Pain Points in Facebook Marketing

Are you trying to create Facebook Ads? You should know these Pain Points in Facebook Marketing!

Introduction

Introduction: Pain Points in Facebook Marketing

Facebook ads are a great way to quickly and easily place your advertisement on the world’s most used social networking website. With a monthly active user base of 2.5 Billion and an intuitive interface, this platform presents users with the opportunity to create extremely high value ad campaigns. While a campaign can be set up quite easily, there are a number of pitfalls that can stand between you and a successful promotional effort. Here, we’ll go over some of the most common pain points in Facebook advertising and some things to keep in mind as you work through them.

Targeting:

Targeting is by far the most crucial pain point in any Facebook advertising campaign. Without correct targeting, your ads will not be seen by the audience they were intended for and ultimately the return on the time and money you invested in developing your campaign will be significantly lower. It’s important that you aim your campaign at the right demographic without being so specific that you actually preclude a portion of your intended audience from being shown your promotional materials.

Let’s say your target audience is lawyers. If all you do is select “occupation: lawyer” and “location: USA”, your audience will not include anywhere close to all of the lawyers in the United States. It’s important to go through all the possible demographic selections (income bracket, level of education, et cetera) and set many parameters that more effectively encompass your target market. This better ensures that your ad campaign is placed in front of its intended audience.

When done correctly, ad targeting is completely data driven, and these parameters are set by carefully done research. Information is collected on the reach and awareness generated by the current settings and that data is then used to further retarget the campaign. From there, one can run lookalike campaigns (more on that later!), create custom audiences and see analytics.

Designing the appropriate campaign:

It’s important to keep in mind that the kind of traffic your advertisement will get on Facebook is unique to that of other popular platforms such as Google AdWords. Search engine ads are viewed by people who are already interested in the topic, or what’s known as “warm traffic”. If you sell sleeping bags and your ad pops up when someone searches for “camping gear”, the person who sees it is already thinking about something closely related to your advertisement and is therefore more apt to click on it. On social media sites such as Facebook, however, advertisements are shown to users on their homepage and in their feed without any interest first being expressed, which is what’s known as “cold traffic”. This audience needs to be warmed up by you before being prompted to sign up for a service or make a purchase.

Being platform-appropriate also means tailoring your advertisement’s content to the way in which people will actually come across it. Facebook ads will be shown to viewers as a part of their feed. The feed is effectively a culmination of each user’s preferences on the site, organized chronologically. They’ll see updates from their network of friends, content from their most liked pages, and marketplace listings in their geographical area. Spliced into all of this is your advertisement, and it’s important to keep the context in which Facebook ads are presented in mind when you are creating your promotional content.

If you’re designing something for a billboard that sits adjacent to a freeway, you’ve got to take into account that motorists will only have a few seconds to take the entirety of your ad. The Facebook feed is actually quite similar to a freeway in this sense, being that it is often scrolled down or thumbed through very quickly, giving your content mere seconds to catch a user’s eye. Lengthy videos, small fonts and generally text heavy content is going to get scrolled right past as opposed to concise and easily digestible visuals that will make an impact on the users that see them in their Facebook feeds.

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Knowing your goal:

Related to the idea of creating platform-appropriate content is the need to hone in on what exactly you are trying to accomplish for your business via each particular Facebook ads. Facebook provides its users with several types of advertisement strategies to choose from and has grouped them into three overarching categories of objective. Ads geared towards awareness (Including brand awareness and reach) are meant to “generate interest in your product or service”, while those with consideration (including traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation and messages) as their main goal aim to “get people to think about your business and seek more information”. Finally, conversion-related objectives (such as catalog sales and store traffic) “encourage people interested in your business to buy or use your product or service” (Facebook).

It’s important to know exactly what the objective of any one particular advertisement is in regards to what actions you want your users to take. If your ultimate goal is to sell users a product like sunglasses (a conversion objective), your strategy might need to include several different steps (accomplish the goal of raising brand awareness first, for instance) to reach that point.

Image Credit: Leadpages

Here we have an excellent example of a simple visual that should connect well with the ad’s target market: People studying for the GMAT exam. “740 on GMAT” is clearly the focus here, written in a contrasting text color on the ad’s image, and three other times throughout the entirety of the advertisement. US news considers any GMAT score above 700 to be a “great” result that should help one get into elite and selective graduate programs, so anyone interested in being accepted to one such school should be intrigued by the story of how a seemingly normal student (who viewers can connect with through the headshot) was able to achieve this mark, and is therefore likely to click on the provided link to read it on the advertiser’s website.

Image credit: Leadpages

This ad is perhaps more visually interesting than the previous example, but still does an excellent job of being very clear about its main topic. Next to the artful photo of their products is a large and bold block of text stating the main takeaway from the advertisement: New customers can get 20% off their first purchase. Also included in the text are the phrases “discounts” and “free shipping”, alluding to the idea that there are many deals to be had once becoming a customer of the advertiser.

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Testing and tweaking:

Testing the efficacy and tweaking the strategy of your Facebook ad campaign is one of the most important obstacles to navigate when promoting anything on the platform. Ultimately, you’re spending money on Facebook advertising because it will improve a desired metric for your business, such as website traffic, and you want to make sure that that investment continues to yield the best possible returns it can.

Advertisers can easily make the mistake of changing too many things about their strategy at once, perhaps editing the copy of their advertisement while also changing their viewer demographic, which can make it extremely difficult to attribute any improvements (or losses) in your desired KPI to any one particular change. A far more effective method of testing is the A/B method in which advertisers change one aspect of their strategy at a time and analyze the changes in outcome that came with that change being made before making another change. This pairs well with the split testing strategy in which only a certain portion of the ads you are running will receive the change and the rest are left alone as a sort of baseline control group. This enables you to better understand and more effectively test the impact of each tweak you make to your advertising strategy.

The simplest way to perform an A/B test on Facebook is via the Ads Manager toolbar. After getting there, click on “campaigns” and “A/B” test, which will present you with a number of variables to experiment with: “Audience” (test different audiences), “Creative” (test visual aspects), “Placements” (test different locations on the page), “Delivery optimization” (test ads with or without budget optimization), “More than one” (test several variables), and finally “Product set” (test different products) are all available to control as test variables via the “Ad Set” section of the toolbar.