Five Ways to Make Your Facebook Ads Perform Better—Right Now!

Facebook is perhaps the most well-known and highly populated website on the planet, with an estimated 2.27 billion active users worldwide.

As the platform continues to be a stand-out leader in social media, Facebook ads are a powerful way to reach thousands of buyers as they check their feeds throughout the day. It also gives businesses full control—allowing them to set their own ad budgets, build custom audiences, and use their own creative designs.

If your business currently uses Facebook advertising, chances are you’re already well familiar with its benefits. But are your ads performing as well as they could be? If the answer is “no” or “I’m not sure,” there’s good news: you’ve got full control over your ads, meaning you can still make changes to improve their impact.

Here are five simple ways you can improve your Facebook ads and start seeing better results right away.

1. Present Better Offers With Better Visuals

Start by considering whether your current offer has enough appeal. Are there changes that can be made to the product offer to make it more desirable to customers? Can you give a deeper promotional discount? If you’re not able to make major adjustments, perhaps you can add value with additional benefits like online-exclusive promo codes or free shipping for new customers.

Additionally, your offer may not even be noticed if the ad’s visuals are poor. Creating visual appeal is about more than just big text, vivid colors, and bold contrast. The visuals need to be interesting enough for users to stop scrolling and take a look, but they shouldn’t be obnoxious or detract from your offer.

Visual Impact – Getting Creative!

Facebook and other social media platforms have become increasingly video driven in recent years, leading to an explosion in the popularity of video ads. The dynamic visual content of a video is likely to be much more interesting to customers than a standard graphic. Switching your ads to a video format could be a great way to increase their impact.

Standing out visually is crucial. Things like photos, colors, contrast, and text size are good places to start, but you’ll have the best luck if you push the creative design a bit. Due to a phenomenon appropriately called “banner blindness,” internet users tend to ignore anything that looks like a typical advertisement. It’s perhaps one of the purest examples of situational irony, but it means you get to be creative!

Test view your ads on Facebook on a variety of devices. As you scroll through, is it easy to miss? Can it stand out more? How can you make your ad look less like an ad and more like an interesting social media post? You have options—never be afraid to test them!

2. Local Markets Speak Louder

Even if you’re a large company with hundreds of locations, it will always be most efficient to direct certain Facebook ads to buyers in local areas. A winter clothing sale might work better for Minnesotans than it does for Californians, for example. Targeting “too broad” a market is a bit like shouting in a stadium; despite strenuous effort, your voice just isn’t loud enough to be heard (and some people just won’t care).

Use local markets for your Facebook ads instead of broadly blasting them across the platform. If you have several geographic locations, try locally targeted ads for each one. This essentially turns the venue from a stadium into a lecture hall, ensuring that your message will be clear and tailored enough for consumers to be interested.

3. Pinpoint Your Audience

Tailoring your social media marketing to a consumer can also seriously boost engagement. You wouldn’t send brochures for corporate finance services to private residences, so why would you pay to show a Facebook ad for daycare to a user who reports having no children?

Quite conveniently, Facebook offers a custom audience building option that helps businesses identify and advertise to specific market segments. Using key target market information (demographics, location, interests, and behaviors), the tools provided can help you pinpoint your ideal target audience.

If you’re not sure who your customers really are, you can start by uploading a list of customer email addresses and phone numbers. Facebook can then pull relevant data from any profiles that match the uploaded contact information, and this group can be saved as a custom audience. Using Facebook audience insights, you can then visualize data trends for a clearer picture of your customers.

4. Keep Them on Facebook

Rather than linking away to a landing page on your company website, use Facebook lead ads to create customer engagement and gain new leads within the platform. Mobile users—who account for over 95% of platform use—may be particularly put off by an ad that links them to a landing page on another site.

A Facebook lead ad allows users to make contact or request information directly from the ad via a pop-up form, no app switching or extra navigation involved. Form fields can be customized as needed, and some data can even be pre-populated from users’ profile information.

5. Tailor Your Ads for the Holidays

Yes, just like with location and audience information, you should also consider tailoring your Facebook ads to the holiday season. From Hanukkah gifts to fitness equipment for that inevitable New Year’s resolution, everyone’s looking for great sales and special offers. Scheduling targeted ads for posting throughout the season is a great way to “set it and forget it,” but remember to keep an eye on competitors’ offers—you may need to make adjustments on the fly.

Want More Tips for Ad Optimization?

These five tips are a great start, but there are still dozens of other ways you can optimize your Facebook ads for the best possible performance. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can get the most from your social media advertising, paid search campaigns, or other marketing techniques, we at National Positions would love to have a chat with you about it! Contact us online or call us toll free at 1 (877) 866-6699.