WRITE A KILLER FACEBOOK ADVERT

Think you know your customer demographic? Prove it with a killer Facebook Ad.

87% of advertisers find interactive marketing more effective than traditional media when selling products and services online. Facebook has more than 300 million active users, of which 50% log on daily. Although associated with teens and twenties, the fastest growing demographic is those 35 years and older.

However, advertising to 300 million active users in all their languages and locations isn’t going to help much unless you’re a truly global and extensive company, and even then, you’d be a fool not to localise and personalise your adverts to provide maximum impact. One size, does not fit all.

Facebook has more than 300 million active users, of which 50% log on daily.

Luckily, Facebook lends itself very well to this, narrowing down your audience by country, to the nearest town, or a combination of towns, within a radius. Or by gender, marital status, age, educational status, where they work, their political views or even down to which films they’ve listed as their favourites. This allows you to narrow and adjust your audience – to everyone in the Bedford area who likes cycling to everyone in the Bedford, Milton Keynes and a 50 mile radius of who enjoy cycling, bicycling, mountain biking and more.

If you’re familiar with Google Adwords at all, the Facebook advert style isn’t too dissimilar. Its concise, with a title and description and limited time to grab attention, but with a bit of thought, you can go as far as harnessing the “social ad” tools, producing an advert to a Facebook user to tell them their best friend Joe Bloggs likes ice cream, and you should too by becoming a fan of the company’s Facebook page.

But if you’re not looking to dip more than a toe or two into the blue and white social network, here are our 10 tips to help you on your way to make that killer Facebook ad.

10 Tips Makings a Killer Facebook Advert

1. Decide your reason for the ad. What do you want the audience to do? Click on your sale? Or just recognise your brand. If its sales, you need per click, if its brand recognition, you need per impression.
2. Narrow your target group. Pay attention to the estimated audience numbers, be selective as to who will be most responsive.
3. Remember you won’t get it right first time, run a few small budget ads first to collect stats as to what might work. Change your calls to action, the target words, learn from the feedback.
4. Link to a landing page. Don’t just be lazy and send people to your home page, that’s daft. If someone’s clicked, you need to hang onto them and take them directly to the info and the offer.
5. If your brand is your goal, use it in the title or body of your advert.
6. Highlight special offers, services and what makes you different to competitors.
7. If you target a specific interest, say “horses”, make sure you use the word in the advert.
8. Write the advert in the country’s primary language. Keep the text simple and easy to read with full punctuation. Avoid hyphenating instead of using full stops. Save the details for your landing page though.
9. Pick a strong call-to-action. These often use words like buy, sell, order, browse, sign up or get a quote.
10. Use an attractive, relevant image with no text, that’s still clear when its postage stamp sized (110x80 pixels).

Following the advice will go a long way to creating a mild mannered assassin, but to go that extra mile, you’ll need to be cunning and test, test and test again. In return, you’ll understand your audience better, collect useful insights and hold a profitable campaign.

Need some help with creating the landing page, or using your Adwords knowledge to transfer to Facebook? Talk to us.