WANTED: A crystal ball for FB Ads and….?

Like Them or Hate them, you cannot Ignore Them. I am speaking about Facebook Ads. With more the one billion people, active on Facebook, it’s a No- Brainer that you cannot ignore Facebook Ads, because someone in that one billion, is your potential customer.

Every other day, there is some product or the other on Facebook Ads replete with case studies how people desperate for a breakthrough, sometimes down to the last five bucks in their pocket, discovered the holy grail in FB Ads and became rich overnight

And we too, in sheer desperation, try to copy their case studies, their ad templates ,hoping and praying that ‘ this time its gonna work’

And what are our results?

Sometimes the ads work, sometimes they don’t and that’s when we burn our fingers and blow deep holes in our pockets.

What works for someone need not work for us and we go through trail and error trying to solve this enigma called FB Ads.
We learn that FB Ads need to be optimized and should have the following:

1.  It should be visual- has to be visually appealing and eye-catching
2. It should be relevant- to your target audience
3. It should have a UVP- Unique Value Proposition that stands out and makes the target audience find out more
4. It should have a clear CTA- Call To Action again inducing the potential customer to click on your ad

But ultimately whether your FB Ad will taste success or not , boils down to these two critical factors:

1. How great is your design?( A great design,as mentioned in the paragraph above should not only get viewer attention but also create desire for your product)
2. How laser focused is your targeting?(Are you really able to zero in on your ideal audience of potential customers when your ads are displayed?)

Here are a few tips for creating effective ad designs.

1. Begin with the Customer Profile in mind.
Different customers have different pain points and hence different needs. Hence it is ‘elementary’ to segment your customers based on sex, age, occupation etc. For each customer type come up with a customer profile and create an ad ‘around’ that profile. For example, let’s say you have a Make Money Offer(MMO) to promote. Whereas the target market is anyone who is interested in MMO, that is too broad a definition. Dig further deep and you will come up with that frustrated employee who wants to get out of his 9 to 5 job , the stay at home mom trying to meet both ends meet, the newbie who is just learning his ropes, the experienced marketer who is looking to scale up his business.They are all united by their desire to make money, yet their pain points or needs are different. Hence we need to come up with different Unique Value Propositions (UVP’s) as we mentioned earlier and design different ads for each UVP.

2. No Hype please, thankyou!
Which one of these ads is likely to appeal to you:
(a) Newbie makes $1000 per day working 10 minutes a day
(b) The six step method to start earning your first 1k in affiliate marketing
I will avoid (a) like the plague because to me an ‘incredible claim’ is just that-‘not credible’-‘not believable’ whereas (b) seems credible.
In other words, keep the hype out and be credible

3. Show Me The Proof.
Something that follows from what we discussed just above ie credibility is how to ‘establish’ credibility and what can be a better method other than ‘social proof’. One of the popular swipes used while marketing an IM product is to inform the prospect that so and so product won the product of the day in so and so affiliate network. Or if it is a product that has sold well, we could say “3000 people have downloaded this”. This allays the fear of the prospect that this could be a scam product- after all a product that has been awarded the ‘product of the day ‘or which has already been downloaded 3000 times cannot be a bad product. That’s the power of social proof. Another example of social proof would be to get the testimonials of a few Internet Marketers who are respected in the industry.
Bottom line- “Show them the proof and they will show you the money!”

4. Choose the ‘right’ image that gets attention.
Images that you use in your FB Ad should get the attention of the prospect- this is of course a No- Brainer. Whereas your image should get attention, make sure it doesn’t get Facebook’s attention for the wrong reasons- images that are too strong or offensive will only land you in trouble. So choose your images wisely which is why I have emphasized on the word ‘right’ in the heading.

5.The landing page should be congruent with the Ad.
Ok-someone likes your Ad and clicks on it. What happens next? They end up on a landing page, right? Whereas the landing page is another critical opportunity for you to further encourage the prospect to buy from you by going into depth, make sure the images and wording used therein are congruent with the Ad. Let’s say you see an ad for an ‘LBD’( Little Black Dress) and click on it. If the landing page displays hundreds of little dresses and if you really have to search for your LBD, how long would you stay on that page? You would leave immediately, right? In other words be consistent through out.

6. Use CTA’s
Once the user clicks on your ad and ‘lands’ on your landing page, he should immediately perform the action desired without any confusion or wasting of time. This is where the humble CTA – Call To Action assumes significance. Your CTA in your Ad- whether it is “ Take the survey and get this gift” or“ Download your Cheat sheet”, should prompt the prospect to take action. CTA’s thus help to improve conversions and thereby reduce the cost of conversions and so they should never be under-estimated.

7. Placing your ads in the right place.
The ‘right’ place would depend on your goal.
If your goal is to get engagement and get sales and leads, you need to place your ad in Desktop Newsfeed as that will support longer copy.

On the other hand, if you want to retarget users who already know about you, then Desktop right column with smaller text and images will be both cheaper and more effective.If you want your product to be discovered, especially when it comes to mobile app installs, then Mobile Newsfeed is where you need to place your ad.

8. Test, Tweak , Test Tweak.
Even if you are an expert in FB Ads, it is critical you come up with three or four Ad designs for the same subject. Tweak the image, tweak the copy text and test , test and test. And then mix and match till you get a real winner

There are also databases of FB Ads which we can refer to find out the winning ads and then we have to test and tweak….
But then, this….. is the HARD way….

What if there is a SMART way- what if there was a crystal ball for FB Ads that tell us exactly what types of ads to run to make profits from those campaigns. Then those campaigns would never fail, right?
Better still. What if you can see what is Trending on social media or Brainstorm Viralposts or best selling items whether it’s some eCommerce items or T-Shirts or any other merchandise?

• Users can save their searches as Favorites so they never to have miss a golden opportunity once they spot it.
• You can spy on FB, T-Shirts, Shopify, Amazon & Ebay and with a built in FB ads database that gets updated in real time with thousands of ads every day
• In short, you are able to forecast what exactly will sell instantly – it is like legally stealing successful campaigns in seconds.

Well there is such a tool- a powerful social research and infiltrate tool which you can check out here.

This is a guest post written by Tom Parker, if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.