Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
How To Utilise Facebook Ads For A Small Business
Advertising on Facebook is a great way for small businesses to reach new customers, drive awareness and increase sales or enquiries. But, it can take time to see the results you’re after…
From the creative to the targeting, there are many factors that determine how well your ads perform. As an experienced Facebook ads agency, we’ve worked with small businesses from all kinds of industries that have seen success with Facebook ads. They’ve been able to grow their revenue, their team and even expand their offering.
Here are our top tips for how you could utilise Facebook ads for your business…
Developing Your Brand Identity
The first step to creating an effective Facebook ad is to develop your brand identity. Brand identity is a combination of visual and verbal elements that help customers identify you in their minds as the best solution to their problems. It’s also important that your brand remains consistent across all platforms, so make sure that you have an established logo, colour scheme and messaging for every channel where you advertise.
To develop a strong brand identity, start by developing an understanding of who your customers are and how your unique offering addresses their pain points. Make sure everything you create ties back to this core message – whether it’s through imagery or copywriting – so people know exactly what your brand is all about when they see your ads on Facebook.
And don’t just copy what other companies are doing – you want people who have never heard of your company before to notice it because they’re drawn in by its unique design aesthetic (and not because they think they’ve seen this before somewhere else).
Refining Your Audience
Alongside your copy and creative, your audience targeting will be one of the most important keys to your success. You can target based on demographic, geography, interests and behaviours to ensure that your ads are being seen by the right people who will already have an interest in what you have to offer.
We recommend creating multiple audience groups to narrow down your audience based on performance. Once you’ve established your cold audiences (people who have never heard of your brand) and begun to collect performance data, you can start expanding your targeting to warm and hot audiences.
Warm audiences are people who have some degree of interaction, for example, have liked a TikTok video or visited your profile before, while hot audiences have the highest level of previous interaction with your brand (they may have added a product to their basket or subscribed to your email list). You can also use the data from your cold campaign to retarget customers and move them down the conversion funnel. By optimising the targeting in every stage of your funnel, you can ensure you get the most out of your Facebook ads.
Choosing Your Campaign Type
Before you choose your campaign type, first consider what your business goals are. Your advertising objective is the outcome that you and your business would find the most valuable. So, it’s important to know what you want to achieve in order to choose the right objective.
For your first campaign as a small business, you may want to focus on building awareness and acquiring new customers. Then, once you’ve generated interest, you may want to encourage people to make a purchase or sign up through a lead form. Consider what actions will be the most crucial for your business to obtain your current goals. Objectives range from brand awareness and engagement to lead generation, conversions and app installs.
Allocating Your Budget
Once you’ve chosen your campaign type, you’ll need to think about how to allocate your budget most effectively. The first option for setting your Facebook ad budget is at the campaign level (CBO). This strategy relies on Facebook’s algorithm to distribute your ad spend across your ad sets to get the best result based on your campaign goal.
Your other option is to allocate your budget at the ad set level. With this option, you have more control over the delivery and measurement of specific ad sets as you can vary your budget on your ad sets. This is a better option if you’ve got some experience running Facebook ads (or you have someone experienced running them for you). It’s also a good option to consider if you have ad sets with varying specifications, like different optimisation goals, audience sizes, or bid strategies.
Finding The Right Creative
Your Facebook ad creative is your opportunity to visually communicate your unique offering. The Facebook ads manager allows you to use either image or video content in your ad, so it’s important to consider which content type would best suit your business. Whichever you choose, we recommend ensuring your content is high quality and focuses on your USPs. This is especially important for small businesses trying to increase brand awareness to help audiences quickly understand what you’re all about.
As a Facebook ads agency, we use a combination of image and video content depending on the business. However, recent research conducted by Biteable has shown that video content can generate three times as many leads as images. Videos also have the power to generate more clicks — almost five times as many.
With short-form video content like Instagram Reels and TikToks becoming a huge part of the content that people consume, this is your chance to show off your small business offering in a unique way.
If you want to upgrade your content but need some help, remember you can always use a creative agency (like us) to support your content requirements.
Perfecting Your Copy
It’s easy to think of the creative as the star of the show, but the copy also has the potential to be highly persuasive. When writing your ad, it’s important to remember that you’re trying to engage with your audience and get them interested in what you’re offering.
You want to make sure that the copy is clear and concise, using the same language as your target audience. This will help them relate to what you’re saying and be more likely to click through on the ad or look for more information.
Using The Right Call to Action (CTA)
The Call to Action button (CTA) is an important part of any social media advertising campaign. The CTA should be relevant to the action they wish to take, whether it’s making a purchase (‘Buy Now’) or getting to know your business better (‘Learn More’).
If you’re using Facebook ads for lead generation purposes, then make sure that you test different CTAs until you find one that works best with your target market. For example: “Download Now” vs “Contact Us”.
Optimising Your Landing Page
A user clicking on your ad is only half of the story. They will then be directed to your dedicated landing page. You can optimise your landing page to increase your conversion rate by making sure it provides the additional information the user needs, the right keywords, and easy-to-use functionality, whether it’s product navigation or a lead generation form. You should also make sure your landing page is highly relevant to your ad; otherwise, you could be paying for traffic that doesn’t find what they were looking for.
A/B Testing Your Ads
A/B testing is a great way to get more data on which ads are working best. You can test different ads, targeting options and ad copy. An important part of the A/B test is to ensure that you run a controlled experiment. Therefore, we recommend creating a “control” which is used as the base across all of the tests. From there, you can run the A/B test on a limited budget for a limited number of days. For example, if you want to target men between the ages of 18 and 25 but you want to test a theory about whether they engage more with images or videos, you can run two identical ads, just changing the creative.
Once you’ve let your test run, you can compare their performance by looking at how many people clicked each one. By running multiple A/B tests over a period of time, you can optimise every aspect of your ad to its highest converting variation.
To Conclude...
Advertising on Facebook can be helpful for any small business; once you understand how you can best present your brand on the platform. If you’re looking to action our insights but need some help along the way, we can help – simply book a call to discuss your business and the kind of results you want to see from Facebook advertising.
