SMO Checklist: 7 Essentials for Running Successful Facebook Ad Campaigns

Want to boost your company’s brand awareness? Have you ever thought about what a Facebook Ad can do to your brand? 

Research says, on average, Facebook houses 1.45 billion active users per day – from students to college-goers, companies – for business purposes, and even CEOs of topmost brands. Now, when the whole community is out there on Facebook, isn’t it the right place for brands to connect with the audience? 

But then, it is not as simple as you think! 

When it comes to social media advertising or marketing, Facebook plays a prominent role. If you have a brand, then Facebook is one of the right platforms to find your target audience. Running Facebook ads would reap you out great benefits, but the process isn’t that easy. 

Facebook ad campaigns are not just for selling alone, they convey our values, culture, success story, mission, and a lot more. In fact, they help you forge an instant connection with your target audience. 

If you’ve already tried using Facebook marketing for your brand and still you failed to succeed, it might be because your ad campaigns weren’t set properly. Be it a paid or an organic campaign, it is important for you to use the right strategy and target the right set of audience. 

Wondering how? Read further to know more. 

Checklist for Running a Successful Facebook Ad Campaign

Ready to set up a Facebook ad campaign for your brand? Here are a few major things that you need to keep in mind while running an ad campaign on Facebook.

1. Focus More on Image Copy 

A picture conveys a lot more than words. Especially, when it comes to social media platforms like FB, it is important for you to limit your text and characters. Instead, you can use eye-catching images that convey your message sharply. 

A right image can bring a lot of conversions. But at the same time, if the image you’ve posted is not eye-catching, your potential customer may simply scroll right past your ad without even reading it. 

Make sure you use clean, high-quality, clutter-free images for your social media ad campaigns. Also, ensure that the text you enter in the image is less than 20%; if the text quantity is higher, the reach for your post will be less. 

Use images that are relevant to your brand and products and target your audience as well. This would lead to the better reach of your post to a huge number of followers. 

So, what are the criteria to be checked before you post an image or an image copy on a social media site? Here is a small checklist for you:

• Quality of the image 
• Size of the image 
• Length of the content inside the image 
• Font style and size of the content 
• Image to text ratio 

More than anything, you must concentrate more on the quality of the image and the image-to-text ratio. 

Image to text ratio: Make sure your image ad copy consists of 20% of the text, the more shorter the text the much better will be the reach. Through the Facebook text overlay tool, you can upload perfect ad material to your campaign. 

• Image text – OK 

Your ad’s image contains little, say 20%, or no text. This is the preferred image style and your ad will run smoothly and effectively.

• Image text – Low 

Your ad’s image contains more text, say 30-40%. The reach for your image copy might be slightly lower. Try using less text or make your font size smaller. You can even remove your logos to reduce the content size.

• Image text - Medium 

Your ad’s image contains more text, say 40-60%. The reach for your image copy is much lower. Make sure the amount of text you use in an image is low and use a smaller font size.

• Image text – High 

Your ad’s image contains more and more text, say more than 60%. The ad might not run, and you may not reach your target audience. Ensure you use the right font size and the right amount of text as well.

In addition to all the above criteria, make sure the image is clutter-free and the background is clean and plain. Having a messy image background would cost you more; you can reduce the noise by blurring the background of the image. 

2. Make Your Ad Copy SPEAK 

Now, you must have a got clear picture of what kinds of images you must use for Facebook ad campaigns. But what about the ad copy? 

Every business should have its own unique voice on social media sites. Especially, when it comes to Facebook, brands need to maintain more interactive tone for a better engagement. 

Do you want to create an effective ad copy for your brand? Ad copies are content that tells a short story of your audience on why they should buy from you. Remember, the most successful Facebook ad campaigns had the best ad copies. A good ad copy contains 3 major elements, namely:

• An attention grabber 
• A phrase or sentence to add value to the ad copy 
• A call to action 

Attention Grabber – It is the hook that generates interest for your audience in your ad. Ensure that the first phrase of your ad copy sparks the reader’s or audience’s interest or addressing a problem faced by a reader; if not, they will stop reading eventually. 

Add Value to the Ad Copy – Once you have grabbed your audiences’ interest, you need to add value to your brand through the ad copy. Convey a story or explain why the user needs to click on the ad. This phrase is also used to link the attention grabber phrase and the call to action statement. 

Call to Action – This is the last and most important part of the ad copy that brings in the user’s response, i.e., getting the user’s response for better conversion. Make sure the call to action you set is clear and effective. 

Now that you have a clear idea of what to say, you also need to know what NOT to say to your audience. Ensure that your ad copy doesn’t have a selling pitch and is not too lengthy. 

