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At Koozai, we always say that the key to successful paid media campaigns is to reach the right audience, with the right message, at the right time. This is certainly the case with Facebook Advertising. We’re going to share some tips on how we create Facebook ad copy that converts into sales, leads or simply relevant traffic to our client’s websites.
When uploading ads to Facebook, they are eligible to appear across multiple platforms, multiple placements and on different devices. Therefore it is very important that we consider how our ads will appear for each of these different formats. For instance, we need to decide whether the same ad will look right on the Facebook News Feed and Instagram Stories. If we are choosing to appear on all of the different placements, we should look to split ad sets out for these and tailor the messaging for each.
Another consideration is the difference in what appears in our ad across different devices. For example, much less of the primary text is eligible to appear on mobile vs desktop ads. In 2019, Facebook changed this so that only 3 lines of primary text could appear on mobile news feed ads, therefore, if we have lots of text in the primary text element, we must ensure that the ad still conveys what we are trying to say even if some of the text gets cut off.
Leading on from the point above, it’s vital that we convey the key messages of our ad early on in the text. As we’ve established, some text will be cut from mobile and other placements across Facebook and Instagram, so we need to get our message across in the opening section of text.
Even if text isn’t cut from our ad, we have a very short amount of time to interrupt the user and stop them from scrolling past our ad. We want to entice the user in by communicating key features, price points and sale/promotion messages at the beginning of the primary text. Not only is this more likely to result in an interaction, it also helps our ad’s quality ranking, as a higher click through and engagement rates are rewarded by Facebook with higher quality rankings, in turn improving our ad’s visibility.
Interrupt the user – use scroll stopping components
We’ve touched on it above, but the number 1 aim of our Facebook ad is to interrupt the user and get them to take an action. We refer to paid social as a push channel whereby, we push the message on to our audience. Very much like TV or radio advertising, the user isn’t necessarily browsing Facebook for ads, much like we don’t watch television to see adverts.
Therefore, we need our ads to grab the user’s attention to make them stop, make them read and most importantly make them engage. Get creative with your ads and don’t be afraid to try something outside the box. The image or video should be high quality and stand out from the crowd. This will immediately grab the user’s attention. This also needs to be supported with engaging text and headlines, as well as a relevant CTA. The best way to think of the process is that the image or video grabs the user’s attention, the text keeps them hooked as they find out what it is you do or have to offer, then the CTA will encourage them to complete desired action. It’s vital that the ad is cohesive and that all elements join together.
Before we get on to the ad creation part of our campaign, we would have already established a number of audiences that we are going to target. From a campaign structure perspective, it’s incredibly important that we don’t target all of these audiences in a single campaign and ad set. It’s best practice to split these audiences out into separate ad sets so that we can manage budgets and creative at an audience level. It is absolutely crucial, when thinking about ad copy that converts, that we tailor our ads to be relevant to each of the audiences that we have identified to target.
For example, imagine we are an online florist. Our audience personas that we have identified to target may be – people interested in florists, people who have a close friend with an upcoming birthday and friends of people who have recently moved house. A single ad targeted to all of these will be less effective than tailored ads to each of the audiences. The birthday audience will be served an ad that conveys a message of ‘Surprise them on their birthday with fresh flowers’. The house mover audience will be served an ad saying something along the lines of ‘Brighten up their new home with a bouquet of flowers’ and so on and so forth.
This point also extends much further into where the user sits in the purchase journey. Having a heavy sales based message with a ‘shop now’ CTA on a prospecting audience isn’t likely to perform well as these users haven’t yet been introduced to the brand yet. We’d be much better off focusing on brand awareness and engagement for these users and targeting them with a sales based message when they get further down the sales funnel.
We often get asked, what works best. Image or video ads? Small amounts or large amounts of text? The truth is, different people interact very differently with adverts. What works for one person, might not work for another. Therefore, there isn’t a right or wrong answer to this. The only answer is to test what works and what doesn’t for your business.
We always propose testing different images, different text lengths, different messages etc before assessing what has worked and what hasn’t. Once we have this insight, we can apply it to other ad sets and use the data to back up decisions made in the future.