3 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Ads : Social Media Examiner

By Larry Alton
January 30, 2017

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Want to improve your Facebook ad results?

Looking for more cost-effective ways to reach your target audience with Facebook?

In this article, you’ll discover three tools and techniques for improving your Facebook ads.

3 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Ads by Larry Alton on Social Media Examiner.

#1: Collect Demographic Data to Inform Your Targeting

Some businesses think their target market is a broad group of people such as “working professionals.” While all working professionals may benefit from your product, you need to narrow your market to a specific group of people so you can market your product more effectively.

If you don’t narrow your market, your message will be broad and unlikely to grab anyone’s attention. For example, if you’re selling a slow cooker and your audience is “everyone,” the most you can do is tell people about the features of the slow cooker and the convenience of cooking a meal without much effort. You might get some sales, but not many, because there’s no real motivation to buy.

However, if you narrow your target market to single working fathers, you can market the slow cooker by telling fathers they can prepare a meal that cooks itself while they pick up the kids from daycare and come home to a ready-made feast.

Here are a few practical ways to narrow down your market:

Add gender to your product checkout page form. Knowing the gender of your target audience is especially important. It’s not uncommon for businesses to have a predominantly female market, yet direct their marketing to males. If you don’t know the gender of your market, you need to find out.
Use a third-party service to get detailed demographic information about your email contacts. For example, you can send TowerData a file of your exported contacts from your CRM, and they’ll analyze that data, based on your preferred data sets, and send you more demographics on your contacts. This is a great way to learn more about your customers and improve your Facebook ad targeting.

You can choose to receive info from TowerData based on the data sets that are most relevant to your business, product, service, or campaigns.

If you’ve designed a relevant ad but the ad isn’t producing the results you’d like, revisit your demographics to see if you’ve missed something. You can always do more research on your target market and then learn how to use custom audiences for your Facebook ads so you can better reach them.

#2: Use Demographic Data to Design Ads That Capture the Attention of Your Target Audience

Using Facebook encourages multitasking, quick scrolling, and scattered thoughts as the user absorbs tiny bits of information from hundreds of news feeds in a single minute. In this environment, a user’s attention lasts only until the next shiny object pops up.

The way you capture someone’s attention will determine his or her lifecycle as a customer. If your Facebook ad strategy consists of roping people in with images and slogans irrelevant to your business, you won’t make many sales.

Here’s how you can design your ads to attract your target audience:

Create Offers That Support Your Strategic Goals

Some businesses offer massive discounts to get sales. If your ad strategy consists of advertising your coaching webinar that normally costs $397 for a limited-time offer of $5, the majority of customers you attract will only last as long as the deal. If your goal is to upsell a monthly coaching program, you aren’t going to do it by roping people in with a $5 deal.

To emphasize value in your ad, you might highlight a few specific benefits from of using your product.

To emphasize value in your ad, you might highlight a few specific benefits from using your product.

Instead, develop a long-term strategy where your Facebook ads attract the kind of people who are likely to upgrade to your monthly program. People don’t always want to pay the lowest price; they want to receive value.

Tailor Your Copy and Images to Your Audience Preferences

To capture attention quickly, some businesses use outrageous images with nonsense for slogans. The thinking is that you can later upsell to anyone who clicks the ad. The problem is this method is a flash in the pan.

A better approach is to create an ad that speaks directly to your target market. For example, this ad from CoPromote uses a funny image to grab people’s attention, but both the ad image and text relate to CoPromote’s service and what its target audience needs.

Choose an image and copy that will grab your audience’s attention and speak to their needs.

#3: Segment Clicks From Facebook Ads to Measure Conversions

If you’re running ads on Facebook and using a CRM to track clicks, you should be segmenting everyone who comes from your Facebook ads. Whether your customers answer a survey or download a freebie, you should segment and tag your customers so you can identify whether they eventually buy your product.

Assuming you’re marketing the same products or services to your Facebook leads that you market to the rest of your mailing list, the only way you’ll know if your Facebook ads are working is if you know how many Facebook clicks turned into sales.

If you’re not capturing leads from Facebook, you’ll want to start immediately. It may be cheaper and easier to run Facebook ads that link to your Facebook page; however, to gather leads who are interested in your marketing, send people to your website. This way you can offer them something of value in exchange for their email address.

Focus Your Facebook Marketing on Engagement Over Activity

If your Facebook marketing plan is to have your team post updates once a day at a specific time, that’s not a plan; that’s a method for implementing a plan. A real Facebook marketing plan needs to include the details regarding what you’re posting and why.The smartest way to create a marketing plan for Facebook is to make it an extension of your existing marketing.

In other words, whatever you’re doing across other platforms, whether on- or offline, craft your plan to match and integrate your Facebook marketing with your overall marketing strategy. Make sure you tell the same story across multiple platforms.

Don’t just throw posts together because you’re afraid people might forget about you. Put together and document a plan for your Facebook marketing efforts.

As you execute your marketing plan, focus on driving engagement that creates an active state of listening and interaction between you and your consumer, a two-way interaction that leaves a lasting impression.

Anyone can click the Like or Share button and then forget about what they’ve read as they move on to the next breaking news story. When you generate engagement on Facebook, you create a connection between you and consumers that will bring them back and leave an impression in their mind.

Conclusion

On Facebook, the key to success is to narrow your target audience and attract people’s attention in a way that is genuine and related to your business. The more specific your marketing efforts are, the more likely you’ll engage your customers and prospects because your ads and content will be relevant to them.

What do you think? Have you tried any of these Facebook marketing techniques? What were the results of your efforts? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.