How To Create Effective Content For Facebook Ads [Video]

Check out these tips on how to create content for social media advertising that will generate more conversions for your business.

Facebook is a social media giant and they currently have around 2.5 billion monthly active users.

If you’re not sure of how big that is, compare it to this: China’s current population is at 1.42 billion.

And if you still can’t visualize how massive the number of users they have every month, imagine 382 times the number of Singapore’s current population. That is how much users they have on Facebook every single month.

Every quarter, Facebook is making approximately $17 billion in revenue and the numbers are increasing by 30% every year.

Samsung is Facebook’s largest advertiser and there was once where they invested $10 million in a span of 3 weeks to launch a product campaign. Isn’t that a huge sum of money?

So what was their Return on Investment (ROI)?

S$129 million.

If you had $10 million, would you invest that amount for that amount of ROI too? We know we would.

Many businesses are using Facebook to advertise their products or services.But did you know that there are over 3 million businesses using the Facebook Ads platform?CLICK TO TWEET

I’m not sure how many of them are actually part of your industry, but these are the businesses that you need to compete with to stand out to your consumers.

So how do you create contents that will capture your audience attention?

And how should you go about producing COUNTLESS of contents, so that you can consistently publish it on your social media accounts?

A Common Advice To Our Clients

In terms of digital marketing, the main goal is to grow your email list.

Having an email list allows you to connect and build rapport with your audience, before selling them something. It is important to build your trust with them first.

So how do you grow your email list?

Take all your audience from your online content and bring them to a lead generation item. For example, if you release videos, publish content on social media or write articles, make sure to have an offer and lead them to an opt-in form.

The Opt-in form feature can be published on your website, a landing page, or even used as a Facebook Lead Advertisement.

After getting all the audiences in one place through the Opt-in form feature, you’ll need to send them updates on your products or services via an email sequence.

An email sequence is where you are going to send approximately 5 to 8 emails spread over across a period of time, usually 20 to 50 days depending on your email purposes and offers.

The purpose of sending them emails is not to sell your product or service directly, but to gain their trust and create a rapport with the audience.

In should only be in the 3rd or 4th email that you can start selling them your product or service.

In the first email, you need to provide an introduction of your business. Thereafter, provide valuable contents that help your customers directly with no barrier of entry. Remember that at this stage, you’re trying to gain their trust in you.

For instance, you can give away a cheat sheet, an eBook or a few articles.

Using Facebook Lead Advertisements To Collect Emails

From our experience, instead of using the basic Facebook Ad type that will lead to the website, using Facebook Lead Ads increases your conversions by up to 5%.

In the (for lack of a better word) “traditional” way, if you click on the sign-up button of your ad, you are redirected to a landing page or a website outside of Facebook.

However, using Facebook Lead Ads allows your audience to send their information without exiting the Facebook platform. All your audience information are pre-populated via their Facebook details. This includes their first and last name, email address, city, country, etc.

A Brief History of Advertisements

In 1704, the first newspaper advertisement was released.

In 1920, the first radio advertisement was released and in 1941, the first television (TV) advertisement was released.

The first TV advertisment was made by a watch company called Bulova and was aired in the United States of America.

Their ad consisted of a static image and a recorded ‘voiceover’ over it. It’s that simple!

The best part? It only costed them $9 to air it on TV at that point in time.

In the year 2000, the Google Adwords (Google’s Advertisement platform) was launched, followed by

Facebook Ads in 2007.

Unlike Television Ads, audience consuming digital advertising media on YouTube (for example) have a very short attention span.

On YouTube, users spend between 2 to 5 seconds to obtain a clear picture of what the ad is all about. Why 2 to 5 seconds? Because they’re able to click on “Skip Ad” within the stipulated time of a 2 to 5 seconds buffer. However, with Television, the audience is required to watch the entire ad before understanding the intended message.

So how do you get your audience attention? By giving them context!

Context refers to how people are consuming the content of your ads.

If we place our ads on Television, we can choose the exact moment our ads appear and we know that our audience are most likely at home watching it on TV.

Now with social media ads on YouTube, Facebook & Instagram, they can be ANYWHERE (home, office, bus, etc.), at ANYTIME, seen by ANYONE, in almost ANY FORMAT and next to ANY CONTENT!

Applying Context In Retargeting Ads

Ads retargeting basically means retargeting consumers who have already shown interest in your business or related business.

You can provide context in your retargeting ads by showing different ad creative and copy, based on where the audience exited from your website.

For instance, you own an online shoe store. If your potential customer exits your website when they are viewing the shoes, they should be receiving an ad that says ‘Look fantastic in our new shoes, buy it now!”.

