How to run effective Facebook Advertising: A Friendly Guide

Facebook is probably a part of everyone’s daily ritual. As soon as you wake up in the morning before work (even before brushing your teeth) you check who liked your post, start scrolling through your feed, and come across a sponsored ad without even realizing it sometimes. I can relate.

There’s so much more to Facebook than it being a digital neighborhood, it’s an advertising magnet for marketers and business owners for good reason.

Table of Content:

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Here’s the breakdown:

What is Facebook Advertising?

If you’re thinking, “there’s Facebook Advertising?” and you’re a marketer or business owner, then perhaps you didn’t get the memo. Yes, with over 2.7 billion users worldwide, it’s no surprise it would attract business opportunities and the chance to build relationships with your audience.

Facebook Advertising is paid content from brands and businesses in the form of their voice to reach out to their targeted audience. Marketers or business owners create campaigns with specific goals aligned to help them reach their business goals.

For instance, businesses usually create a campaign because they want to drive more traffic to their website. This leads to creating ads for the campaign, which may come in various formats like text, images, videos, Gifs, and a targeted audience they think will help meet their advertising goals.

Why you need Facebook Advertising?

Based on recent statistics by CNN Business, Facebook has over 8 million advertisers, enabling advertisers’ access to 2. 6 billion monthly users and another 1 billion on Instagram, which now belongs to Facebook.

So, if there’s one platform for local advertisers to do their social media marketing, Facebook is the perfect platform.

Here are solid reasons why:

• Facebook Ads are inexpensive

The best part about advertising on Facebook for businesses is that it depends on your budget. You can allocate a budget from the start, and Facebook will automatically stop circulating your ads when it hits the amount you set. The higher your budget, the more reach, and exposure you get. Reasonable, yes? 

• Facebook Ads are effective

According to Social Media Examiner, 93% of social media advertisers use Facebook ads regularly and are the best social media platform for your ROI. This applies to both B2B and B2C industries.

• Where your audience is

Facebook applies to all age groups worldwide and almost everyone has an account. Statistics point out that users spend an average of 38 minutes a day using the platform, more than 2.45 billion users access Facebook monthly, and 1.79 billion daily active users on Facebook.

• Target people who matter most 

Facebook has an abundance of information about its users, which most businesses use as an advantage to target a specific and relevant group and have the potential to be your customers.

It allows you to choose based on your criteria such as age, gender, location, interests, job title, industry, status, behavior, and more.

Facebook also gives you an option to filter by connections (friends of users who have liked your page).

Another cool targeting option is that you can also target lookalike audiences, which are users with similar traits to your target audience, so you don’t need to make further guesses on your demographics if you lack certain information.

• Retargeting options 

Facebook allows you to reach users that have shown previous interest by visiting your website, used the app via mobile, or have given you their email address. This serves as a reminder that your business is available for them and has a higher chance of downloading your content, to make a purchase, or start a free trial.

• Ads are customizable

No worries, Facebook makes it easy to set up an ad and get it running.

All you have to do is go through the steps of selecting the type of ad you want, choose your rightful audience, set your budget, and give a timeframe.

However, the tricky part is that it’s also customizable, so you can choose from a variety of ad formats, the delivery, and bidding options. For instance, most Facebook ads use a pay-per-click model, but it also offers options for pay per impression, pay per like, or pay per action.

• Facebook offers valuable Insights

Advertising on Facebook allows you to reach your audience, but it’s not entirely effective for pushing a sale as most users are there to check on their friends’ activities, etc., which can be an opportunity for you to create your brand awareness and to capture leads for future development.

This may make measuring your ad’s success more complicated, so Facebook makes it easier by giving you insights that are in line with your goals. It all points to how your audience reacts to your ads — or your social ROI.

