigns in case an ad fails to deliver, for example. Ultimately, budgeting makes it easier to track key performance indicators (KPIs).
3. Target Your Audience Properly
Creative ads can lead to successful campaigns, but if you’re not targeting the right audience, you might as well be pouring money down the drain. Figure out exactly who you’re marketing to. The trick here is to define your audience so you can tailor your message to suit them. If you have multiple audiences in mind, don’t sweat. Categorize them clearly and ask yourself what solutions you can provide to solve your audience’s problems.
Find out what your audience uses Facebook for and see how you can leverage their use of Facebook to spark their interest and get their attention.
You need to know if you are:
- Targeting new prospects, existing clients or both
- Running A/B tests on a few audiences to establish which ad resonated most
- Incorporating specific parameters such as location, age and gender
Facebook gives you plenty of resources that allow you to hyper-target your ad. If you’re offering accessories that will appeal to teens who are into gaming, for example, be sure to select an audience that precisely matches that.
4. A balance of Text and Imagery
Adding text to your images is a great way to grab people’s attention, but make sure it doesn’t cover more than 20% of your image. Facebook will either dramatically reduce the reach or not approve images with text that make up more than 20% of the ad. Nonetheless, you can’t afford to compromise on the actual message. Also, pay attention to how the ad looks. Ultimately, it’s all about striking a balance before you start spending money.
5. What’s the Frequency?
Planning for effective reach has become standard practice for digital mediums, but also critical is ad frequency. Facebook gives you the power to fine-tune who you reach and how often you reach them. As a result, you can get the most impact from your campaigns by planning for reach at the most effective level of frequency while considering factors such as the message, associated market and media.
The last thing you want is to bombard people with the same ad over and over, so it’s important to check the frequency settings before getting started. Check your frequency levels often to ensure you’re not over-indexing your audiences as that can lead to negative feedback and fatigue.
However, note that “warmer “audiences are usually more receptive to your messaging, so you can still drive conversions by showing remarketing ads more often.
6. Would You Click It?
Before giving the green light on an ad campaign, ask yourself whether you would potentially interact with your own campaign. If you fall reasonably within the ad’s target audience, would you want to click? If your gut feeling tells you there’s still something wrong, consider delaying the process and reworking the ads before publishing your campaign.
