Hi! I’ve been working in the digital marketing space for quite some time. I’ve seen many changes on Facebook and strategies that were popular on Facebook were very different to the ones today. From testing different interest targeting options to lookalikes.
It used to be very easy to sell pretty much anything with a simple creative put together in few minutes.However, since the increase in social media platforms competition, Facebook is putting all of their resources in keeping the users on their platforms (eg. Reels copy Tik Tok or few years back Stories copied Snap). So because they want to improve their user experience as much as they can, but at the same time still earn from advertisers, they tend to reward advertisers who have very good creatives.
Facebook’s machine learning is so good now that if you have a decent creative it will find people who are the target audience for your product. There is no need for testing interests anymore.
Here is an example scenario why interest targeting is not great:
Let’s say you have an expensive product so you decided to target people who have money. Your first thought could be to target interests like expensive cars etc. However, Facebook doesn’t know if the person actually owns a car like that. 99% of the time this person likes a picture of Ferrari while being on their bus ride to work and FB considers them as someone with expensive car interest (I mean it's partially true but you get the point). So by using interests you are severely limiting audience size and targeting random people. Moreover, the smaller the audience pool the higher CPM (it’s what you pay per 1k impressions).
A better option is to go with broad targeting and have a killer creative. But how can you do it? Below I have some examples:
Video Creatives
Video creatives work amazing on Facebook. Not only they are much more engaging but you can use them for story telling or give more USPs (with story telling keep in mind that the story is not about you but the customer. They don’t care about you). They are also much cheaper to run.
However, if you don’t have a video showing your product or service, we found that taking a static image and turning it into an animated one with flowing text etc still brings better results.
UGC
UGC or user-generated content is great. It comes from real people, making it more authentic and trustworthy than anything your brand may have to say about itself.People are also exposed to far more images and messages than ever before. So naturally they became much better at pointing out posts that are pushy for sale. Which is the whole point of UGC that this content doesn't look like an ad.Also the desire to belong is one of the core factors in everything we do. So with UGC ads other people can hear from a normal average person that this product/service is great.Okay but how do I get UGC?
To be fair it doesn’t have to be a video from real customer. You can take your phone and record yourself with the product. You can show how the product solves a pain point or share your experience from using it.
It’s the same as the story telling I mentioned it before. Make it about them and not you.
Script & Copy
This one is quite simple. You need something that catches their attention at the beginning which we call “Hook”.
For example:
- Struggling to find the perfect skincare routine?
- Did you know XX% of people are using the wrong XXX tools?
- Struggling to find the motivation to work out?
See all of those sentences are speaking directly to the customer. So when they are scrolling and hear this they will think “Hey thats me! I’ll watch it.” With this you done the hardest part - getting their attention.
Next you can introduce the problem and speak more about it. After that you can offer a solution which is your product/service and finally a Call To Action.
And the last one - Test
This is one of the most important things you need to do. You need to quickly test a lot of ads to see what’s working and what’s wasting your budget. Here you want to find a winning ad which later on you can scale.
There is a lot of variables you can test like different tones of voice, headlines in the creative, numbers vs %, prices like £1,000 or £1000 and so on.
My final note is that all of it is very similar for B2B and B2C. After you are still speaking to a real human whether it is B2B or B2C.
Hope this helps!