Types of Advertising

Wondering how Facebook ads appeal to your audience? Let’s dive into the top 8 Facebook Ad Types:

1. Image Ads

These are some of the most common types of ads on Facebook. It usually appears subtlety in the user’s newsfeed and blends in well with other people’s posts in your feed. These ads feature an image, call-to-action, or a link that directs you to a landing page.

2. Video Ads

Video ads are one of the most effective ads to drive engagements and conversions which makes it popular among advertisers due to its ability to capture the audience’s attention and a good way for them to learn about your business.

3. Right Column Ads

Just like it says, right column ads appear on the right column of a user’s Facebook feed on desktop. These ads are direct, just like an image ad, except it’s intentionally placed on the right-hand side with a link description that leads you to a site.

It is noticeable because it’s in an unexpected area, as compared to the majority of ads in between your newsfeed.

4. Carousel Ads

Carousel ads are the best if you want to showcase a range of products on Facebook. With this type of ad, you’re able to incorporate up to 10 cards of visuals or videos.

Each card has its feature, as it serves as an advertisement that can include individual links and CTA to each image or video in your Carousel ad.

It is best suited for businesses that want to showcase multiple products or services in one ad.

5. Dynamic Product Ads

Talk about Dynamic Ads! These ads are the most direct approach for shopping made easy. This ad format allows you to showcase your products to people who previously have expressed interest in them. How? They use a Facebook tracking pixel to track users who have visited pages on your site.

6. Slideshow Ads

This Facebook ad type requires creating a slideshow with selected images. It’s a simple ad and it tells a story with the relevant information you want to include in the ad.

Once you create a slideshow ad, you can upload it as a video including slides, or use Facebook’s slideshow creation tool. Slideshow ads are best suited for businesses to highlight products, introducing products and services, display short demo videos, and telling a brand story.

7. Collection Ads

Collection ads are the perfect ad formats to showcase multiple products that you sell on your website. It creates a shopping experience for your audience, making your products easy to discover, browse through, and hopefully make a purchase.

It may be similar to Carousel ads, but Collection ads are created fully for mobile user experience, whereas Carousel ads can be viewed on both mobile and desktop. Collection ads have a format of a large video on the top with selected images below on your mobile phones where your audience can swipe up and down on their mobile devices to view your products.

It is usually used for eCommerce businesses.

8. Instant Experiences

Formerly known as Canvas ads, Instant Experiences is one of the most immersive ads users will experience today as it allows advertisers to create a full-screen mobile experience that is impactful and aesthetically pleasing.

This is done with a mixture of images, videos, text, and more and it allows your audience to interact with your ad by scrolling, swiping, tapping, etc.

There are many feature aspects you can include to this type of ads such as your logo, product sets, auto-playing videos, and full-screen tilt-to-pan images, and more.

Instant Experiences allows you to build a more memorable and better ad experience to increase brand awareness and traffic to your business.

Tips on Facebook Ads for your business:
  • To increase website traffic or leads, use link click ads, video ads, and boosted posts.
  • To increase product/sales leads, use carousel ads, dynamic product ads, Facebook lead ads, canvas ads, and collection ads.
  • To increase engagement or Facebook page likes use page like ads, page images, video, or text ads.
  • To increase application installations, use mobile, desktop, and Instagram mobile ads.
  • To increase event attendance or store visits, use event invite ads, offer claims, and create local awareness ads.

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Why is my Facebook Ads Not Working Well?

Common mistakes marketers and businesses make:

Advertising on Facebook may seem pretty simple, but it can get overwhelming for marketers and businesses when it comes to creating attractive ads to meet their business goals.

According to statistics from Socialbakers, there are 92% of marketers out there are using Facebook ads but a lot of them are having difficulty converting and landing the results they want.

Facebook Ads require a different type of sorcery compared to others, it’s a different breed of its own. Let’s identify some of the common issues:

1. Not Targeting the Right People

This is one of the reasons marketers don’t get the results they want is due to poor targeting tactics. Facebook allows you to customize your audience, but many are oblivious to it.

