How to get the most out of your Facebook Ads

Shopitag
6 min readOct 3, 2018

--

In the ever changing world of social media, sponsored content and ads, it’s increasing difficult to see the forest through the trees. Facebook offers you all kind of marketing tools for your Facebook page, thinking that they’re helping but actually, they’re just making it even more complicated, both for businesses as marketeers.

Shopitag was created to increase online conversion from mobile shoppers who are on Facebook, Instagram, checking emails,… on their mobile. Thanks to the multiple pop-up shopsconcept from Shopitag you’re able to set up different shops for every ad you run.

In this article we will share some interesting tips that we learned along the way while building our company.

“Tell your customers fair and square what your ad is all about”

Get straight to the point in your ad’s headliner. With so much information going around these days, so much information to process, it’s easy to annoy a customer with false information. The more straight forward you are, the more it will be appreciated.

Blend this straight forwardness with maybe some humor and you got yourself a winning headliner. Remember, people buy with their emotions, they might not buy your product, but if you’re able to make people smile, they will remember you.

It was the famous artist Picasso who once said “good artists copy, great artists steal”. Now he didn’t mean to shamelessly steal headliners from your competitors but (in this case) use their content to get inspiration. Some brands that we really like here at Shopitag are Nike, Adobe and plenty of SaaS-companies. If you google some examples you’ll see all ads have at least 1 thing in common: they have a conversational approach. “They talk to you”.

Another returning feature is the classic benefit-focusedheadliner, saying what the company can do for you. Again, combine these two and you got yourself a winning headline.

Pro tip: when making your ad in Facebook’s Ad builder you’ll notice that your headline appears in the third position under the image of the ad. This will eventually result in the headline being the second thing that you read, which kind of makes it not a headline at all. You can bypass this bad designed feature by entering copy in the “text” field and treating that as your headline.

This will lead to the “text” being the headline that your prospects will see and where your headline is supposed you can fill in additional information.

“Keep your CTA clean and simple”

Be clear about what action you want from your prospect. What’s the main goal of a Facebook ad? Ads in general can be divided into two categories: ads that are designed to engage with your prospect to create brand-awareness; and ads that are targeted to make your prospect make an action such as a sale, or a download or installment.

Agreed, both categories walk hand-in-hand with each other but you will notice once you’re making ads, that the result will tend more to one side than to the other. Be clear in your ad, if you don’t think your CTA is clear, then how can your prospect think so? In the perfect world you can combine both but it’s smart to play it safe and: or engage, or demand action.

In line with these CTA’s it is suggested to adjust your headliner to the CTA that you’re going for. If engagement is what you’re looking for then I suggest you think out of the box and be creative. If action is what you want and you want to sell products or services, be straight to the point, don’t waste your prospects time and tell them straight forward what you could mean to them. As you can see in the Nike-ad below, after seeing the ad you know you can make your own customised Nike’s and that they’re delivered at your doorstep, boom.

The famous AIDA-sales funnel was invented in 1898 by a guy named Elias St. Elmo Lewis. Despite the fact that this funnel is over 100 years old, it’s is still more than accurate in today’s businesses. The funnel says that you have to get prospects through 4 steps in their purchasing journey: you get their attention, you wake up their interests, you create desire, you make them take action. So I repeat: do you want to engage with your prospects? Or you want them to take action? Sometimes it’s better to engage before going for action to create brand awareness, up to you to decide your priority.

Thanks to the multiple pop-up shops concept you can run multiple ads at the same time, each ad focussing on a different action.

“Clarify your CTA in your description area “

The description of your CTA is actually the News Feed Link Description. Be one step ahead of your customers and predict whatever negative issues they could think off and ward it off in your description.

When you ask something from a stranger, that person will always have a sense of fear or doubt about anything of your request. Of course, a stranger is asking him for a favour. Would you say yes to everything a stranger asks you?

In the ad below it’s the description that removes all unclarities hovering around the ad. By informing their customer about the sale and suggesting them to book shoptime now, it engages with their prospects.

“An image speaks louder than words”

When deciding on the look and feel of your ad it’s suggested to think outside of the box, think creative. If your headline can be visualized, do it! To give you an example, if the headline for a matress-ad is “sleep like an angel”, then the picture will be a person in a pyjama holding his teddybear, walking on clouds with a halo above his head. It’s a fun thing to do, visualize your slogans in the adjoining picture. This shows playful creativity, interplay and contrast between slogan and art.

Slack mastered this rule like no other company. With their straightforward headliner and their image showing a metaphor of how life feels when working more efficiently with Slack. Imagine they used a dull image of some office or a meeting. The creativity aspect brings this ad to life.

AdEspresso is a cool free ad tool that can help you getting visually inspired as it lets you spy on your competitors and find successful examples of Facebook Ads.

Beautiful, sharp professional looking pictures always work, click here to see our 7 favorite free stock photo sites for you to use pictures from.

“Test your targeting strategy”

As we mentioned before Facebook gives you endless opportunities, from goals to targeting audiences. These endless amount of options might make you desparate but do not give up: if you put these opportunities to good work they will pay off! The most important reason why you should target your audience is the financial reason. Don’t waste money on ads going to people who are not relevant to your business.

What we suggest you to do? Start off with a lookalike audience. Don’t underestimate the power of these. Lookalike audiences are powerful because you basically use already existing data to target a similar audience on Facebook. This will provide you a solid foundation to start your testing with and eventually refine your audience targeting. By running multiple pop-up shops you can even test different audiences with different shops by running multiple ads.

If you want to experiment with running multiple pop-up shops Shopitag is the go-to platform for ecommerce entrepreneurs.

Want to know more about selling on Facebook and Facebook ads? Read more about it here. Or visit our website www.shopitag.com or come say hi at hello@shopitag.com

--

--

Shopitag

We make e-commerce simple again. No large, heavy webshops that are far too complex. Light, targeted, focused, personalized conversational commerce.