Nearly all small businesses are using Facebook for marketing currently. With over 2.2 billion daily users, the population of Facebook is undisputedly massive. This perhaps explains the reason why all businesses, both small and large, want to use this platform to promote its products and services. For a small venture, competing in such a field with big companies is a losing game.

Well, this is where several tips and tricks for small businesses that levels Facebook advertising strategy come in. Whereas Facebook advertising is overly lucrative, there is a huge learning curve before expecting positive results. Facebook ads to be specific is increasingly becoming competitive. And, as more marketers flock Facebook for their portion, it drives up the campaign’s cost per click, making it harder to profit.

Marketers pouring money aimlessly into Facebook ad advertising leave empty-handed, thinking that this platform doesn’t work. Honestly, spending some cash is inevitable, but it is prudent to take the process as a learning investment. When doing your ad campaign, consider several factors. The target audience, ad type, ad placements are just but a few to mention.

Various ad elements contribute to the success of your Facebook ad campaign. The following best practices and hacks, however, will help you beat your competitors in their own game.

1. Find the Right Audience

Most Facebook marketers forget the basics of marketing 101. Whereas targeting people based on their interest is good, ensure that your ads target potential buyers and not curious and random web surfers. For any niche, there are both casual fans and diehard fanatics. Of the two, which group do you think will likely purchase your product or service when they come across your ad?

Thinking that you should just optimize your Facebook ads for better results isn’t completely true. Therefore, develop a Facebook ad strategy drawn from your deep understanding of the businesses’ target audience. This is where Facebook ad reports and audience insights come in.

For better results, it is prudent to target engaged fans. Note that as you run your marketing campaigns, you will likely grow the number of Facebook followers. Invite them to follow your page – where a good number might do so. From the “ads manager tab,” check on the “audience tab” and create a custom audience. This audience should comprise of people drawn from Facebook who has engaged with the content on your page.

Running an ad campaign targeting such engaged fans has been proved to be beneficial. For instance, if you upload a video, consider having a custom audience comprising of people who have watched a certain percentage, say 25% of all your videos. Engaging with such people means that they are familiar with your brand and more receptive to your Facebook ad campaign.

2. Use High-Quality Ad Design

Regardless of how your ad billing methods are, having a low-quality ad design will ruin all your efforts. High-Quality ad design is a key ingredient to the success of a Facebook ad campaign. By a high-quality ad, we imply of one that appears to be trustworthy and isn’t difficult to understand.

Tip: Ensure that your Facebook ad design is 1200 x 68 pixels.

3. Create Colourful Ads

There are thousands of Facebook feeds demanding users’ attention. To have your ads noticed from others, they need to be contrasting from the rest. There are two extremes ad image designs that work best. The first being very light ad images with white background and high-contrast ad images with extra strong colours.

Besides using colourful ads, work on the color psychology too. For instance, the yellow color stands for great optimism, blue for trust and red for excitement.

4. Alternate Videos with Images

Videos are probably the most overlooked and underrated marketing opportunity in Facebook advertising. Most marketers fear to create video ads, citing ambiguity. However, creating a Facebook video ad in Facebook’s Ads manager is as easy as setting up a regular ad. You will only be using a video instead of an image. The best part of video ads is that you can use videos explaining to your audience how to use the products.

5. Build Attractive Landing Pages

Facebook marketers invest their time and money creating Facebook ads for their campaigns. However, they forget that they need to direct similar effort in building a perfect landing page for the potential audience. Convincing Facebook users to click on the ad is 20% of the success. After they have clicked, you have approximately 8 – 9 seconds to convince them to sign up from your landing page and learn about your product.

During these few seconds, your visitor quickly evaluates if your site is trustworthy and worth staying longer. This is why your landing page should be captivating. That said, a good page should;

• Have a clear value offer with a loud call to action
• Have high-quality design and images
• Be well aligned with your Facebook ad
• Have no unnecessary images and texts

6. Watch Your Ad Frequency

After running your Facebook ad for several weeks, you will note that its click-through rate is decreasing as the ad cost increases. Well, this is because people are seemingly tired of seeing your ads repeatedly. Unless your targeting strategy encompasses millions of people, Facebook by default will start displaying the ads to your audience repeatedly.

The more the number of times users see your ad, the less likely they will click on it. Inferring psychological theories, someone must look at something at least thrice before they could remember it. Therefore, aim at showing each user a minimum of 3 and maximum of 10 times. To achieve this, you can schedule the ad to display four weekdays out of seven.

Conclusion

Running a successful Facebook campaign, specifically when using ads can be challenging. Most companies fail by splashing their ads all over Facebook, which may end up being marked by followers as spam. Well, avoid this by considering the hacks outlined above when running your Facebook ad campaign. You can also use bots for social media to help you automate the ad creation process. All the ad management techniques can be done comfortably from the ads manager.