Facebook makes it easy to set up an ad, giving you the guidelines to enter text, visuals, links, and more. But there’s a strategy to everything - as well as a right way, and wrong way to do it.
Copy
Why it matters:
WIthout the proper messaging, you can confuse your audience. Plus, these platforms are built for content, and you’ll need to have that message stand out from all the others you’re competing with.
Tips:
- Watch character limits and make sure you’re finishing your sentence before the “see more” part on mobile.
- Here is also where you can go into huge detail if you would like - for some personal trainers we’ve used 5-6 paragraphs of text here. Giving people info right there on fb is great, because you’re not requiring them to make any more clicks or actions. The eye usually moves from visual to headline to copy, so this is where you can get creative and show more info. The other areas you want to be more clear about what you’re doing.
- Use bullet points - they help get information across very quickly
- Emojis - use at your discretion. Does it fit your business ‘voice’? If so, they can be very fun and catch attention.
- This is a great place to use testimonials, especially at the retargeting level
Visual
Why it matters:
Obviously this is the first place people look, and is your 1 second to get people interested and educated about what is going on in your ad.
Tips:
- Video is best most times, and garners much lower cost per engagement (you can also retarget video viewers). Just simply using ‘talking head’ videos are actually very successful.
- Videos should be 20-60 seconds long for users that have never seen you before. When retargeting they can be a bit longer, but will not show up on IG if they are longer than 2 minutes
- If you’re doing lead generation, you’ll want to provide an intro to cold audiences. Typically this works best as a video or the long copy text with image ad.
- For ecomm, carousels are an excellent way to show multiple products and get people to see a lot of info/items without ‘committing’ to any further action (yet)
- Images need to follow the 30% rule, meaning text cannot take up more than 30% of the space on the ad. Test your text percentage with the facebook overlay tool.
- You only have seconds on fb and ig to catch attention, and this section is the first place the eye will go. Use people or elements (hands, faces, etc) to get higher engagement.
Headline
Why it’s important:
After the visuals, this is the second place the eye typically goes to. This is where we make the most impactful statement about what we are or the pain point you’re solving for your customer.
- We usually don’t want to be extremely creative here because it is more important to get across exactly what you are doing/selling. If that message is not received by a user in the 1-3 seconds you have that they are looking at it, you’ll lose them forever.
- Make sure that this fits into the mobile character limits (changing the call to action can give you more or less space because “shop now” is less characters than “learn more” for example)