With over 1.79 billion active users on Facebook, it’s evident that people are on the site, so it’s not that your ads are not working, but it’s not reaching the ones that truly matter.

You can create the best ad ever, but what good will it do for you when it reaches people that don’t care about it?

I mean sure, there’s a possibility they will click on your ad out of curiosity and your conversion tracking will show you a positive conversion pixel, but the bounce rate will be the one to tell you the painful truth.

If you’re a marketer, ‘curiosity clicks’ will only result in people who are not interested and will never purchase anything from you — and those clicks are going to cost you. And that’s one of the worst things that can happen to any marketer.

As a marketer or a business owner, you need to take time to create a buyer persona in order to target with more precision. Specify your target audience’s age, location, interests, social sites they often hang out in, and the type of people that influence them, and other relevant information.
These are all important factors to refer to in order to target your ads more effectively to the right audience.

Facebook offers a useful tool, called Audience Insights to research your ideal people. Best to refer to it when you’re unsure about your target audience.

2. Bidding Incorrectly

If you’re not generating enough clicks or impressions, you probably need to make some adjustments in the bidding department. This is probably one of the reasons where you went wrong with the bidding choice or option.

To be honest, it can be quite difficult and confusing to understand if it’s something you’re not accustomed to.

According to the marketing experts, you only need to focus on a few specific sections.

The first would be the ‘Bid Amount.’

If you’ve tried the automatic option but didn’t see any positive results, it’s best to choose the manual option to determine the amount you’re willing to bid, per click.

If you don’t get the results you’re looking for, consider bidding a higher amount, if it is within your budget.

If you find that after all these adjustments have been made and you’re still generating low impressions, consider looking in other areas such as your custom audience.

Overall, it is possible that maybe your ad isn’t clicked worthy.

However, if you do have a campaign that is producing good results and generating lots of clicks, consider the being charged by impressions to reduce costs.

3. Your Ad Creative

If you still find that you’re doing everything you can in the custom audience and bidding section, don’t give up just yet! The beauty of marketing is trial and error— it requires tweaking at times. Consider yourself as an ad mechanic, making sure you take a look at things holistically.

Perhaps you need to fine-tune your ads creative and how it looks. It might not appeal to your ideal customers. Who knows? Don’t worry, if you have limited knowledge about content creation, check out this link here.

The average CTR on Facebook is 0.9%. so you can benchmark whether your ad creative is performing poorly or not.

Keep in mind that Facebook is a visual platform so your ad creative must appeal to your audience. But don’t limit yourself to just people within your niche market, you just might find something that also applies to another type of niche.

You can make your ads more click-worthy if you don’t use an overload of text within the image, because it feels heavy to see and you’re targeting people with a short attention span, so make it clear and concise.

Refer to this example below of the preferred type of image ad:

The image above is a good example of an effective ad creative by Jasper’s Market with just enough content to communicate the brand message and a quality image that shows the quality of their produce.

The image below is less effective due to its text-heavy nature in the ad image, which loses its main focus and is less direct.

4. Trial and Error

The best marketers are always experimenting with new ways to reach their audience. It’s all about learning from trial and error— success is never achieved overnight.

Don’t take this too personally, many experts have failed many times before producing a winning campaign.

Everyone, from marketers to business owners — including you must undergo the process of testing to identify the type of ad/ads that will deliver optimal results for your business.

Always be flexible and choose to run multiple variations of ads to understand which one gets the most results.

Here you can get an idea of how you can split test your campaign.

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How Agencies run Facebook Ads?

Facebook may be easy to use for leisure, but it can be a tricky platform to understand from a business perspective — many businesses have not achieved their goals or their desired ROI on Facebook because most are not Facebook experts.

But, as a business owner, you cannot afford to NOT to be on Facebook because it’s the largest social media platform in the world and is home to 1.79 billion daily active users— and you want a piece of the pie.

