Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
How to Run a Successful Facebook Ad Campaign
Here’s All the GOOD Bits:
- Choose the right format and match it with the intention:
Video = engagement, Carousel = showcase products, Collection = eCommerce, Reels = discovery. - Consider your objectives. Want to make your audience aware of your products? Intrigue them. Want them to consider you? Engage them. Are they ready to buy? Seal with a good nudge.
- Keep the visuals bright and relevant, and write copy that highlights the important offers you want to dazzle with.
- When it comes to budgeting, start small, test for a while, then scale.
Facebook is one of the most cost-effective ways of advertising and one of the most popular. With over 2 billion active daily users, you have the potential to reach a hell of a lot of customers at once!
However, in order to be successful, you need to make sure you know what you’re doing and that you’re doing it right.
Worry not. The Good Marketer, once again, comes to the rescue with some useful tips on how to succeed with Facebook ads.
Tip #1: Choose the Best Ad Format for Facebook
First things first, you need to pick an advertisement format. Whether you want to use a video advert or a carousel advert (up to 10 images), deciding this is important because it will have a big impact on the success of your campaign. If you’re struggling to decide, consider what message you want to get across and the resources you have to hand.
Here are some of the key options at your disposal, and in what cases you may want to use them:
- Single Image Ads: These are pretty simple and pretty effective if you want clear messaging. They are best used for product launches, announcements, or driving more traffic.
- Video Ads: The king of engagement nowadays. Short-form vertical videos (15–30 sec) perform best in the feed or Stories. This is a great option if you want to rely on storytelling and showcasing product use.
- Carousel Ads: Here, you can show 3–10 images or videos in one ad, which is excellent if you want to present your product collection, share tutorials, or multiple features.
- Collection Ads: These are ads optimised for mobile, which combine video or images with an interactive product grid. Perfect for e-commerce.
- Reels Ads: This is basically Facebook’s version of TikTok. We highly recommend it if you want to be more easily discovered, as it increases your chances of engagement and viral reach.
By the way, nothing stops you from using or testing multiple formats in the same campaign. Just make sure that when choosing an image to use, it is relevant and eye-catching. Or, if you decide on a video, add subtitles so those who don’t have sound can also engage with it.
Tip #2: Make Sure You Have The Right Objective
As we learnt, Facebook has different types of ads to help you achieve your goals. But they will work best when your ad creative aligns with your campaign objective. So, next, on our Facebook ads tips, you should know whether you want to create an ad for the awareness, consideration, or conversion stage of your customer’s journey.
At a stage of awareness, you want to attract potential leads and make them aware of your brand and products. It’s best to use the ad formats that engage the most, like video, carousel, and reels.
But if you want to keep the attention of the audience that’s already noticed you, then at the stage of consideration, you want to invite them to engage with your brand, visit your website, and keep watching your content. Here, again, we recommend you have some video and carousel ads in your campaign.
Finally, at the conversion stage — that sweet moment, when people actually buy from you, you want to seal the deal, drive the purchase, make them sign up. Collection ads, carousels, and even a single image with a powerful and urgent CTA will do it.
An additional piece of advice is to match the creative with the audience’s intent. Just remember that people in the awareness stage want to be intrigued, so don’t push them to buy just yet.
Tip #3: Text & Imagery
Your imagery and text should work hand-in-hand in any campaign you create. The objective is simple: grab the attention, drive action. Facebook Image Rules dictate that your creatives should be bright, appealing, and relevant to what you’re offering or selling. They also dictate that no more than 20% of your image should be text. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t use more than 20% text in your image; it just means your advert may not perform as well.
Now, let’s look at the text. That is actually, more often than not, the first thing your potential customers will notice, so you should be writing Facebook ad copy that counts . Highlight key products, services, information, special offers, etc. Anything juicy like “Money Back Guarantee” is worth mentioning. Use your headline to entice clicks, and your link description to complete the fuller picture of what you’re offering.
Together, these two can be invincible.
Tip #4: Budget and Audience
One of the factors on which your Facebook Ad strategy depends is the amount of your budget available and how you use it.
Facebook allows you to set a daily budget, which is appropriate for shorter-running ads, or a lifetime budget, which allows you to set a maximum spend for a set period. This one is best for campaigns with a fixed duration.
Setting the budget is completely up to you, and it depends on various factors such as Location, Audience, Ad Run Period, etc. You can always update your budget whilst your adverts are running if you decide you’d like to spend more or less than you originally intended. Things are pretty flexible, so don’t stress about that.
However, a good piece of advice, in terms of budgeting, is to start with a modest budget to test different creatives, audiences, and formats. Once you know what works, and you should run your ads for at least 3-7 days (but the more the better) to gather enough data, you can increase the spend.
Audiences are also extremely important when it comes to Facebook Advertising. With hundreds of available targeting options, from age to interests, there is much to consider when setting up your campaigns. If you don’t already have a clear customer persona, it is worthwhile taking a look at your current customers in greater detail.
Interests help to niche down your audience, but make sure they relate to your products or services so you only reach potential customers.
The Ultimate Tip: Don't Do It Alone
If you’re a Small Business Owner, running a Facebook ad campaign is really made to be very easy by Meta.. But let’s be honest, you’re also a ‘Jack of all trades’, which means you probably don’t have time to be doing this yourself. Therefore, why not speak to one of our Facebook Ad Specialists who can set all of this up for you? We’re here for you, and we know how to help you grow with confidence.