Regardless of what business you are in, Facebook offers the best solution for creating low cost and high converting advertisements as long as you are doing it correctly. According to Pew Research Center, 68% of the U.S. adult population are using Facebook and 74% of those users check the platform every day. That means there is a ton of opportunity for getting your ads in front of people.  

However, creating Facebook ads can come with its challenges. 

Perhaps you don’t consider yourself to be much of a copywriter and the thought of writing an ad is nauseating. Or maybe you are a fairly decent copywriter and you already have some Facebook ads running, but they are not converting no matter how great your copy is.

Don’t fret, there is a solution to your Facebook ad woes. Creating Facebook ads that convert isn’t as difficult as you might think. You just need to have a grasp on the following: 

Understanding Your Target Audience

Facebook advertising all starts with understanding exactly who your target audience is. If you haven’t identified who your target market is, you will need to start by creating your customer profile

Creating ads for your target audience holds a lot of power because these users will resonate with your offer and lower your ad costs. If you are targeting the right people on Facebook, they will be significantly more likely to engage, click, or even share your message. 

To give you some better data on who your audience is currently, you can check out your Facebook Audience Insights. This gives you some great information on exactly what kind of people are already interested in your page. 

The Purpose of Your Ad

If you didn’t already know, your Facebook ad serves one purpose, and one purpose only. That purpose is simply to get your prospect to click through to the landing page and convert on that page. Your ad does not need to sell your product, talk about yourself, your business, or your brand. The number one purpose is to get your prospects to click through to the landing page with the intention of converting. 

In this case, a conversion could mean a number of things. It could mean making a sale, but it doesn’t have to. It could just getting them to read an article and pixeling them for retargeting purposes. 

Conversion = DOING the action you are optimizing your ad for. It doesn’t always mean making sales. 

What does this mean?

As we are creating our ads, it is very easy to get caught up in all of the features and benefits of our products and services. However, none of those things matter. The only thing that matters is getting our prospect to click on the ad and convert on the landing page. It almost seems too simple, right?

In order to achieve this, you will want to refer back to your ideal customer (or customer profile). The idea is to twist the knife of their biggest pain, and emphasize how great their life will be after they purchase your product. This helps you hone in on why your product or service will benefit them and help solve their problems. You can think of this in terms of pain versus pleasure or anxiety versus ease. 

Elements of a Facebook Ad That Converts: 

  • Compelling copy that gets the click and pre-frames the prospect for the landing page (tells them what to expect once they click) 
  • Continuity between the ad and the landing page (same headline / similar messaging) 
  • Ad creative (image or video) that catches the prospect’s attention and looks native to Facebook (ie: stay AWAY from stock images of people… usually) 

The ad creative typically has the greatest impact on your click through rate. Changing and testing the CREATIVE is generally the biggest lever you can pull when creating ads. 

The ad headlines and post text are the second most important elements in an ad. These elements should serve to “call out” the prospect and give the prospect something he/she wants, as well as telling the prospect what to expect on the landing page. 

Split Testing

The best way to create Facebook ads that convert is, without a doubt, by split testing your ads. Ad performance is extremely data-driven and takes out all of the guessing of which ad will perform better than the rest. With low spend, you can find out which ad is the winning one with a split testing service like Adespresso

Split testing is a marketing strategy where you take two ads of a marketing campaign and test them against each other to analyze which one will deliver the best results.

When you split test your Facebook ads, it is important that they each generate a good amount of data before you make any decisions on which ones to delete. The data can be in the form of likes, comments, clicks, conversions, or other. It is best that you do not immediately start testing ads with multiple elements. Instead, start with a headline variant or just a different image. You can optimize your ads little by little, slowly eliminating those that have very low performance. 

By using data and split testing, you can continually optimize your ads for better performance. It doesn’t even matter if you’re the best copywriter in the world. If you aren’t testing your ads, you won’t be able to improve them. Data always wins the race in the world of Facebook advertising.