7 Easy Tips For Creating Fantastic Facebook Ads

With over 2.91 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most popular marketing platforms on the planet.

And with users scrolling their newsfeeds numerous times each day, Facebook ad campaigns are an easy way to get your products or services noticed without having to be a digital marketing expert.

One of the best things about Facebook ads is that they offer flexibility to create ads that best reflect your brand. You get complete control of the type of ad, target audience, and budget you want to work with.

Facebook also gives you comprehensive reports and analytics on the performance of your marketing campaigns so you can keep a close eye on what is and isn't working for you.

Moreso, compared to traditional marketing methods, Facebook advertising costs less, making it ideal for all businesses.

There's no doubt Facebook ads have much to offer. But, knowing where to begin with social media ad creation can be overwhelming.

To help you get started on your ads or to simply improve your current Facebook ad campaigns, we've shared our top 7 tips for creating fantastic ads.

Let's begin!

Choose the correct ad format

When you create a Facebook ad, you'll have the option to run ads in various formats.

The format you choose will be determined by the kind of Facebook ad you’re running and your campaign objective.

Examples of popular formats for a Facebook ad campaign include:

Image: Ads containing images are simple, effective, and easy to create, but it's important to ensure your photos are high-quality if you want to appear professional and legit to users.
Video: Facebook video ads are a powerful tool for retargeting. Thanks to a handy feature, Facebook allows you to retarget those viewers who watched 75% of your video. For best results, keep your videos short, engaging and relevant.
Carousel: Carousel ads allow you to showcase multiple slides containing images, videos, text, and links in a single ad. Carousel ads stand out on users' feeds, which gives them a distinct advantage. They're also interactive, encouraging users to scroll through the slides to see more. In particular, carousel ads work great for menus, product catalogs, and HR job posts.
Instant experience ads: Instant experience ads, formerly known as canvas ads, are full-screen, mobile-optimized ads designed to capture the complete attention of your audience. Instant experience ads allow users to interact with your ads by tapping through a carousel of images, zooming in and out, shifting the screen in different directions, and more.

When choosing the right Facebook ad format for your business, Facebook's customizability feature makes it easy to try out different types of ads and placements.

This allows you to find the most effective Facebook ad combinations that resonate with users and meet your campaign objective.

Target the right audience with Facebook ads manager

The main goal of creating Facebook ads is to reach people likely to become customers. You can get your message out to your target audience with the ads manager. Your target audience is those who are most likely interested in your product.

This can be achieved with customized advertising in ads manager. Since ads are more relevant for the people who see them, they create more meaningful experiences for your audience. This can ultimately lead to better results for your business.

Remember that one of the most specialized audiences you can create for your Facebook advertising is a look-a-like audience from a current customer list.

This can save money on your Facebook ads campaign and prevent you the trouble of having to test multiple audience options. A win-win!

Establish a Facebook presence

When creating Facebook ads, the primary goal is to lead customers to your website. However, social media ads will often help grow your Facebook page following and extend your organic reach simultaneously.

For example, if Facebook users like the ad content, they'll likely engage with the post and potentially like or follow your Facebook page.

Over time, if you continue to create quality posts, your new followers will likely share them with their extended network - bringing more attention to your brand.

With the Facebook algorithm favoring posts that are getting more attention, every comment, like, share, and mention can do wonders for expanding your brand's reach.

Don't forget about Instagram

As part of your social media strategy, we recommend running your ads across both Instagram and Facebook, which are owned by Meta.

Doing this increases your reach and engagement and provides you with twice as many valuable analytics.

Like Facebook advertisements, running ads on Instagram can help you generate leads and move them down the funnel to a conversion.

By posting on Instagram, you'll also benefit from increased analytics and statistics.

These extra insights will help see how well your campaigns are performing and how past campaigns performed. This allows you to tailor your future campaigns to ensure they’re as successful as possible with each ad.

Understand the difference between ads and boosted posts

When advertising on Facebook, some goals can be reached by boosting a post, and others can be reached by creating an ad.

A boosted post is a post you’ve paid money for to receive a boosted spot on your audience’s timelines.

Boosted posts differ from ads on Facebook because they’re not created in the Facebook ads manager.

Pros of boosted Facebook posts:

Help your posts perform better.
Make it simple for you to reach your audience.
Easy to create

Cons of boosted Facebook posts

Limited targeting options
No control over ad placements
Requires marketing expertise

Pros of Facebook ads:

A targeted audience and wide reach
Manual ad placement and customizability
Real-time feedback on performance

Cons of Facebook ads:

Less organic reach
Big competition
A rigorous ad approval process

Create a simple CTA with one clear action

Every great ad is clear about the action it wants potential customers to take, and Facebook ads are no different.

Whether your Facebook ad campaign aims to get viewers to leave a comment, buy a product, or subscribe to your newsletter, you must direct them toward taking your desired action.

Although users will see your Facebook ads, without a clear CTA, they'll have no idea where to click or what to do. This means all the hard work you put into creating your ads gets wasted, and you'll fail to drive traffic to your website.

Keep in mind Facebook receives 94% of its ad revenue from mobile. This means most Facebook viewers see your content on mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

It's best to keep your Facebook CTAs short and sweet so they don't get lost under a sea of text.

Research competitor ads

If you need help planning your advertising strategy, a competitive analysis gives you a real insight into what works and doesn't in your market.

With Facebook's ads transparency tool, you can see what ads your competitors run or have recently run.

All you have to do is enter the name of your main competitor, and you'll see all the ads they're currently running. The transparency tool lets you gain meaningful insights, such as:

How your competitors are positioning their offers
Which platforms are they using? (Are they posting exclusively on Facebook or using Instagram and Messenger ads, too?)
What calls to action are they using?
What types of creatives are they using? (Images, videos)
Are they collaborating with partners?

Gathering this data about your competitors helps you understand their best practices and mistakes. This information will be incredibly helpful when deciding the best strategy for your own ads.

Another way to get a peek at your competitors' ads is to engage with their pages and then wait a couple of days to be retargeted with ads.

If you want to see ads from your competitors, all you have to do is:

Write a list of your biggest competitors
Visit their website and social media sites
Accept all cookies
Turn off your ad blocker (or use an incognito window)
Surf the web as normal

We hope this blog has helped you gain insight into how to create successful Facebook ads that drive the results you desire.

If you'd like help creating effective social media advertisements for your business, then Mantis Media is the solution.

Our talented team has a reliable track record of creating custom content, including paid social media inventory ads and videos, to help brands like yours make a splash on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

If you'd like to work together to build social media content that converts followers to loyal customers, we'd love to hear from you.

Get in touch today