One mistake that a lot of businesses make when developing their Facebook ad campaign is treating it like a PPC ad campaign. However, when consumers visit Google, they are often looking for a specific product or service with a high intent to purchase. Whereas on Facebook, most consumers are not necessarily looking to purchase anything. For this reason, your Facebook campaign should focus on building awareness before worrying about conversions.
Below, we are going to cover a few ways that you can plan your Facebook brand awareness campaigns to scale leads.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #1 – Look at audience demographics.
No two consumers are alike, and there is a good chance that your company provides different products and services for different types of buyers. In order to better understand these customers and their likes, dislikes, and motivations, you need to develop buyer personas, or generalized profiles for each of your target buyers. One of the best places to start gathering data for these buyer personas is by looking at your current customers. Lucky for you, Facebook Insights can provide you with a wealth of information on the people who are already engaging with your brand.
Facebook insights gives you a great starting point for developing your buyer personas as it allows you to access the basic demographic data for your buyers. The Insights tab will give you a brief overview of the gender, age range, and locations of your current buyers, which allows you to start making some assumptions about your target audience. In addition, you can also enable the Demographic Report in Google Analytics to access age and gender data for your audience.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #2 – Discover buyer motivations.
Demographic information is a great way to start learning about your target audience. However, it is only the beginning of discovering what makes your ideal buyers tick. You also need to consider what is driving their purchases. What are their greatest motivations for purchase? What holds them back from making a purchase? This type of information will help you better understand their motivations, which will allow you to more effectively convert your visitors into customers through your Facebook ad campaign.
One of the best ways to discover your target audience’s buying motivations is to actually have a conversation with your customers. Whether you choose to engage your fans on Facebook, call up your best customers on the phone, or send out customer surveys, you will need to dig deep to find out what your customers consider when making a purchase and what most influences them to buy. This information will be invaluable when creating your brand awareness Facebook campaign.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #3 – Research your target buyers’ interests.
Now that you know who your buyers are and what motivates them to make a purchase, you’ll need to find out how to target your customers on Facebook. Facebook offers interest-based targeting, which can be very valuable in reaching new potential consumers through your brand awareness Facebook ad campaign. However, if you want to reach the most relevant audience, you need to go beyond just targeting for broad interests like “Motorboat”.
One way that you can do this is by targeting fans of other brands, people, or publications. This helps you target like-minded people through your brand awareness campaign, while also helping you better identify potential brand partners. You can target fans of brands that sell similar products/services to yours or people and publications that speak to your offering. For instance, if you sell organic body soaps, you might target fans of other organic beauty products, organic beauty bloggers, or blogs and magazines that promote natural beauty, skin, and hair care. After you have the names of the other brands, people, and publications, you can create a new saved audience for each of these in Facebook to start building lists of personas.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #4 – Help your existing audience identify themselves.
One way to gather data about your existing fans to find out where they fit into your brand personas is by helping them self-identify. You can do this by providing specific information targeted to each buyer persona and then seeing which category your existing fans fall into.
For instance, you might publish different blog posts that are targeted toward each buyer persona. Then, you can look for clues to see which posts your fans are clicking on and which topics they find more useful. This information helps you better understand your current customers and buyer personas to offer more relevant and useful content in your brand awareness campaigns.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #5 – Find the right audience size.
For brand awareness campaigns on Facebook, you’ll need to find the right audience size to maximize your ad budget. If you go too large, you will be wasting money serving ads to those who are not right for your brand. However, if your audience size is too small, then you won’t be able to reach enough people to boost sales later on.
Targeting 500,000 to one million people seems to be the sweet spot for targeting. As you continue to add interests and brands, people, and publications, you’ll find that your audience exceeds this number. That is when you will want to use audience exclusions to reduce your audience size and reach a more relevant population. You can exclude different audiences based on location, income, or other demographics based on your offering.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #6 – Create ad content that widely resonates.
