When it comes to advertising on Facebook and Instagram through Meta Ads, the benefits are endless. Indeed, a well-positioned Meta advertisement can be an extremely lucrative way to authentically connect with your target audience. If you are seeking a highly effective way to reach users who are likely to convert to customers, Meta Ads are worthy of your attention. With a typical cost of a few dollars per click as opposed to thousands of dollars per page with traditional advertising** (think newspapers and magazines) this platform can be a game-changer for your sales strategy.

Meta provides several unique advertising options for business owners including video ads, messenger ads, instant form ads, and brand awareness ads. Each of these options provides its own set of benefits worth exploring. By perfecting a campaign for your specific business, you will engage with quality leads who are likely to do business with you.

Types of Meta Ads

By far, the most engaging content on Facebook and Instagram is highly visual. Video ads are a great way to quickly capture your audience and keep them engaged. The foundation of any effective video ad is a great story, which is why Meta provides several user-friendly video creation tools. After selecting an objective that supports video, creators can upload their content or generate a video within the ad center. Awareness ads are best for this format as they will reach many people who are likely to remember it.  

With the Messenger app having over one billion users per month, entrepreneurs may consider this route to be the perfect opportunity to reach new customers. Messenger ads help foster conversation between your audience and your business, leading to a more authentic brand identity. These ads appear in a user’s Chats tab. Once tapped, the ad will display a call-to-action or allow the user to begin a conversation with your business.

Business owners can effectively optimize lead generation through the use of Meta’s instant form ads. These ads are designed to prequalify potential leads by prompting them to answer a series of questions that are relevant to your product or service offerings. Potential clients need not leave Facebook or Instagram to complete the questionnaire and responses can be prefilled for the user. Instant form ads are a perfect way to secure high-quality leads at a lower cost per click.

Brand awareness ads are designed to grow awareness for your business and communicate your brand’s unique story and values. This ad objective is designed to keep you top of mind with your current customers as well as help you to develop rapport with potential customers. For those seeking to change brand perception, these ads are also ideal. 

Cultivate the Proper Audience

The most important factor in a successful Meta advertising campaign is the audience. Meta Ads allows you to be your own Madison Avenue advertising executive; it is up to you who sees your copy and where. To be successful in this digital arena and avoid wasteful spending on clicks from those who are not an ideal match for your product or service, a business must have a well-defined target market. There is an art to generating the perfect audience; it is an effort that requires deep thought and creativity. An audience should not be too narrow, nor should it be too broad.

Meta Ads can be narrowed to gender, location, and a plethora of interests, allowing you to reach those who are most likely to take action when viewing your ad. Interests are predefined categories that Facebook has built based on the data they compile on users that is then rigorously interpreted by their algorithms and appropriately organized. This data provides major insight into users’ activity on each of the Meta platforms.

From aviation to gospel music, Meta offers hundreds of interests to choose from. The seemingly endless list of categories can be as general or as specific as you wish. For example, a campaign can opt to engage with an audience that is so general as to include all users who like sports. On the other hand, one can choose to aim for a narrower market, focusing on users who favors a specific sport or even a particular athlete.

When cultivating a list of interests for your ideal client, be sure to only select those that are truly relevant to your business. At the same time, don’t shy away from thinking outside the box. Once your ad has interacted with Facebook and Instagram users, the Meta system will report on who is engaging with it, helping you to narrow your audience.

A great strategy for mastering your target audience is segmenting audiences into different ad sets. The results will help you to garner insight into which advertisements perform best. Segmenting audiences can also help you to avoid audience overlap, saving you money in the long run.

Audience Narrowing

After the criteria for your business’ initial audience have been established, Meta allows you to narrow it down even further. A surefire way to reach the right market, this feature is activated by selecting “Narrow Audience” after you have selected your first criteria matches in the ad builder. If you know your audience, this is a great way to be front and center as your potential customers scroll their Facebook or Instagram feeds. 

Audience narrowing enables entrepreneurs and marketers the ability to include or exclude Facebook and Instagram users who meet all of their chosen qualifiers. Think of it as “and” advertising as opposed to “or” advertising. For example, an ad creator may opt to target fans of both comedy television shows AND Seinfeld. When the “Narrow Audience” feature is used, advertisements will only appear to people who like comedy television and who are also fans of Seinfeld. Without audience narrowing, a campaign may miss the mark: you may waste clicks on comedy fans who dislike the show. As long as you truly know your audience, this tool can be a game-changer for any business’s digital marketing. Audience narrowing can ensure your ads are front and center on the feeds of those who are most likely to engage with your content.