Running an effective Facebook Ad campaign on Facebook is very exhausting if you don’t have a team of experts running it for you so you can sit back and focus on your main business.

Most businesses rely on their in-house marketing team to advertise on Facebook, but it never generates enough conversions or positive results, then they give up because it is tough to understand Facebook from a holistic standpoint.

If you’re looking to acquire an agency to run your Facebook Ads effectively, it’s time to engage with one. Besides, freelancers cost more than a full-fletched agency with full resources and brain muscle, such as a team of content strategists, graphic designers, videographers, project managers, and more!

Let’s walk you through how agencies run effective Facebook Ads:

1. Understanding Your Business

As an agency, we do what we do best — research more about your company and find your unique selling proposition and your overall social media advertising goals.

We will thoroughly run through your previous campaigns to determine what has worked out for your business and what doesn’t.

From this, we will identify a strategy for your business to proceed further with your Facebook campaigns.

2. Develop Your Facebook Ads

Now that we are familiar with your social media goals on Facebook, we will begin to align it with your brand and develop your advertisements. Our agency will create and curate relevant ad copy, from headlines to captioning, and include creative ideation such as high-quality static imagery, Gifs, graphics, or videos to attract your rightful audience. As a client, we will report to you regarding our social media strategies and deliverables before it goes out to your audience.

3. Optimize Your Facebook Ads

Once you have approved our proposed ads, we will proceed to start a campaign with several ads for starters and monitor the progress of the ads. We will then track down the highest performing ads along with the others to analyze key metrics to see where it lacks and to improve it.

4. Monitor Your Facebook

 The best part about working with a Facebook Advertising agency is that you have extra manpower on your side to monitor what you don’t have enough time for such as micromanage errors and optimizing your campaign. As an agency, it is our duty to take the load off you and to manage your Facebook Ads like a hawk on a consistent basis and keep an eye on that budget to deliver the best performance possible. 

5. Report on Facebook Analytics

We provide a monthly report on your brand’s overall performance and results to keep you in the loop about the status of your campaign. We will also be available to meet you on a weekly or monthly basis to ensure we are aligned with your goals.

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Facebook Advertising Do’s and Don’ts: A Quick Guide 

Yes, rules can be boring! I don’t want to bore you with lengthy rules and regulations, so I will keep it short and snappy for you because it is crucial for your Facebook ads.

Do’s

1. Identify your people

Always get to know who you’re communicating your brand message to before you target a certain audience. For example, you create an ad that would appeal to the TikTok age group, but you’re targeting an age group above 50 years of age. That will only waste your advertising budget and is a recipe for failure.

2. Include catchy Call-to-action (CTA)

You want your audience to react and act on your ad, so be clear and highlight your CTA so they can click on your ad and make faster decisions. Refrain from wordiness.

3. Set the right Ad Budget

Try to be realistic with your ad budget and ask yourself if you can afford to go a little higher because sometimes you might not reach your targeted audience. Be prepared for that. Try to find the right balance.

4. Proofread at all times

This is one of the most important aspects of every Facebook Ad. The slightest error will make your brand look bad and what happens on social media, stays in social media forever. Remember, your audience might not trust your brand when they identify the slightest error in your ad. It reflects on your brand. Before your campaign goes out to the mass public, PROOFREAD!

Don’ts 

1. Don’t lie

Never overpromise your customers or misinform them with services that you can’t deliver. This will cause you to lose their trust and it will almost be impossible to earn their trust back with a tarnished reputation. 

2. Don’t forget mobile optimization 

Don’t be a snob or ignore your users on mobile as they are the ones that are probably viewing all your Facebook ads. Research shows that mobile users are 3X more than desktop viewers.

Make sure your ads or your website have been optimized for the mobile audience.

3. Don’t leave your campaigns unattended 

As advanced as technology is today, never leave your campaign unattended and be consistent with your monitoring patterns to keep track of its performance and to make necessary tweaks when required.

4. Avoid information overload

Ever heard of the saying “less is more?”

