Facebook advertising – an undeniably, beneficial platform that you can utilise in order to get your ads seen by your ideal customer. There’s no denying that there are ample opportunities that can come with Facebook ads – you just need to know the tips and tricks that are going to allow you to get the most from your ads (which is what we are here to help you with, by the way).
From our experience, Facebook ads with the right targeting and placements have the ability to generate high-quality leads. We’ve also found that using chatbots within Messenger can be a highly beneficial way of obtaining your customer’s details. But there are some things you should know before you dive straight in blindly…
The secret formula to Facebook Ads revealed
When it comes to your Facebook ads, who your ads are being shown to and exactly where they are being shown can be pivotal in how successful they will be in generating you the kind of results that you want.
When it comes to your Facebook ads, who your ads are being shown to and exactly where they are being shown can be pivotal in how successful they will be in generating you the kind of results that you want. #Youpreneur Click To TweetOnce you’ve set your budget and finished the targeting of your perfect audience, it will be time to choose the placements of your ads (where they are going to be shown) you may be tempted to place your ad on every available platform. But in fact, by doing this – you would only be doing yourself a disservice, as we’ve seen some of the best performing ads only placed within Facebook Feeds.
Why does placing ads in Feeds alone work?
Bizarrely by selecting just “Feeds” when you’re choosing your placements within your ad sets can significantly improve the quality and quantity of the leads you produce. Initially, it may feel like you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot by not selecting every available placement for your ads to be displayed, as you may believe that choosing every platform will give you more reach.
It might very well give you more reach, however – that will be all it gives you. On the other hand, by displaying your ads in just feeds, it could provide you with better quality leads and we’ve got the proof – just in case you didn’t believe us.
You would think that if your ads are trying to encourage someone to send you a message through Messenger and interact with your chatbot, that having your ad placed within Messenger itself would provide you with better results, however – this couldn’t be further from the truth.
The reality and a little psychology behind it are that people that go into Messenger have an objective, not to see your ad and interact with it – but to send a message to someone. On the flip side, the reasons why someone may be scrolling through Facebook are very different from that of someone on Messenger – they usually don’t have a particular motive (unless you’re planning on stalking someone).
People traditionally go on Facebook to pass time or because they are bored, therefore there’s a higher chance of them stopping and interacting with your ad in this instance.
The difference between advertising on Facebook and Instagram
Although owned by the same company, Instagram and Facebook have some distinct differences when it comes to advertising. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Instagram is photography based. So when it comes to creating ads for the platform, your picture is going to speak a thousand times more than your content ever could. Which is ideal if your product or service is creative.
On the flip side, if you’re using Facebook as the platform for your ads, your text and headline are going to be a lot more crucial. So the key thing to take away here is if you want to up your ads-game, you’re going to need to nail the content in your ads before you start seeing results.
You may find our video; Google Ads Vs Facebook Ads Vs Insta Ads Vs Linkedin Ads quite useful to pick out the differences in each platform.
Content is King… When it concerns Facebook ads
We’ve found that some of the best performing ads that we’ve written have featured short, punchy one-liners as the intro. Also, with Facebook ads, your text will come before your image, so you’ve got to grab the attention of someone with your words, which isn’t always the easiest thing to do, until now.
If you’re stuck for inspirational, captivating, mind-blowing one-liners that are going to entice someone to send you a message on Messenger, you could try starting your ad with something that gets the intrigue going, such as “did you know”, “have you heard” or “are you aware” …you get the picture.
We’ve found that ads with these particular one-liners have performed well, as well as opening lines that are to-the-point as opposed to being broad and feature statistics – which occasionally can work quite well, too.
Images perform better than videos
Historically, we’ve always found that videos perform better than images. But only more recently, has there been a change in algorithm and we’ve seen ads with images outperforming ads with videos (this can obviously be subject to change… frequently). Particularly when still, bright images with no text are used, as they showed to have a higher click-through rate and lower cost per result.
However, in some cases, ads with videos do perform better than ads with images and the videos that do work are usually random and unrelated to the product or service being advertised. For example, we’ve used videos of time-lapses on a busy London street which have performed particularly well.
It is for this reason that it’s so vitally important to keep an eye on the numbers as they could reveal a trend with your ads, so you can keep doing or steer clear of certain things that see your ads perform well or not.
So, overall, although Facebook ads may be more expensive, you could potentially see better results than in comparison to advertising on Instagram, a more creative platform to advertise on. It's also important to always bear in mind that you want to increase the number of messages from clicks you receive, not just the number of results – as it could give you a false picture of the truth.
In order to get your percentage of messages from clicks, here’s how you work it out. You take the number of messages you receive, divided by the number of link clicks you receive and times it by 100 – you’ll then get the percentage of messages from clicks.
Alex Curtis is a lead generation specialist and founder of lead generation agency The Lead Engine. Alex and his team help financial services businesses generate their own leads using their own brand as an alternative to ‘buying leads’. Alex coaches self-employed brokers and his agency works with large financial services lenders and broker firms.
