Facebook is a powerful business tool. The amount of data that Facebook has is staggering (and a little scary), and allows for pinpoint targeting of your advertising campaigns. Despite this, Facebook Ads campaigns can take a little more work, than for example Google Ads campaigns. Users on social media are not actively searching for your product or service. Because of this, Facebook Ad campaigns will often require a little more strategy and research to optimize the chances of them being successful.

Business owners tend to be very busy people and can often make the mistake of ‘ticking the box’ of Facebook Ads, in that they put an advert live or boost a post, but then give up because they don’t see an amazing amount of leads being generated. However, with a little research and attention to detail, by knowing your ideal customer persona and by approaching your marketing efforts in a carefully planned, strategic manner, you can often be rewarded with a great return on investment.

Not Using High-quality Images

This is a crucial mistake when it comes to Facebook ads. Not only do poor quality images, potentially harm your brand, but they also do not entice people to engage with them. Facebook newsfeeds are full of images that are not professional quality. To stand out you should use high-quality images and professional design with a colour scheme that will stand out and represent your brand appropriately. Using a website or app such as Canva and searching for Facebook Ad templates can give you a good starting point.

One final point about imagery – if you use a carousel ad, make the images distinct from each other.

Poor Targeting

Make sure that you know your customer personas to a very detailed level before you start any Facebook advertising campaigns. Use Facebook’s targeting options to create your ideal customer persona. For example what life events may have recently happened, what is their purchasing behaviour, what is the age and gender, what are their interest and where do they live?

Use Facebook audience insights as well, you can enter the interests that you know your target audience has to then get insights into other information regarding the best users to target.

Too Many Campaigns

Start with 1 campaign for your ‘warm audiences’ and 1 campaign for your ‘cold audiences’, each campaign should have 2 ad sets. It is important to have different ad sets, so you can test which performs the best. Let your ads run for 3-5 days and see which ads are working. You may also want to look to refine or broaden the audiences at this point.

Ignoring Click to Call Campaigns

Although much of today’s lead generation, sales and business, in general, is done solely online, telephone calls are still the most valuable type of lead – ignore them at your lead-generation-peril. It is recommended that you set your marketing objective to “Reach” to begin with. Then, in placements, click “Edit Placements” and then change the “Device Types” to “Mobile Only”. When designing the ad, tick to “Add a website URL” and then in the “Call to Action” section, choose “Call Now”:

You can now enter your phone number – ideally one from a call tracking service.

If you are a small business owner and may miss phone calls from these ads, consider coinciding your campaign with a free trial with a virtual receptionist such as Moneypenny. They offer a 24/7 service so that you will never miss a lead.

Not Using Different Hooks

“A hook is not the whole offering: It’s a tease, a sample and a mental appetizer. The hook should give your prospects just enough taste to leave them wanting more”
Quote Source

Hooks are a must for Facebook advertising. Talk about the benefits of your product or service – remember that– people don’t buy what you are selling, they buy why it’s of value to them.

For example, people won’t be interested in the dimensions of the widescreen TV that you are trying to sell; they are more likely to be interested in how it can make watching sports much more entertaining, or how having this specific TV will make movies much more intense.

When trying to come up with hooks, you can use the following tips to help with idea generation. Use numbers – numbers and symbols tend to stand out more in all types of ad copy. For example, can your product save people at a set amount of money each year?

Be witty, can you explain the benefit of your product in a funny way? For example, a dentist could use the tagline “You can relax. With 20 years’ experience, we know the drill”. 

You can also use the power of negativity and the fear of missing out by telling people that they could be making a mistake. For example, a fitness trainer could grab people’s attention with the hook “This common training mistake could destroy the benefits of training into your 40s”, or “Don’t miss out – in 20 seconds you could learn this simple way to revolutionise your fitness”.

Not Warming Up Your Target Audience

People using Facebook are not actively looking to purchase a product. You can directly go in for a sale in some instances, especially if it’s a relatively low-value product, that’s on offer and you make the transaction process quick and easy using a streamlined checkout with Paypal or Apple Pay.

However, for pretty much every other product or service, you will first want to touch-base and warm up the audience without directly prompting them to purchase from you.  Think of Facebook Advertising as a bit of a journey. You need to take your audience on a journey with you so that they get to know and trust you. 

A common way to warm up an audience is to offer a free eBook or a free webinar with interesting tips and advice. For example, if you are a fitness trainer, you could run a webinar which targets beginners and outlines the dos and don’ts of starting a fitness regime. Of course, you would advertise this webinar using Facebook Ads to ensure the right people know about it. You could also run as simple video view campaign, using the video of the webinar, and then retarget people who watched at least some of the video.

You could also integrate a webinar campaign, with an email marketing campaign. For example, the fitness webinar could be followed up with several weekly tips emails, with a subtle sales pitch for your product or service. Every 4 or 5 emails, you could try and sell your product more directly.

Trusting Facebook a Bit Too Much

Facebook is a business, they make money through advertising. Like other ad platforms, you need to be aware of some ways they might go about improving their bottom line. For example, according to Hayden Bowles when you duplicate an ad set it will automatically add on 2 extra sets of placements for your ads – usually placing them in Messenger stories and inboxes.  

You should also be aware of and consider or research the benefits of the boxes that Facebook automatically ticks or checks for you in the setup process. For example, “Expand interests when it may improve performance at a lower cost per result” is normally auto-ticked in the “Detailed Targeting” setup. For more information on audience expansion, this Adespresso article is very interesting.

In the “Placements” setup, Facebook will also automatically place your ads on Instagram and many different places on Facebook. There are exceptions, but to begin with, it is often best to place your ads just on the main news feed of Facebook. To do this select “Edit Placements” and untick the placements that you don’t want.

Finally, in the location settings – if you are only offering a product to people who live in your target location, make sure the setting is on “People who live in this location” rather than “Everyone in this location”. The way the options are worded can be a little confusing.

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