How To Make Good Facebook Ads That Convert: 5 Best Practices
Do you know what a photographer, an automotive ecommerce store and a women’s supplement company all have in common?
They all drove hundreds of thousands of dollars for their business using Facebook ads!
This photography client was able to drive 5,813 leads at an average cost of $6.41 per lead.
This automotive ecommerce client drove over 74 purchases resulting in over $391 thousand dollars.
This women’s supplement company drove more than a quarter of a million dollars.
We’ve driven millions and millions of dollars for our clients using Facebook ads and our social media advertising services.
Today we’re sharing the 5 exact steps we use for our clients that you can follow to learn how to make good Facebook ads that convert and drive sales.
- Write Down Every Problem Your Offerings Solve And/Or Every Goal It Helps People Achieve
- Nail Down Your Target Audience(s)
- Create A Marketing Funnel
- Make The Ads For Your Different Audience Segments
- Continuously A/B Test Different Ads
- Two Bonus Tips
5 Steps To Create The Best Facebook Ads
Step 1 is to write down every problem your product or service solves and/or every goal it helps people achieve. Everything you do from here on out should be related to something on this list.
Too many times we have seen small businesses come to us for help and one of their biggest problems is they’re making business-oriented ads instead of customer-oriented ads.
Customers don’t care that your dishwasher has the new cleaner turbo 3000; they care that it gets their dishes clean in one wash without them having to pre-scrub it in the sink first.
Customers don’t care how many awards you’ve won, or what’s on your company resume; they want to know that what you do helps them and solves their problems.
Write down every problem or goal you can think of that your audience has that your offerings are the solution for.
Step 2 is to nail down your target audience(s). We say audiences plural because within your target audience there’s always different niches.
If you sell clothes for both men and women, you’re going to have a male audience and female audience.
If you sell coolers, you might have one audience grouping of outdoorsy people who use it when they’re camping.
You might have another audience grouping of sports people, tailgaters or soccer moms who use it at games.
Ideally, you wouldn’t run the same ad to both groups. You’d run different ads that address each audience grouping’s unique pain points or goals.
And this goes back to step 1 because if you were running an ad for everybody, you’d probably start listing out the cooler’s features: “Keeps items cold for this many hours, comes in different colors, is this size!”
But when you tailor your ads to each specific audience, you can reframe those benefits in a way that’s important to them.
“Keeps your kids’ post-game snacks and drinks cold the entire game. Super compact and easy to carry on the longest hikes.” See the difference?
So for this step, you’re making a second list of the different target audiences that benefit from using your product.
Step 3 is to create a marketing funnel. Before you get overwhelmed, don’t worry, we’re going to break down exactly how to do that.
If you have never drawn out a marketing funnel for your business, think of it as three parts.
You have the awareness stage where people who have never heard of your brand or business before are entering your funnel.
Then you have the engagement stage, where people are considering your brand, learning more about how you can help them.
Then you have the conversion stage, where people buy the product or service and either continue to use it or make repeat purchases or refer business to you.
You don’t want to run the same ads to people in the awareness stage as you are in the
conversion stage or vice versa, and that’s where having a marketing funnel helps.
It gives you a plan on what ads you’re running to who and then you can allocate your budget accordingly.
Ads geared towards people in the awareness stage need to account for the fact that people have never heard of your brand before and they don’t care about it until you make them care.
How do you make them care? Address what THEY care about: your list in step 1. Give them free value.
Ads geared towards the engagement stage can provide gated value.
Maybe in order to get the more in-depth value, they need to sign up for your email and text list, subscribe to your subscription-only Facebook content etc.
You want to start connecting the dots on how your product or service provides the solution they’re looking for.
Finally, ads in the conversion stage need to have a strong CTA (call-to-action) asking for the sale. Tell them exactly what to do.
Step 4 is to make the ads for your different audience segments.
We talked about this a little in step 2, making cooler ads for your outdoorsy audience vs your sports audience.
You know to pull from the list you made in step 1 so that the message is customer-oriented and not business oriented, but when it comes to actually making the ad, we have 3 tips for you.
- #1 Make it a short, vertical video Reels ad that can be displayed in between organic Facebook or Instagram Reels. It’s the number one media type right now and has the highest potential to grab your audience’s attention the quickest.
- #2 Don’t make the ad look like a TV commercial. The more informal and down to earth, generally the better it’s received.
- #3 Use UGC if you can. UGC stands for user-generated content, and it’s what we provide for our clients every day.
The point of UGC is to show your audience somebody like them that they can relate to, using and demonstrating your product or service. Showing exactly how it helps people like them.
These are the real steps we take to generate millions of dollars for our small business clients using Facebook ads.
Step 5 is to continuously A/B test different ads.
If you don’t know, A/B testing is when you run multiple different ads to the same audience to determine which ad is going to generate the most money for the lowest cost.
So, yes, you’ve got your cooler ad for the outdoorsy people and your cooler ad for the sports people.
Now you need to take it a step further and make multiple ads for the outdoorsy people and multiple ads for the sports people.
Make 2-5 ads for each audience grouping, or however many your budget can sustain. Each ad should tackle a different goal or pain point.
You might find that one pain point resonates more with a certain audience than another, and the only way you’ll find that out is by A/B testing.
Once you find the winning (most profitable) combination, you can turn off the lower-performing ads and reallocate that budget to the one driving you sales at the lowest cost per sale.
Not only are you investing your Facebook advertising dollars well at this point, but you also have a better understanding of what your audience cares about as it relates to your offerings,
So, now you can go and make more ads around that pain point or goal. This is where you really start to hone in on your audience and scale!
Bonus Tips
Now, since you made it this far, we’re going to share two bonus tips that help make Facebook ads effective.
In step 2 when you’re nailing down your audiences, we would ALWAYS, no matter what industry, recommend you include a lookalike audience and a retargeting audience.
We use a lookalike and retargeting in almost all of our client campaigns and it’s because together, they drive the sales you’re looking for.
A lookalike audience is an audience that Facebook creates from an existing audience you have: ideally, your customers.
Facebook then goes and finds new people who “look like” your customers.
So this audience is a cold audience, meaning they’ve never heard of your brand before, but it’s usually the most profitable cold audience out there that you can target.
You can create a lookalike audience out of any list, like your email subscribers, but it’s most effective if you have a customer list of 1,000+ people for it to create a new audience out of because you want the new audience to have the same attributes as your existing customers.
A retargeting audience is an audience that has already heard of your brand in some capacity, such as your Facebook engagement or your website traffic, that you are showing ads to again in order to get them to convert.
97% of people who go to your website do not come back unless they are retargeted.
In most cases, especially with small businesses, you can’t show an ad to someone 1 time and then expect them to purchase.
They need to see your ads several times and be retargeted to get you back to your site.
You will usually see the highest amount of sales at the lowest cost per sale from a retargeting audience.
Facebook Ad FAQs
How to make Facebook ads effective?
In order to make Facebook ads effective, you need to make the ads customer-oriented, not business-oriented. You need to address pain points or goals your audience has and provide your offerings as the solution.
What is the best Facebook ad strategy?
The best Facebook ad strategy is to offer free value your audience cares about in exchange for their contact information. Then, retargeting those people until they convert.
How do I make my Facebook ad profitable?
You make your Facebook ad profitable by A/B testing and retargeting warm audiences so that they convert at a low cost.
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