Internet and smartphones have affected and changed everything; from consumer’s behavior to the way brands market their products.

Inevitably, digital marketing has slowly become a huge part of the survivability of most companies coupled the increasing popularity of consuming media on the various social media platform, with Facebook (and its subsidiaries) leading the pack.

Thus in order to effectively make use of social media for your marketing objectives, the one thing you will need to know is Facebook marketing.

Whether your end objection is lead generation, conversions to sales or even getting more likes on your post, there is no 1 fixed approach to it. The beauty of running ads on social media, as opposed to traditional media, is that you can actually make changes to it even after starting the campaign. We call it the optimization of campaigns.

There are some ways listed below that can help you in optimizing your Facebook ad campaign.

1. Choosing the Right Campaign Objective

The first step for creating a Facebook ad campaign is choosing the right objective. The available objective selections are:

• Brand Awareness
• Reach
• Traffic
• Engagement
• App Install
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Conversions
• Product catalogue sales
• Store visits

Selecting the most suitable Facebook campaign objective is an important start as it tells Facebook what type of consumers it should be showing your ad to.

As every business has its own different target audiences, the Facebook campaign objective can be a big help to reach these audiences through the help of the platform’s AI.

2. Research Continuously for New Audiences

Don’t waste your time on an audience who is not interested in what you have to offer. Putting too much time and effort on the wrong audience will cause a lower engagement, resulting in a more expensive conversion and indirectly making Facebook showing your ad to lesser people due to a lower relevancy score.

As such, it is always advisable to spend some time researching your target audiences and their interests so as to reach new potential customers easier.

Learning and starting with the buyer’s persona is also something taught in our digital marketing course, taught only by practitioners in the digital marketing field.

Another important part of finding new audiences is utilizing this function called “exclusions”. For having a higher engagement, you may want to exclude the wrong audiences who are definitely not interested in what you offer. For example, for targeting those who are looking for spectacles, you may want to exclude those who have recently performed or considering a Lasik operation.

3. Be Creative

Everyone knows that the first impression is very important. In an offline setting, a potential consumer will judge your brand, product, and services by your first impression. This is even more true in social media marketing.

In a fast-moving social media world where a post will be easily replaced by the next with just a movement of the finger, you have less than half a second to capture the attention of your audience.

It can be the copywriting (words on the ad) or the picture that captures the attention and create the most important first impression for your ad.

A bad quality photo and poor written copywriting can easily ruin these precious nanoseconds that you have to impress.

Spending a considerable amount of time on finding and editing high-quality images or videos and coming out with a killer copy(writing) for your ad is not only going to be worth the effort but something that is considered crucial by some companies that they are willing to pay top dollars to engage creative agencies to do on their behalf.

4. Incorporate Video into Your Ad

Videos have become a common sight in all social media platforms in recent years, something unthinkable of just a few years back on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.

For the past few years, various platforms have been encouraging the use of videos since it can hold users’ attention for a much longer time than usual, and provide the entertainment that traditional television and the dominant YouTube used to hold an advantage over its competitors with.

Researches have also shown that users pay less attention to static information as compared to video and image content.

With video, advertisers can advertise on more placements within Facebook like Facebook video feeds, Audience Network Rewarded Video, etc., in turn reaching out to a much wider audience and target market.

Unlike in a retail store where a promoter can explain the product to a prospective customer face to face, it is not possible to do that as efficiently in a simple social media ad. However, with the use of video, this problem can be mitigated.

If video production is too expensive for your business, you can consider using slide shows in the form of videos to engage your audiences.

5. Short but Specific Copywriting

As mentioned in the previous points, a good copy can be the deciding factor of an ad.

With people having lesser and lesser attention span, your customers are neither interested nor have the patience to read long paragraphs in an ad anymore. Reducing your words and description to a few crucial keywords, limiting your characters to a certain amount, avoid clichés, and show the call to action clearly in your writing can go a long way in creating that high conversion ad on social media.

Your copywriting should not only be short but also have the ability to interest your targeted audiences with the unique selling points of your products and services being described clearly.

6. Using Tools offered within Facebook

In order to make every advertiser successful, Facebook has offered some tools that can help you optimize your ad campaign since a successful advertiser will mean more media buy shifting from other platforms over to their suite of platforms (namely Facebook & Instagram).

By using these tools, your campaign can be one step closer to success.

Facebook Creative Hub Tool

Your Facebook campaign’s creativity can have a massive impact on your ad performance. Hence, no matter how great your offer and copy are, if your campaign doesn’t have a good user experience (UX) design, it will not be able to attract the eyeballs of your target audiences from the sea of other ads feeding to the same audience every other minute.

This is what Facebook creative hub is designed for. It helps you improve your ad creative by allowing you to test your video performance, create mockups before going LIVE, and view an inspiration gallery of high-performing ads for mobile.

You can use the Facebook Creative Hub for:

>> Creating an ad mockup in the creative hub
>> Accessing the text in your Facebook ad image
>> Running a split test with your Facebook video
>> Getting creative inspiration from other brands

Facebook Test and Learn Tool

Testing your Facebook campaign is essential to find the potential audiences and optimize your ads in the best way. But it has become tricky as Facebook ads have so many moving parts with algorithms for “scoring” your ad being updated on an irregular basis.

The Facebook Test and Learn tool is designed to help you define and quantify testing with a series of standard split tests. There are some tests listed below that you can run using the Test and Learn tool.

>> Conversion Lift: It is the test in which evaluates all of your active Facebook campaigns over 4 weeks and identifies which campaigns are producing the largest uplift in a conversion.

>> Brand Lift: In this test, Facebook surveys the users exposed to your brand to see how much they have noticed your ads and are aware of your brand. However, this test requires the brand to have a minimum spend of $14,000 over 30 days.

7. Optimizing Shares and Likes on Your Facebook Ads

The shares and likes you get on your Facebook ads tell Facebook's algorithm that your target audiences like your products and services and that they are actually relevant to them.

Therefore, the more shares and likes your Facebook campaign gains, the more users Facebook will show your ad to.

When you set up a Facebook campaign, there are two options: create new ads for every campaign or use an existing post. If possible, you should explore the possibility of using the “existing post” option. In this way, it uses the same post to set up multiple ad campaigns and the number of likes and shares is being “transferred” from ad to ad.

8. Use Facebook Pixel

Apart from allowing you to view more statistics and data from the ads that you are running on Facebook, Facebook pixel also allows brands to create a lookalike audience to find new people who are similar to people who have visited and shown interest in your product or service before.

With this, you will be able to target a wider spectrum of an audience that may be interested in what you are selling but was unknown to you previously. This will greatly increase the effectiveness of your campaign and reduce the cost per conversion as a result.

Having said that, digital marketing is more than just Facebook marketing. A useful digital marketing course can help you know more about digital marketing like SEO, SEM, etc. Find out more about how you can learn from experienced industry practitioners who have much more to share.

Original article from MAD School