When developing the creative for your brand awareness Facebook ad campaign, it’s important to remember that the goal of brand awareness ads is not to sell your products. Instead, you are trying to reach a wide audience to let them know that your brand exists and give them a feel for what you stand for. This requires that you make some sort of connection with your audience.
Whether you aim to inspire, motivate, or just resonate emotionally with your audience, you need to develop ad content that widely resonates. The more universal your campaign message, the more people it will impact. The wider the appeal of your ads, the higher the chances of your Facebook marketing campaign being shared with others.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #7 – Speak to your audience’s challenges.
Emotional or inspirational ad campaigns don’t work for every brand, especially B2B businesses or other companies that sell more technical products and services. Luckily, there is another approach you can take to developing creative for your brand awareness Facebook campaign. Instead of trying to resonate with your audience emotionally, you can work to speak to their greatest problems and challenges.
Remember, you still don’t want to focus on the product or service in your campaign since you are just working to promote brand awareness. Instead, focus on the problem that your customer faces. Let’s use the previous example with the company that sells organic body soaps. This audience may be concerned about the chemical content of the health and beauty products that they use. The organic soap company might want to create Facebook ad content that focuses on the issue of harsh chemicals and additives in body soaps.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #8 – Form partnerships with influencers.
Earlier, we discussed identifying the people that your customers follow. Whether these are popular bloggers or industry experts, it may be worthwhile to reach out to these influencers to form mutually beneficial partnerships. Consumers are more likely to trust these influencers who they have already developed have a relationship with then a new brand that they have no experience with. In fact, studies show that over 90% of consumers trust influencer messages more than those directly from brands.
Though it can be difficult to measure the success of traditional influencer relationships, Facebook makes it easy to partner with other people and brands to deliver ad content with transparent metrics, allowing you to see your return on investment for these Facebook ad campaigns. This allows you to run ad campaigns while also leveraging the influencer’s name and reputation. For instance, the organic soap company might partner with a green beauty blogger, adding his or her testimonial to the brand awareness ad.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #9 – Don’t forget mobile ads.
Mobile Facebook ads allow you to reach an even wider audience. And with an estimated 167.4 million mobile users expected to be frequenting the social media app by 2020, mobile ads are a great option for brands that want to increase their reach for less. Mobile ads are a great way to reach consumers who are taking a few minutes to browse the platform on their off time.
The key to creating effective content for Facebook mobile ads is developing creative that is concise and to the point, but still stands out to the average user on the go. In addition to short, attention-grabbing text, you will also want to include compelling images or videos that will invite mobile users to stop and check out what your brand has to say. Don’t forget to include an effective call-to-action (CTA). Again, your goal here is not to make a sale, but to get the word out about your company and what you have to offer, so your CTA may lead to targeted content you’ve created or even your company’s Facebook page.
Facebook Ad Campaign Hack #10 – Make your ads interactive.
Facebook users are bombarded with ad content every time they open the app. If you want to impress your mobile audience, you will need to go beyond just static ad content. Facebook Canvas ads make it easy to create interactive, full-screen ad experiences that can help you create a more impactful brand message and set you apart from competitors.
Like other types of Facebook ads, the Canvas ad allows you to choose an ad objective before you get started. Facebook also provides different templates, making it easy for you to develop these interactive ads. Canvas ads are also created for mobile, which means they load quickly on mobile devices.
Final Takeaways for Your Facebook Ad Campaign
If you want to generate more leads on Facebook, you’ll need to develop and implement a brand awareness Facebook ad campaign. In order to do this effectively, you’ve got to do your homework by finding out who your target buyers are, what they care about most, and what motivates them to make a purchase. Once you’ve done this, you can start being visible in the places on Facebook that your target audience frequents most.
Remember, when it comes to Facebook, your first priority should be to build relationships with leads and customers, and focus on conversions later. With the tips above, you can be on your way to scaling your brand awareness campaigns like a Facebook marketing agency in no time.
Need help with your Facebook ad campaigns? The Facebook marketing experts at SevenAtoms can help you develop effective Facebook ad campaigns that drive awareness and conversions. Contact us today to get started.