Keep in mind that Facebook has a 20% rule when it comes to the amount of text and your image will be rejected if there’s beyond 20% of text in your ad image. Also, the likelihood of success is low when there’s heavy content because people want to view ads that are simple and concise.

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Some Little (not so little) Tips You Should Know

1. Social Proof

 The key principle of social proof is:

What people like, you will probably like them too.

This cuts through the thought process and allows you to make a decision based on what another human said.

You will want to create a Facebook Ad and leverage social proof whenever you’re creating a new batch of ads or a new campaign by going to the page and using the existing ad rather than creating it from scratch.

An example would be the bubble tea brand hype on social media, with the long queue just for bubble tea and social proof that it’s worth the wait.

This will show all the likes, shares, and comments across with your campaigns. Social proof increases the chances of more clicks and sends a powerful message that shows how powerful this ad is because people are engaging with it.

Your costs will go down and your engagement will increase, resulting in better performance from that ad. 

2. Increase Engagement by interacting

By increasing engagement, I mean the interaction and hype you’re creating when you get high engagement in your ads.

The thing about Facebook is that they are all about their users, so any ad that is engaging and keeps the audience on Facebook will be prioritized.

If Facebook detects high engagement from your ads, they will return the favor by circulating your ad around to more people for less money. Cool huh?

3. Make it conversational  

Basically, you want to come across as friendly and sociable on Facebook and not have a sign that says “I’m an ad” on Facebook. It turns the audience off because they’re there to be entertained.

Blend in with the crowd by trying to be conversational and social with them, kind of like how you are with your friends and family. Keep it casual.

Don’t sound so rehearsed and robotic, loosen up and explain your thoughts on a subject like you’re having a chat then you can transcribe it right after.

Besides, people don’t make decisions based on facts or statistics, they purchase it based on emotions.

4. Leveraging on look-alike audiences

Now, there is such a thing as look-alike audiences on Facebook.

All you have to do is list of your existing targeted audience and tell Facebook to go out there and find more people with similar characteristics like that.

Facebook does a good job with that too.

If you’re a fresh new business and don’t have a customer base yet, just slowly build up a look-alike audience by creating some catchy ads then get their details from website traffic, leads captured, or any way that you can get more people coming to you.

5. The perfect ad image

Finding the perfect image for your ad is not easy and you will probably spend just as much time or more to find one that really suits your brand.

Facebook is a very visual platform, so put yourself in the audience’s situation where they are scrolling through their newsfeed then come across an attractive image they can’t resist not to read and click on it.

What’s the point of good copy when nobody stops to read it right? You need a combination of images to capture their attention and to read your copy to get more information.

Find an image that really tells a story and really invites curiosity. This is not something that takes a minute to do, so you if you need any help with this, here’s a free guide for you to get your juices flowing.

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Conclusion

If you’re still on this page, you’ve managed to absorb a lot of information at one go and I am truly grateful because the attention span these days is usually kept to the bare minimum. At this point, I hope you understand the power of Facebook advertising and how it’s helped many businesses come to life, from being completely hidden behind all this potential. To me, Facebook gives hope for businesses, the people, unites them, gives them something to share, and discover at the same time.

However, as marketers or business owners, we all face the same challenges but it’s best to not take your first failed ad too personally and move on with testing a variety of ad types with Facebook’s split testing ad feature.

Digital marketing agencies today have dedicated time and effort to testing the right ads for a specific industry, so they are pros when it comes to running campaigns and choosing the right Facebook ads for your business.

If you need some help with Facebook Ad Campaign ideas, get in touch with the nearest agency in Malaysia for your business.

Please do let us know your thoughts on Facebook Ads, like do you find Facebook Ads effective? Has your Facebook Ad campaign succeeded? Or have any tips to share with us?

We would love to know more about your Facebook Ads experience!

Feel free to contact us anytime and perhaps we can arrange a coffee session!