For more from this great article..http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249307
What follows below is just an excerpt of it!
For more from this great article..http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249307
What follows below is just an excerpt of it!
When we write headlines for Buffer blog posts, we often come up with a big handful of options (15 or more headlines per post when we can manage it) so that we can test and see what works best.
The same idea works with social media ads.
When you read about a successful social media ad, it’s likely that the ad has gone through a few key variations based on these actions:
Write several versions of ad copy
Test different images
Adjust and hone your target audience
In the comments of our post on Facebook advertising budgets, Lucie shared this great tidbit about how to gauge what’s working and what’s not:
I always have several versions of the ad and anything with lower than 1.5% CTR after few hours I deactivate.
The strategy then would look something like this:
Create lots of ad variations
Check often to see what’s working
Deactivate the lowest performers and try something new
In terms of testing out different ad copy, there are many popular recommendations for what might work (including a few ideas I’ll share below).
And when it comes to custom audiences, there are some great tactics on different ways to hone in on a segment that converts (probably enough tactics for a post of its own, which we’d love to cover separately). One bit of advice I’ve found helpful in thinking through things is another useful comment on our Facebook Ads post, from Bill Grunau:
You want to cast a large net, BUT not try to scoop up the entire ocean.
A target audience of 3,000 to 5,000 is very, very small. For FB ads it should be in the high five or six figures as a minimum. If it is many millions then it is likely too big.
When creating ads for the Facebook News Feed, you get the chance to include one of seven buttons with your ad.
If in doubt, it’s best to choose a button instead of no button.
You can add the button in the bottom section of the Facebook Ads editor. These are the seven button options to choose from:
Shop Now
Book Now
Learn More
Sign Up
Download
Watch More
Contact Us
The theory behind why this button works is that it helps focus your ad to an even greater degree, like a Mario mushroom for your already great copy. Adding a button enhances the call-to-action and primes a reader to take the action.
As for which button works best, you’re might notice that one fits your niche particularly well (“Book Now,” for instance, would be great for vacation spots). For the “Learn More” button, there seems to be growing evidence that it’s the best overall bet for engagement.
Noah Kagan found that “Learn More” converted better than the other optionsand better than using no button at all.
And Facebook ad tool Heyo ran an A/B test to see the effect that the “Learn More” button had, compared to no button at all. The result: a 63.6% increase in conversions and 40% decrease in cost-per-click just from the Learn More.
If the goal of your social media ad is conversions—sales, signups, what-have-you—then you’ll want to think not only of the ad itself but also where a person might end up once they click.
Picture social media ads as a two-step process:
Create the ad
Create the destination
Some of the most successful social media advertising campaigns include custom landing pages, where the copy carries over from the ad and the action crystal clear.
The more targeted your ad, the more targeted your landing page needs to be.
You’ll see this often with e-commerce ads that do a great job targeting a single product and then send the person from the ad to the main product page, full of menus and related products and all sorts of potentially distracting (albeit eminently useful) places to click.
Siddharth Bharath, writing at Unbounce, suggests a click-through landing page, which is an intermediate page between an ad and a final destination (shopping cart, for instance).
This keeps the focus on the offer – the reason the prospect clicked – and leaves them with two options: buy now or lose the deal forever.
As Unbounce describes it:
Videos or product images paired with a description and product benefits help to persuade the visitor to click the call-to-action.
Socialmouths shared five key elements of these social media ad landing pages.
Goal-Driven Copy Length
Limited Form Fields
Key Visuals
Responsive, i.e., “Mobile-ready,” Design
A Single Call to Action
Of these, the single call-to-action stands out as a potentially quite key element.
Also of note, the goal-driven copy length suggests the idea that there could be multiple goals for your social media campaign, something like a spectrum from immediate goals to long-term goals or sales/lead-gen to awareness/education. In general, a landing page for an immediate goal has short copy. A landing page for a long-term goal has long copy.
Another interesting tip from Siddharth Bharath involves the idea of pre-qualifying your traffic. Essentially, it works like this:
You only want people clicking through to your ad who are comfortable paying the price for your product.
The key then is to share your product’s price early.
Doing so will help qualify the traffic that heads to your landing page. Instead of filtering out people when they reach your pricing page, you can do so before they even click—thereby saving you pay-per-click costs that wouldn’t have amounted to a conversion.
The goal, in other words, wouldn’t be about people clicking your ad. The goal would be people clicking your ad and eventually buying your product or service.
In a survey of Facebook users, 67 percent of people said they were likely to click on a discount offer.
A simple strategy for a successful social media ad: Mention a discount in your copy.
In a really cool case study from Hautelook, the clothing website ran a 50% off sale on their Diane Von Furstenberg line. Mentioning a discount in their ads led to a huge sales day—the third largest sales day in company history.
And discounts don’t necessarily always need to be tied to huge sales events. At Buffer for instance, we have three different pricing options (free, Awesome,Business), and at the Awesome price the price is lower when paying a year in advance rather than month-to-month. It’s kind of a built-in discount and one we could explore using in our social media ad copy.
When I wrote about our Facebook Ads experiments a few weeks back, I was so grateful for all the advice and learnings that folks shared in the comments. This bit from Lucie has stuck with me:
I test my ad on a small budget and see the relevance score first. If it is less than 8/10, it means I should adjust my targeting. If it is higher, then I know I hit the nail on the head.
Facebook says they use relevance score to determine “expected” interaction with your ad.
Relevance score is calculated based on actual and expected positive and negative feedback from the ad’s target audience. The score is updated in real-time as users interact with and provide feedback — both positive and negative — with that ad.
Positive feedback includes people liking, commenting, and sharing your ad and also any desired actions taken with your ad (clicks to website for instance).
Negative feedback includes those instances when people hide your ad or ask not to see ads from you.