Create Lookalike Audiences

A lookalike audience is a target market that is created based on your existing custom audience. Then, Meta harnesses the power of its highly efficient algorithms to analyze the demographics, behaviors, and interests of its users who share similar qualities to your current audience. Hence, the name: these users “look like” they could be members of your existing target market.

Meta allows businesses to select a percentage range for how closely they would like their lookalike audience to resemble their source audience.

Avoid Ad Fatigue

Ad fatigue occurs when the same audience is repeatedly exposed to the same campaign - or different variations of it - and they’ve grown tired of seeing it. When ad fatigue ensues, viewers will either begin to ignore the content or grow annoyed by its repetitiveness. If you start to notice lower click-through rates, decreased engagement, and/or high cost per click, you are most likely facing ad fatigue. To combat this common setback, the copy and assets associated with your campaigns should be refreshed regularly.

Patience is a Virtue During the Learning Phase

Many creators gauge the success of their campaigns far too quickly, leading to many missed opportunities. To make the most of your campaigns on Meta, be sure to allow your ads ample time to exit the learning phase.

The learning phase refers to the timeframe required for Meta’s ad delivery system to discover the best people and places to show the content. The system can only optimize performance if the ad has been shown to enough users for a long enough time. Without an ample source of this initial data, the campaign will be unstable and costly.

Allow the learning phase to play out. This way, Meta’s delivery system has ample time to explore the most efficient and effective way to present your ad set. You will know your ad is in the learning phase when the Delivery column is labeled “Learning”. It is recommended that the campaign remain in this mode until it has undergone several optimization events. To avoid resetting the learning phase of your ad, avoid editing it until it has exited this stage.

Run an Experiment for Invaluable Ad Feedback

With Meta Experiments, entrepreneurs are armed with extraordinarily useful tools designed to optimize ad performance. This feature removes any guesswork from your campaigns by determining the impact of each campaign that is presented to your target audience. The tests available in Experiments are A/B testing, Brand Lift, and Conversion Lift.

A/B testing grants business owners the ability to test up to five versions of an ad at a time. It is a great way to understand what imagery, audience, and ad copy garner the most positive results. Meta will randomly separate your audience into groups and will only show each segment one version of your ad. Whichever ad generates the lowest cost per conversion will be the winner.

Brand Lift can help to determine the impact - if any - a company’s advertisements have on its branding efforts. Meta will show the ad to half of the audience and hide it from the other half. Days later, Meta will issue survey questions on Facebook and Instagram to your entire audience, surveying brand perception and performance. Brand Lift is the perfect way to determine if your campaigns are a strong reflection of your mission and if that mission resonates with your targeted audience segment.

Conversion Lift sheds light on the effectiveness of your Meta ads to close conversions. This test involves the creation of a test group that is exposed to your campaigns and a control group that has not been exposed. From here, Meta can provide insight into any incremental lift generated when your audience sees your ad. Ideally, a business owner would want to see a high incremental lift as it would be an indicator that the content is effectively resulting in conversions.

Attract High-Quality Leads with Conditional Questions

When advertising with Meta, one of the biggest issues small businesses face is the bombardment of low-quality leads. In response to this dilemma, Meta has developed ways in which creators can optimize filtering tools to attract higher-quality prospects. An ad’s instant form can be customized with conditional questions that will change based on the response provided by the viewer. The next question or landing page will appear differently for users with different answers.  

For example, a plumber may generate a conditional question like, “Where is your plumbing problem?” Respondents could then select from choices such as kitchen or bathroom. The next conditional question or landing page would then be designed to be relevant to the user’s response. For example, those who selected “kitchen” won’t be lead to any future questions concering toilets or showers.

Conditional questions grant access to valuable information that will surely help to convert a click to a customer.

Find Mets Ad Success with Doukas Media

If you’re eager to take your meta advertising strategy to the next level, Doukas Media is at your service. Our award-winning team of campaign curators has developed several proven techniques that are designed to optimize the many features offered to small businesses on Meta. Book a complimentary discovery call with a member of our team today to learn how to increase the quality and quantity of your leads through Meta advertisements.