4 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Ads

#1: Choose Color With Care

It’s long been accepted that the psychological associations that come with color–and how we process what we see–affect the power of an advertisement.

Here’s a quick guide to color:

Every color adds its characteristics to your ad.

The use of color can make all the difference in how potential customers first respond to your advertisement. Use the information about which colors cause which reactions to reinforce the message of your ad.

#2: Use Language That Reflects Your Brand

The limited lifespan and size constraints of social advertising mean that you don’t get much room for a blurb. Keep your language punchy, short and authentic.

As you craft your message, think about connotations to avoid any misinterpretations. Don’t rely on cliché phrases either. We’ve all heard the expressions ‘feather-light’ and ‘whiter-than-white’ too many times for them to have much impact.

Sole Society‘s news feed ad is a great illustration of how short sentences can have an instant impact.

The language in this ad immediately appeals to people looking for women’s shoes.

Keep the language simple and make sure your message can be understood at a glance.

#3: Create Impact With Images

The image you can use in a Facebook ad is dictated by the size of the ad you build. The larger dimensions of Facebook news feed ads make it easy to choose images. However, ads that appear at the side are much smaller, so you need to make a careful selection.

Here are some ads that appear in the Facebook sidebar.

The image in the Marks & Spencer ad above works well because it’s recognizable even though it’s small.

The blue tones in both the image and text allow for a feeling of luxury, while the use of red stimulates a passion for food and white creates a sense of calm.

The overall message encourages the user to act by appealing to the desire to enjoy good food and a stress-free holiday.

The web is a visual place, which makes images doubly important. Think carefully about what the image you choose says. Does it help convey the message you want to communicate?

#4: Target Effectively

Newcomers to social advertising often make the mistake of targeting as wide an audience as possible. However, this approach is unlikely to have a measurable impact. Think of the reach of “a drop of water in the ocean.” Would that drop find a specific fish by any of the following?

• Location
• Age
• Interests
• Connections

To create a targeted Facebook ad, first choose your type of advertisement.

Facebook lets you build an ad that will achieve specific results.

In this example, I chose Clicks to Website.

After making the selection, you have the option to use an image that Facebook picks up or upload one of your own. Add your headline and blurb. Now, scroll down to the audience section. This is where you make your targeting decisions.

Target your ad to reach a specific audience.

Choose in which countries you want your ad to appear. If you’re located in the US and sell beauty products online but are really just a small business, then target as locally as possible.

When you define the age and gender you want to reach, don’t automatically exclude teens. They could be your biggest buyers.

Now, use what you already know about your existing customers to target interests, but keep it reasonably tight.

Your targeting can be very specific.

You can also target by relationship status, language and workplace.

Targeting is about using what you know about your customer demographics toensure your ads are served to the right audience. Who’s buying from you? Why? What’s their budget and why are they attracted to your product? Who are your competitors and what demographic are they targeting?

Use the answers to these questions to target delivery of your Facebook ads for advertising success.

Bringing It All Together

Social advertising can be an extremely effective part of your marketing strategy. The key is to combine color, language and imagery to deliver a single, clear message to targeted recipients.

If you have more than one message or target demographic, don’t create one ad. Create an ad to fill each need.

Use the tips in this article to create clear Facebook ad messaging that appeals to your audience.

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4 Steps to Building an Engaging Presence on Social Media

#1: Build a Targeted Community

The first step is to build a community of people who care about what your brand has to offer.

It doesn’t matter if you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ page or all of the above. As long as you have a starting point, you can start building your audience on social media.

Haphazardly trying to build a large community won’t be very helpful. Your best bet will be to build a targeted community. How do you build targeted communities? Generally speaking, there are two ways.

Organic Community-Building

To build a community through organic means, you must provide share-worthy and useful content that’s relevant specifically to the audience you want to reach. The more your content (on any social network) gets shared, the more eyes see it.

Whole Foods shares recipes that its food-based community will enjoy and then share with others.