However, if your potential customer exits your website after they bought your shoes, they should be receiving an ad that says ‘This bag would go well with the shoes you just bought!’.

Get where this is going?

You are giving your audience context based on where they exited from the page.

Here’s a real-life example

Last month, I was shopping for shoes online on Converse’s website.

I visited their site but as I was about to buy the shoe after adding it into my shopping cart, I had to attend to something else and forgot about it.   

A few days later, as I was on Facebook scrolling through my news feed, an advertisement from Converse popped up with the exact shoe model that I had added into my shopping cart.

It reminded me that I was supposed to purchase the shoes. So I went back to the online store to purchase it. Converse won me back as I converted from a prospect into a customer.

What did Converse create? A powerful retargeting ad that provides context on Facebook.

Does this not tell you that social media retargeting is such a powerful tool for businesses?

It works 10 times better than a normal advertisement and about 70% of prospects usually convert into customers.

Up till today, I’m still receiving advertisements for shoes from other relatable companies like Adidas and Nike.

Common Social Media Platforms for Businesses

There are many different social media platforms that you can use for your business. Common platforms includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Here are some tips on how to make use of some of these platforms.

Facebook registers 2.32 billion monthly active users each month, mostly ranging from 25 to 44-year-old. Does your target audience fall into this age group?

Instagram registers 1 billion monthly active users and have a much younger audience ranging from 16 to 29 years old.

The types of content that works well with Instagram include high-quality photos, quotes, memes, and IG Stories recorded vertically.

All these social media platforms have advertising platforms built in them.

What is Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising are online paid advertisements that you commonly see when you scroll through the news feed of your social media accounts such as on Facebook, Instagram, and the ones that appear before or during your videos on YouTube.

Why should you use social media advertising?

Because you are able to target specific audiences by taking control of the ad in terms of gender, age, or location.

It allows for cheaper A/B testing. Ideally, A/B testing involves testing two advertisements at the same time using one differentiating factor. The differentiating factor could be the ad type, creative content, copywriting or even the demographics or psychographics of the audience.

It allows flexibility in Ad types unlike an ad for TV or magazines.

How do you know what type of content resonates with your target audience?

At Plexxie, we have a process that we work out with our clients, called the advertisement experiment process.

For this process to work, you ought to have a certain number of following on your social media accounts. If you do not have at least 300 followers, you’ll not be able to gather user feedback from an audience. Consider spending a minimum of three to five dollars per day to reach a sufficient number of your target audience to see how they engage with your post.

Assuming you already have a following on your account, the first step is to post the same type of content you intend to publish as an ad, to your social media account.

Then monitor them to find out how is your audience engaging with your posts.

Is it a positive or negative feedback?

Based on the engagement, you will be able to use the feedback and improve on your current basic content until you’re satisfied and then boost (aka advertise) the posts that are doing well organically.

With platforms like Facebook being a “pay-to-play” platform, you need to use their advertising tools to reach a bigger audience.

How To Constantly Create Content?

Gary Vee has developed a content creating model called the ‘Content Model’.

What you’re doing is basically churning off a lot of content from a Pillar-content (aka long-form content). A pillar content can be something that is probably around 5 minutes or more.

From the Pillar content, you’re going to create multiple Micro-content (aka short-form content).

Subsequently, you are going to create more short-form content from the Micro-content & the Pillar content based on audience feedback. We’ll call these “Community-driven Micro-content”.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re speaking at a conference. A video and audio recording of the conference is an example of a Pillar-content.

The Pillar-content can be uploaded to Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram TV. All these social media platforms have the capacity to host long-form videos content.

Afterward, you can “take out” Micro-content from the Pillar-content. For example, some quotes you mentioned during the talk, photos and cutting the videos at parts where you feel is important for your audience to take note of. You can even transcribe the talk in text format and uploading it as an article on your blog or LinkedIn.

Give these Pillar-content and Micro-content a couple of days to gather community insights. Monitor what are your audience saying about your Pillar-content or Micro-content.

Are there are any parts of the Pillar-content that the community finds interesting but you did not take it out as a Micro-content yet? If yes, take it out now and publish it as a community-driven Micro-content!

Can you see how it works? From one Pillar-content, there are tons of opportunities to use it on different platforms.

Conclusion

Most importantly, your contents should always be focused on providing value to your audiences. By being genuine in helping, it is one of the best ways to capture the attention of your audience.

Help people because it is your passion, and it is usually why businesses exists in the first place.

As long as you’re genuine and your contents are providing value to your consumers, the results will come.

Let me know if you have any questions below and I’ll answer them as soon as possible!