The Essential Guide to Building Brand Awareness on Social Media

Published in

ART + marketing

4 min readSep 8, 2016

If audiences can’t easily distinguish you from your competitors then it’s time to step your game and start positioning your business to stand out on Facebook!

Here we are with some branding musts that will make your business easy to spot and impossible to forget.

Reach and Frequency Ads

Here you can block your ad inventory which will ensure guaranteed reach unlike all other ad types on Facebook.
Know your target audience well before bombarding them with R&F ads to ensure healthy CTRs. (Close to the Industry benchmark of 2.5%)
Set your frequency between 2 to 4 here as below 2 will impact brand recall and above 4 may end up boring your audiences.
For better branding results, start off with a strong monthly budget.
Instead of exhausting the entire budget in just one day, split it equally into 3 days. If budgets are high (>14L) increase the same to 7 days or more.

Video Views Ads

Want to grab your user’s attention in under 2 seconds and get your ad noticed? Then start designing visually attractive graphics i.e. small 15 sec video clips.
Keep it short and add a buzz element to reduce drop-offs.
This ad format will drive views at less than 1 rupee, hence, is very cost effective for branding or driving traffic.

Canvas Ads

Canvas has the biggest ad space and is very interactive hence, very useful for branding.
Canvas ads can be a combination of Static Images, Carousel, Videos, Slideshows, etc.

Post Promotion

This will help you build your fan base.
Compared to Reach and Frequency ads, we see almost 35% better engagement rates here but at a lower reach.
Always add a URL (use url shorteners) to direct users to your website. This will serve both purposes — branding, as well as driving traffic to the website.

Twitter

Twitter is evolving as one of the most crucial channels for branding as its audiences are intellectual and savvy. A few of our clients are converting manifold on Twitter by religiously following the following best practices:

Post great content and more often
Always make use of the human element in your creatives. This will help you easily connect your brand with the audiences
Post funny or buzz elements in your images or videos
Post images (even with link posts)
In Twitter Engagement ads use more videos than images — 15 to 30 sec clips is recommended
Respond to mentions. Always!
Retweet posts from followers
Maintain a relevant (and fresh) cover photo as it helps grab user’s attention to your handle very easily

Now that you are done with branding, it’s time to get back all the audience who have previously shown interest in your products. This is when sustenance comes into the picture.

Here are some performance and sustenance best practices which will help you reclaim your lost clicks and conversions.

App Downloads

Use the new Facebook Engagement feature to create and target lists of users who have viewed your R&F Ads, Video Ads, Page Posts.
Create and target list of users who have viewed, added to cart or purchased from your website.

Note — These lists will be low in reach but will help you tab audiences who are well aware of your brand, which in turn will generate very healthy Conversion Rates and Cost Per Install.

Create and target Lookalikes of above lists. For ‘Add to cart or Purchase’ you can create lookalikes more focused towards reach. Whereas for ‘View Content’, you can have it focus towards similarity.

Note — This will generate larger potential reach and volume at healthy cost as these audiences are similar to your acquired customers.

Maintain a minimum of 1M potential reach for lower CPI and larger volume.
Instead of capping CPI and restricting reach, go for oCPM bidding model without any cap.

App Engagement

Once you have built a good installed user base, start off with engagement ads.
Divide this user base into 3 segments:

Installed but not launched — Use push notifications for this set.
Installed and launched — Use offers/USPs to push them to convert.
Installed, launched and Added to cart or Converted users — Further segregate this set into High and Low LTV. Keep your spend on High LTV and lower on low LTV user list to maximize ROI.

Use very customized creatives and copies to drive healthy CTRs.

Acquisition Campaigns

Run Dynamic Product Ads focused on both cross-selling and upselling.
Run Remarketing ads largely targeting transacted users to increase their purchase frequency and in turn your revenue!
Through email marketing, re-target users who have added to cart but not purchased.

Note — Push them to payment gateway by sending them customised emails showcasing same/similar products.

Run ads targeting Website Custom Audiences.

Note — Show footwear ads to the ones who have visited footwear page in the past and so on.

This will increase ad relevancy and in turn will generate better conversion rates.

When doing interest targeting always map each product/category to the most relevant/close persona
Creative Suggestion — Applicable for all ad types.
Maintain very short and crisp ad copies.
Showcase USPs in ad description line.
Avoid text on the creative.
Largely make use of 5/10 Link Carousel ad format.
Always try and showcase each product in different views.
Do mention discount/price point in the copy or on the creative. If promoting high AOV products avoid doing the same.
Largely make use of bright images on white/light background for CTR’s close or better than the Industry benchmark.

Authored by: Pratiksha Sinha | Manager — Business Strategy

Originally published at onlinesales.ai on September 8, 2016.