3. Narrow Down Your Audience 

Have you identified your target audience? Well, narrowing down your audience is easy on Facebook. But finding the right ones can be tough. 

Based on a recent statistics, Facebook holds 1.59 billion daily users –and you could convert them into prospective clients. But this is not as easy as you think! Just posting on the Facebook page won’t bring you enough audience or convert followers to customers. There is a lot more to do! 

Start working on your Facebook ad campaigns. Running a successful Facebook ad campaign would generate good revenue for your business. But what if you’re not sure of your target audience? 

There are a few places that you need to start focusing on. If you already have a page and have a decent number of page likes, then it is easy to turn your followers into customers. For this, select the people who are already connected to your page and make them as your target audience. By doing this, your target audiences will become familiar with your company and they know what products you are selling. 

On Facebook, you can narrow down your audience based on location, gender, age, and demographics. For further filtering, go for a detailed targeting option – people often miss out this, but this is the most important option while running campaigns.

What's your Marketing Objective on Facebook?

*Source: Facebook – Choosing the right advertising objective

a) Awareness – This is where your customers and clients get to learn about your brand, products, and services. Make sure you engage your new audience and make them familiar with your brand and products. 

This phase includes the following key objectives:

• Brand Awareness – By enabling this option, you can increase people’s awareness of your business, brand, product, or service. 

• Reach – Choose this option to display your ad to as many people as possible in a set of your target audience. 

b) Consideration – This is the stage where your consumers get to know about your brand and try to decide from whom to complete their purchase – from you or a competitor. Marketers consider this stage to be the “lead generation” stage. 

This phase includes the following key objectives:

• Traffic – Drive people from Facebook to any URL you choose, such as your website’s landing page, a blog post, app, etc. 
• Engagement – Reach those who are more likely to engage with your post. Engagement not only includes likes, comments, and shares but also includes offers claimed from your Page. 
• App Installation - Send people to the shop where they can download your business's app. 
• Video Views - Share videos of your business with people on Facebook who are most likely to watch it.
• Lead Generation - Collect leads for your business. Create ads that collect information from people interested in your product, such as sign-ups for newsletters. 
• Messages - Connect with people on Facebook and communicate with potential or existing customers to encourage interest in your business. 

c) Conversion – This is the stage where you specifically want your client/customer to take an action – probably a purchase. 

This stage includes the following key objectives:

• Conversions - Encourage people to take a specific action on your business's site, such as having them to add items to a cart, download your app, register for your site, or make a purchase. 
• Catalog Sales - Show products from your e-commerce store's catalog to generate sales. 
• Store Traffic - Promote your brick-and-mortar business locations to people that are nearby. 

People often tend to miss out on this detailed targeting option, but you have to remember that this is the most important filtering option. Most of the time, agencies focus on this while brands fail to do this. 

4. Know Your Ad Placements 

Facebook comes with a fantastic option that allows you to target any set of people. You can narrow down or broaden the audience group with the options available. 

On top of all, Facebook allows you to decide the places where your ad wants to show up. Read further to know more about the various ad placements, how they differ from each other, and how to choose the right placement based on your brand, budget, and objective. 

Basically, when you set up a Facebook Ad campaign, the default option in which the ads are set to run is automatic placements. 

Selecting this option, your ads will be shown up in various social media platforms including:

• Facebook – both mobile and desktop newsfeeds 
• Instagram 
• Messenger 
• The Audience Network 

You can also change this option to Edit Placements where you can find device placements. It includes:

• All Devices 
• Mobile Only 
• Desktop Only 

It is always advisable for you to choose both mobile and desktop users as the target audience. Only then, you will be provided with various placement options that are available. 

Choosing only the Facebook Newsfeed, your ads will be limited to the Facebook audience alone. But then, FB provides you with a couple of placement options based on your campaign objectives and this includes:

• Feeds – FB News Feed, Instagram Feed, FB Marketplace, FB Video Feed, etc. 
• Stories – FB stories, IG Stories, Messenger Stories 
• In-Stream Videos 
• Messages In-article 
• Apps and sites 

Now, it is your call to choose the ad placement. Remember, not every ad placement works with every campaign. 

A small tip for the brands from our side: if you are running a B2C ad campaign, then Facebook and Instagram would be the right option for you. In case, if you are running B2B ad campaign, then you can expand specific categories of applications and websites and choose the right platform for your ads. 

5. Combat Ad Fatigue with Ad Rotation 

Do you find the performance of your Facebook ad campaigns start to drop after a period of time, say a few days after you post? 

