Written by: Colby Flood
Long since a gold standard for social media marketing, Facebook ads remain a potent tool—but generating solid wins from your efforts has only grown more difficult in a crowded marketplace. Decreasing audience sizes, the fight against content fatigue, and the challenge of driving more sales all mean you need a smart strategy that can help you stand out from the crowd right now. It's no longer as simple as microtargeting to the most potentially valuable customers. Today, success comes from a comprehensive strategy driven by data and user behavior.
How can you approach the monumental task of staking your claim on social media? You need to go beyond basic ad-buying and think about the mechanics behind how audiences find and interact with your ads. Just as importantly, you need to take concrete actions on and off the platform to ensure that you can functionally grow your reach. This comes down to three key things: building broad audiences, embracing native Creative, and supplementing your efforts with work to improve AOV (Average order value).
Let's break it down, piece by piece.
Finding Success With Broader Audiences
The number of techniques for zeroing in on the right audiences for your ads on Facebook has declined in recent years. This change comes as the result of several factors. First and foremost, Facebook simply lost the ability to track user data and demographics as effectively as it once did. The privacy and transparency features Apple baked into iOS from version 14.5 onward shut off that pipeline. Likewise, a public backlash against Facebook and its microtargeting capabilities has changed the game for advertisers.
Successfully marketing to broader audiences requires not only a smart strategy but good search engineering on your behalf. Consider that when you run an ad that links to your website, Facebook's web robots crawl your page and inspect its schema markup to understand what you're all about. Properly configuring your schema ensures that Facebook understands what your business is about and how to recommend it to others. According to one study, accuracy is critical, with Facebook misidentifying nearly 30% of a user's advertising interests.
Facebook crawls and parses the ad copy you upload, too—though it seems to lack some of the natural language processing capabilities found in some platforms today. Too much ad copy and Facebook's algorithm can lose the plot. Keep it short, punchy, and informative. Users respond to that kind of copy, too.
Retooling Your Creative for Native Social Media Appeal
Good creative is the ultimate driver of success in Facebook advertising. If you aren't grabbing the attention of users and generating engagement, your campaign isn't meeting the mark—and that usually signals an issue with creative. If you're still relying on an old way of doing things, it's time to embrace the shift to native creative. What does that mean?
Put simply, "native" means developing creative output that blends in perfectly with the type of content that users expect to see on the platform. It's an ad, but it doesn't look like an ad—that's what makes the difference. Your goal is to engage with users, not push a hard sell on them. This effort makes for a much gentler and seamless entrance into the funnel and can work at almost any stage.
What are some of your options for native creative? User-generated content, such as reviews and photos, is one solution. You might pay influencers for content or boost organic content created by influencers, such as unboxing videos. Also, new content types offer an opportunity, such as Instagram's recent "Reels." A simple Q&A video that looks like a user-posed question can help you educate an audience effectively while capturing engagement from the TikTok demographic.
Boosting Your AOV and More
Finally, you should ensure that your Facebook ads dovetail with your other efforts. Combined, your marketing efforts should work together, not against each other. Improving your AOV and frequency of purchases comes with better ad targeting. Bundles, upsells, and even post-purchase upsells can all motivate users to return and buy again. Reaching out to users through opt-in measures such as SMS marketing and email campaigns can keep you engaged with them. Likewise, using Facebook ads to re-target customers with loyalty campaigns is a robust method for getting the results you want to see.
Don't Leave Social Media Potential Untapped
Though the world of social media has grown more complex, businesses that adapt to these changing conditions can still generate engagement and drive real wins. By revamping your approach to audience targeting and exploring new and innovative ways to display creative advertising, you can ultimately create the conditions for producing a better bottom line.
The chance to reach a vast number of people and to make them familiar with your brand and what it offers is within reach for many businesses. Why leave that potential untapped? Consider what you could do differently today.
To learn more, please visit Brighter Click!
About the author:
Colby Flood is a leader in digital marketing and eCommerce growth. Colby founded Brighter Click, an eCommerce growth agency that saw 300% growth in 2021. He started Brighter Click with the mission to create an education-first agency that prioritizes educating its team members, proactively communicating with clients via educational conversation, and educating business owners and other marketers.