If you consistently produce enough great content, people naturally gravitate toward your brand. Be sure to leverage hashtags when appropriate so your content is categorized correctly and easy to find.

While it might sound cliché, content aimed at your specific intended audience will help lay the groundwork for organically building a loyal community.

Paid Community-Building 

Paid community-building is traditionally much faster than its organic counterpart.

By leveraging the paid advertising options of social media channels, you cansupercharge the growth of your community by hyper-targeting the people who are most likely to want to connect with you.

While most of the major social networks currently offer paid advertising options, I highly recommend leveraging Facebook ads to help build a targeted community.

Use targeting to put your paid social ads in front of the right people.

Facebook ads can be extremely useful when you’re trying to get in front of a particular group of people. The targeting options within Facebook ads are so granular that you can target users by interest, age, gender, language, education level and location.

If you’re an insurance company looking to build an audience, you should consider targeting people with interests relating to insurance, risk management, financial services and other interests that might be in the same arena.

With the right strategy, it’s entirely possible to acquire hyper-targeted fans for as little as $0.25 per fan. It doesn’t take a huge budget to make a big impact.

No matter what interest is related to your brand, there’s an audience for it on Facebook.

If you decide another social media network is a better fit for your brand, Twitter,LinkedIn and Google+ all offer opportunities for paid social ads.

#2: Leverage Unused Brand Assets

The next step is to perform a complete audit of your brand assets to identify unused or underutilized content. This process may be time-consuming; however, you can discover valuable pieces of content that have been previously overlooked.

Content Inventory

There are a few ways to do an audit of your brand assets. I recommend you start by asking a series of questions:

• What is your mission statement?
• What idea or concept created the brand originally?
• How many blogs do you have?
• How many images?
• What content are you not using for promotion?

These questions are meant to make you think less about what you are doing and more about what you aren’t doing.

Many brands have an extremely compelling story to tell and they don’t even realize it.

You know that feeling when you look under the bed to find that long-lost favorite t-shirt? That’s exactly the goal of searching for unused brand assets. You never know what you’ll find unless you look!

#3: Identify Indirect Content Opportunities

Now that you’ve rediscovered valuable brand assets, it’s time to map out your content strategy.

To draft a social media content plan, brands usually rely on concepts that are directly related to what they sell or do. This is a tad shortsighted, in my opinion. There are many other opportunities available when you take a step back and identify all of the concepts that are indirectly related to your brand.

For instance, if you are a real estate company, your social channels are probably filled with listings, employee information and maybe even home-buying blogs. Why not mix in some home decorating tips or famous homes from movies? This type of content will spark engagement and support your future “normal” content.

TOMS retweeted content from another brand that shares its values and will appeal to its followers.

Everything you post doesn’t have to be about what you offer, nor do you want to publish content that has nothing at all to do with your brand. Find a middle ground where you leverage content that isn’t exactly about your product or service, but is related to it.

Coca-Cola does a great job here leveraging National Pi Day.

Pi has nothing to do with Coke; however, people drink Coke while eating pie… and pie sounds likePi so this works.

#4: Listen to Your Community

The last part of this puzzle is to utilize content that comes from your social community. User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail in social media. Everyone is looking for it! However, sometimes UGC isn’t as obvious as you’d think it would be. Most of the time, the good stuff is right in front of you and you don’t even see it.

When users reply to content on social sites, they’re basically telling you what they want. Pay special attention to the Comments section. This is where you’ll find ideas that you can turn into solid content campaigns.

We all know that listening is a huge part of social media; however, we have to know how to listen and what to listen for. It’s not just simply monitoring the conversation to make sure your community is happy. Truly listening to what they have to say can produce amazing content that you might not come up with on your own!

Warsteiner USA posted a plain text update asking a question about Thanksgiving recipes and received a reply that would make a great graphic or video.

Look to your comments and replies to find great content ideas from your community.

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