Then, your ad campaign has become a victim of Ad Fatigue. Wondering what? 

The ad campaign you have created will be served to a number of audiences on Facebook. Now, if the same ad is served again and again to the same set of audience, eventually, it leads to ad fatigue. Also, the cost of the ad increases if you post the same ad for days together. As mentioned earlier, using a cluttered or messy image would also increase the ad cost. 

What happens? 

• Your audiences are served with the same advertisement again and again. 
• Your FB ad is competing with several other ads, photos, statuses, and much more on the user’s news feeds section. 
• Users become familiarized with your ad and this would eventually result in a drop in click-through-rate (CTR). 

Need for Ad Rotation 

Ensure that you change the Facebook ad posts periodically, say 3 to 4 days once. This stops your audience from becoming ad fatigued. Experts say that it is better to change your ads every 3 days once and few others suggest for a change once in four days. 

Instead, you can use another checkpoint to monitor your ads. Keep a close watch on the Frequency Metrics and CTR. Whenever there is a change in your frequency metrics and CTR, change your ad posts. When the CTR for your post decreases and Frequency increases, then it is time for you to change the ad. 

In order to ensure that your ad is not served to the same set of audience, again and again, you can change your audience preferences. You can opt for the Reach option[as your Marketing Objective] – this way the ad is served to different sets of audience but remember your post must not include the thumbs up button which eventually leads to lesser likes for your post. 

By default, the Brand Awareness option is always enabled – meaning the ad is served to the same set of audience often (This may lead to ad fatigue so use this objective smartly). 

Also, keep in mind that you can always replace your ads than deleting it! 

6. Maintain a Healthy Budget 

Always keep an eye on the amount you spend for the ad campaigns. Remember, Facebook often suggests you to perform paid ad campaigns but you have to choose wisely from the paid options available. Spending the right amount and reaping huge brand awareness is always the key. So manage your spend cleverly and earn an immense reach. 

If you want your Facebook Ad Campaigns to be successful, then try to maintain a healthy budget for your ads. It might be impossible for you to predict the budget on the initial stages. Fixing a budget depends on various factors including how big your target audience is, the ROI goals, the influence of your brand, the price of your products and services, and much more. 

When compared to big corporate, small companies usually have small budgets. Experts suggest that it is advisable to spend $5 per day for your Facebook ad campaign, which is considered to be a decent budget. But keep in mind, the more you spend on Facebook ad campaigns, the more will be the reach for your ad posts. 

Based on the lead generation and conversion rates, you can change the budget over time. If you have set up the ad campaign perfectly, then you can start monitoring your ad campaign and conversions. Based on the conversion rate, you can adjust the budget for your marketing campaign. 

The amount you spend for your ad campaign is completely based on:

• How many ad posts you have for boosting? 
• How well those ad posts perform? 
• For how long have you been boosting the ad posts? 
• Spending for the same post for a long period or spending on a series of ad posts? 

Try to optimize your ad posts as much as possible. When you aim to spend a certain amount of money as a budget, then profit is whatever you get as output. But, if you aim to maximize your profit, then you will start spending as much as possible in order to maximize the outcome. 

7. Review Your Ads Periodically 

Hope you have successfully posted your ad and chosen the right ad placements for your campaign. Planning to sit back and relax? 

No. Not at all. Your job doesn’t get over here. You should start monitoring your ads periodically. Start reviewing them based on the feedback and comments. Remember, it is not just what you post, but how and where. 

Incorporating and fine-tuning your ads based on client feedback would help in boosting your ad’s performance. 

One key point to keep in mind is that the following Publish and Pray method won’t work. Every Facebook Ad Campaign works on the Trial and Error method. You have to keep on changing the criteria periodically till you get your conversions. 

Follow the below steps to optimize your Facebook Ad Posts in the right way:

• Understand your customer feedback 
• Finetune your campaign 
• Tweak the target audience if necessary 
• Check for the conversion rate 
• Closely monitor and keep working for the betterment 

Try not to follow ‘set it and forget it’ policy. It never works for Facebook ad campaigns. To find qualified leads and good conversion rates, serve it to the right audience. 

So, planning to start your Facebook ad campaign? Create an ad campaign that covers all these essential elements to make it successful. Remember, the most successful ads on Facebook do not sound like ads itself. Your goal should be to make the users understand the message of the ad and its benefits, thereby making them click on your ad rather than just telling them to do so. 

Follow the above tips and your Facebook ads would turn into a successful one definitely. 

Be Connected… Be Discovered! 

Want to know more? Contact us to get perfect Social Media support for your brand. If you have any suggestions or points, keep us posted.