3 Ways to Reinvigorate Facebook Advertising

September 1, 2015

When marketers first started using Facebook as an advertising platform, it was easy enough just to create a Page and post regularly. Now the tides have changed on Facebook, and it will take more than just daily or weekly posts to reach your audience.

In recent years, Facebook advertising has become an essential part of the marketing game, and more digital marketers are starting to realise its true value. The problem they seem to run into often is that their Facebook efforts don’t seem to generate enough leads or return-on-investment (ROI). As a result, their campaigns do very little and they have fewer leads to pass back to their sales teams.

If you’re like these marketers, don’t give up just yet. What you really need is a new Facebook advertising strategy. Here are three awesome ways you can reinvigorate your Facebook advertising and start generating strong leads.

Change Up Your Images

Like many other social media site users, Facebook users love visual posts. From photographs to infographics, visual images capture attention far better than just copy alone. Now that so many more readers are just skimming their Facebook newsfeeds and sparing only a glance for the side panes, it’s important that digital marketers start making the most of images on Facebook if they want to remain relevant.

If your ads are relying more on copy than images, try switching up your look. Try to cut down on the number of words in a Facebook ad and let the image speak for itself. Limit your call-to-action (CTA) to just a few words and be as brief as possible without being too aloof. Always make sure another person reads your CTA before you publish it to ensure that your message is clear.

This tactic also works if your images are boring or lacking in life. Ditch the stock photos and hire a professional photographer. A higher education institute, for example, might take photos of the campus or pop in a class and take pictures of students at work. Now crop these photos in as many different ways as you’d like and use them for your ads.

Move away from using your logo on every ad. Facebook itself is not really designed for hard sells, and more people will unfollow you if they see nothing but obvious ads. Instead, use ads that showcase the benefits of your product or service and highlight how consumers can benefit from your company.

Focus on Area-specific Advertising

Much of your audience will probably come from local members of the community who use your services every day. These are local business owners who come to your property development company when they want to open a new location or to a financial firm when they need help managing their finances. Advertising to locals helps build a strong foundation and encourages community support.

Rather than spending your time advertising to demographics far outside your geographical location, try focusing harder on building and maintaining strong local recognition with your ads.

When people want everyday goods and services, they usually don’t go looking too far out of their general location. They want somewhere close to home that they can easily walk or drive to. Becoming a local favourite is also great for repeat business, and your local regulars will be more likely to leave reviews on other sites like Yelp and Google+.

Focusing on a single suburb or region can also help you think more specifically about just one demographic. When you’re thinking about marketing to a large general audience, then your ads tend to look large and general. They don’t really offer any benefits or showcase those benefits effectively.

You don’t have to focus solely on your local community forever, but it should always be a part of your Facebook advertising strategy. As these people are your closest geographical leads, you’ll be the first ones they think of when they need a property developer or a financial firm’s assistance.

Run Split Testing

Some marketers just don’t know what they’re fans really want. They’ve stuck to a single type of ad that seemed to work for a while but is now going stale. When you’ve gotten so used to creating one type of ad, it can be difficult to imagine doing your advertisements any other way or thinking of new ideas that will actually strike a chord with your audience.

The truth is that if you don’t know what isn’t working about your ads, then you need to start doing some heavy split testing to find out. Maybe your Facebook CTAs are really strong, but your images are low-quality and look like spam. In some cases, your CTA might be difficult to understand or it might not make sense to your viewers.

With split testing, you can test out all aspects of your ads and find out which ones are working best for your audience. For example, which type of image is more appealing in an ad for a higher education institute: a shot with students in it or one of campus? By running two types of the same ad with different images, you can see firsthand which type of image attracts more people.

This is also valuable when it comes to testing out CTAs and gated content. Some CTAs are definitely more attractive than others, and running two similar ads with different CTAs will help you see which CTAs resonate more with your audience. If you’re producing different types of gated content – ebooks, white papers, free trials – then you can see which type your audience seems to prefer.

Above all, split testing will keep your ads from becoming routine and boring. Marketing is always changing, and so are your audience’s preferences. Regular split testing is mandatory for all Facebook advertising so make it a part of your good marketing habits.

So which one of these ideas will you use to reinvigorate your Facebook advertising strategy? Share your thoughts with us!