How to Tell Your Startup Story with Facebook Ads
By Amanda Desouza, Community Manager at Abacus
This week, we’re featuring a blog post from Amanda Desouza from Abacus. Abacus is a lean, mean, growth-focused Facebook advertising agency, and is part of TribalScale’s network of community members who we love to support! In this post, Amanda shares valuable insights on how startups can grow their followers by telling their stories through Facebook Ads.
So you have a brilliant product or service but right now nobody knows who you are. The next step is raising awareness about what your product/service does and how amazing it is so you can get more sales/conversions.
With 2 billion people on the network, Facebook can be a natural choice for many startups to reach their target audience and raise awareness. By telling a compelling startup story through Facebook ads, you can allow your target audience to interact with your brand and ultimately become a consumer of your product/service.
Here are 3 ways to tell your startup story on Facebook
1. Creative is king
Lightweight animations, sticky copy, and emotional content. These are some of the key components of a winning Facebook ad. Creative is a huge part of how you make a thumb stopping experience for your target audience. How else can you tell a compelling brand story that makes people feel something and remember it? Startups need to tell compelling and creative brand stories especially when they are first establishing themselves — it’s what differentiates them in the market.
In comparison to traditional media forms, Facebook ads are less expensive to develop creative for which can be great for startups who are trying to stay within budget. Also, experimenting with different types of creative can help your startup test out messaging and determine what resonates with your audience through best performing ads.
Here are some examples of brands that are killin’ it when it comes to creative for their Facebook ads:
2. Mobile first
According to Facebook, people are 1.3 times more likely to be on mobile than desktop/tv. Therefore, it’s crucial to create ads that are compatible with mobile first viewing versus desktop. Meet your audience where they are.
What this means is creating vertical content for a fully immersive full-screen experience. Also, creating content that can be digested quickly by the viewer since people scroll 1.5 seconds faster through mobile feeds than desktop (2.5 seconds).
Here’s an example by McDonald’s Canada:
3. Video, video, and more video
People have much shorter attention spans than they once did which means a higher threshold for engagement. Video is everything for this reason alone, it captures people’s attention more than static images.
However, you can take your static images and turn them into a video ad using Facebook slideshow to make it more dynamic. Alternatively, you can create a video from scratch to use as an ad or animate text over a static image. As a startup you have options but the bottom line is that audience’s thirst for video content is obvious. Make sure you choose a compelling thumbnail image for your video and keep in mind that you have 3 seconds to capture your audience’s attention before they may click away from your ad.
Tying it all together, video content that is creative and built for mobile is the best way to format your ad content and is typically the most effective.
Here’s an example by Air Transat:
Final Thoughts
Telling a compelling story for your startup can help lift your brand especially when no one knows who you are. It’s important to recognize how crucial creative is and create content that is for a mobile first viewing experience. Also, video content is the key to capturing people’s attention versus static images, to compete with the abundance of other things on the Facebook News Feed.
If you need help with your Facebook ads talk to us at Abacus, we specialize in helping clients create awesome Facebook ad campaigns.
Amanda Desouza hails from Toronto and is the Community Manager at Abacus, a company specializing in Facebook advertising. A self-proclaimed digital marketing nerd, she is happy to discuss the latest industry trends. She is fluent in pop culture references, loves food, and kayaking.
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