It feels easy enough when you look at a master chef at work rolling out one dish after another.
In reality, it’s tough.
Baking a winning Facebook ad might seem like it’s easy too. After all, you only need creative, headlines, text, and a call-to-action to make your Facebook ads work.
Right?
Wrong.
After working on thousands of ads in the past few years, we clearly see bad apples among Facebook ads.
Monica Maifredi of AdEspresso actually scrutinized some real Facebook ad campaigns and sorted out winning ads from duds.
You can’t afford to have Facebook campaigns that don’t work. No one has time for campaigns that are doomed to fail. You can’t throw money and pray that it works.
For consistently performing campaigns, you’d need a system to work with. Before you get anywhere near working on a process or a system, you’d need a simple checklist first.
Try this:
Start your Facebook Campaigns Right
Facebook advertising isn’t as simple as throwing up an ad to see if you’d get leads or sales.
To make sure your Facebook campaign strategy is right, start with the following questions:
- Are you aware of the various types of Facebook ad campaigns you could run and the benefits of each?
- Does your business or the advertising content comply with Facebook’s own advertising policies?
- What’s the offer you are making and why?
- Are you making a clear offer that’s relevant, valuable, and interesting for your target audience?
- After clicking on the ad, does your target audience feel consistent with the experience? Are all the components of your Facebook ad in sync with your branding?
Thinking ahead about your campaigns, the Facebook ads themselves, and what happens after your target audience takes action along with how you nurture your leads, etc., makes you 99% better than most other advertisers.
When you think of Facebook ads, you’d need to think in terms of a funnel blueprint. We have an exclusive Funnel Blueprint series created for you — a 5-step course that reveals the exact formula for you to use to help streamline sales and to create winning sales funnels.
Make Your Images Work Harder
Img Credit: Ogilvy and adsoftheworld
Facebook ads are incomplete without visuals and images. That’s good news since visuals can bring in the money, literally.
Images can affect human behavior. According to Randy Krum of HuffingtonPost, visual content makes 94% more impact than text. About 60 to 80% of the human mental faculty is dedicated to processing visuals.
You can use images to inspire, attract, engage, motivate, and persuade. Visuals also enhance your ability to persuade.
Using the right visuals and testing variations of your graphics and images while running Facebook ads naturally makes your images work harder to get you the results you need.
Next time you work on Facebook ads, don’t just give it half the importance than you should just because you thought that it’s a “Facebook thing”.
Headlines Make it or Break It
If you’d take 1 hour to create a Facebook ad, you should spend 50% of that time just trying to craft a headline.
See this headline below?
“At 60 miles an hour, the only thing you hear in the new Rolls Royce is the ticking of the dashboard clock …”
David Ogilvy spent rewriting this headline about 104 times.
Other popular copywriters like Gene Schwartz spend weeks just trying to get his first 50 words of sales copy right.
According to Brain Clark of Copyblogger, about 80% of people will read your headlines but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of the copy.
Good lines are good but you can’t survive with “good”. You need “magnetic” headlines.
You need simple but exciting, simple but relevant, subtle but powerful headlines to grab your target audience’s attention.
Weak Copy won’t cut it
When you create ads on Facebook, you’d see at least two text boxes “text” and “long description”.
Too many advertisers end up not using the available text boxes at all.
If and when they do, the copy or the text they use is weak and without a purpose. Most ad copy is bland, void of emotion, vague, impersonal, and unengaging.
To make your Facebook ads work, you need strong copy. The kind of copy that’s useful to your readers, provide them with a sense of urgency, hits on their emotions, is unique, and somehow do all of the above in a specific way.
Don’t let your Facebook ads go live with mediocre copy or text.
Focus on the Call to Action
The call to action is the final nail in the coffin in the entire at of persuasion. As Jeremy Smith of Crazy Egg writes, it’s a button but it’s not just text, a hyperlink, a gif, a meme, or a black hole.
It’s not just a design element that has to be fancy; it’s not something you got to do because you have to.
It’s important, essential, all-encompassing, and overwhelmingly powerful.
Your call to action gets things done – it gets you leads, and then sales. It’s the thing that makes others take action.
Between your ad and your landing page, it’s the call to action button that does all the hard work.
Ignoring the call to action is equivalent of throwing money out of the window.
Your Facebook ads should have clear text on the button consciously (or subconsciously) nudging others to take action.
Place your CTA visible and centered. Make it easy to find and size it appropriately and be sure to make your CTA button passes the blind test.
Would you like an easier way to develop the right kind of copy for each campaign and also create email sequences and sales letters? Check out what Scriptly can do for your business.
Get a message matching Landing Page
See the example above? That’s an example of a native Facebook landing page (Canvas ad) which is the destination for a Facebook ad that also promises a savings of $50 off your first bill with the luxury limousine booking.
Message matching on a landing page implies that the message that you have on your Facebook ad is seamlessly continued on the landing page as well.
The phrasing, style, and the content of the ad is carried over to the landing page. This helps in keeping your message consistent while drastically improving conversions.
If your ad doesn’t point to a message matching landing page – a clear and focused page that’s still on brand, void of any distracting elements, relevant to the offer you promote using your Facebook ad, and one that’s built to generate leads – you shouldn’t be running Facebook ad campaigns at all.
Building effective landing pages isn’t even rocket science. Using Scriptly's Page Builder, for instance, you could whip out effective marketing pages and landing pages along with sales copy and email marketing sequences.
As Oli Gardner, founder of Unbounce puts it,
“If your ad copy doesn’t match the message on your landing page, you’re disrespecting the click”
Do you have all of these points on the checklist figured out before you launch your Facebook campaigns?
What challenges do you face when it comes to launching Facebook campaigns? Tell us all about it. If you need help with your Facebook ad campaigns and funnels, schedule a strategy session call now.