Facebook story ads are an extension of your social media ad spend. Some marketers use them primarily, but it’s best to be diverse with the type of ads you use.
That being said, this guide is designed to show you how to make your Facebook story ads better. It will show you what makes a good ad and all the things you need to before you start using this great feature.
Facebook story ads are easy to learn, but tough to master. Many marketing gurus will tell you that it will take only a small investment to sell your products using ads, but anyone that has been in the game for long enough will know that home runs usually don’t happen overnight.
The truly succeed at Facebook story ads, you need to be creative, targeted, and you have to have a long-term vision of the story you want to tell. Studying what makes a great story is essential to making this strategy work for you. This guide will talk about all of this, so bookmark it and employ it’s strategies slowly, making sure that each step is applied and adapted to your business in a unique fashion.
Getting Started
All you have to do to get started with Facebook story ads is follow this link to the Facebook business page and create any kind of ad you want.
Laying the Foundation for a Great Ad Campaign
What most marketers will tell you is that you’re doing something wrong with the ad. They’ll tell you the ad doesn’t have the right copywriting or the video isn’t professional enough. The truth of the matter is it might not be any of those things.
What your problem could be is something far more subtle and have nothing to do with the construction of your ad. That may be hard to believe, but after you read this section, I hope to make you a believer.
Making Posting Non Facebook Story Ads Part of Your Daily Strategy
Creating Facebook Story Ads is not like creating pay-per-click (PPC) ads on any platform. To be successful, you need to be active on your profile whether it’s a personal account or a business.
The idea is when you’re ad comes up people should recognize you and appreciate the content your produce. It takes to build a community on Facebook. If you start sending ads to that group without the proper warm-up you could jeopardize everything you’ve worked to create.
I suggest doing what many great Facebook community builders have done for years. Post great content for your page everyday. If you can do twice a day then do it, but do not sacrifice the quality for quantity.
Be Active in Groups and Drive Traffic to Your Facebook Page
The next thing is to participate in all the relevant groups and contributors in your space. If you’re in marketing, meet everyone you can that writes content regularly. Join groups where customers seek information, and become an active contributor. The more you do this the more people will follow your business page.
This strategy is contingent on whether you’re not you’re consistently producing content that draws interest. Use your Facebook page and all the tools available to keep things fresh. Use Facebook Watch to start your own television show.
It’s simple, but not easy. You need to put as much thought as a full-fledged media production agency. This doesn’t mean that have to match their production quality or their budget, but it does mean that your creativity and your planning need to be on par.
Look to the contributors in your space and see if you beat them at their own game. If you can’t then find your own special sauce by creating more content.
The Characteristics of a Great Ad
No one can tell you what kind of Facebook story ads will be great for your business. In many cases, it’s a combination of a lot of factors that compound over time. Some of these factors include a solid brand, great images, and an active presence on Facebook and other networks to name a few.
Those qualities are the basics of marketing, and adapting those qualities to your Facebook story ads is the tricky part. It’s so tricky that even if you follow all the tips in this guide and others, you still might not have success.
Stay Consistent With Your Brand
Good Facebook story ads aren’t just great stand-alone pieces of content. They are a part of your entire marketing campaign. Today, there needs to more content about your business than ever before.
Years ago, all a business needed was a physical location and a phone number. If people needed it, then they would buy it.
Now, if you every business needs to be online and it’s optional to have a physical location and a phone number. However, without the ability to meet the people you buy from, content is very important to establish the relationship before you reach out to people for a sale.
Considering that the majority of online buyers are millennials or younger, your brand’s authenticity is of the utmost importance. The longer your business stays in “creative-mode” to more credibility your brand will have. Then, when you have a product, the audience, and the credibility you can start placing ads anywhere you want.
If you prematurely start selling your products, you’ll most likely have to recoup the losses every month. You’ll work harder than you have to.
Target Your Audience
The best way to get the jump on Facebook story ads is to target your audience better than your competitors. Make everything that you create (ads or not) revolve around that target. Use Audience Insights and your experience participating with the community to understand them better.
After you understand them, you can sell to them.
Plan Your Ads Well in Advance
To truly make your Facebook story ads all they can be, you have to have a solid strategy to get them the exposure they deserve. That means properly planning every post, Facebook Watch event, and every ad.
Feel free to use technology to help you stay ahead of your posts. Click on this link to find the 7 best free social media schedulers.
Each piece of content should easily flow into the next piece and into each ad. You should strive to properly warm up each client, then when the time is right release all the ads with proper sales funnels to ensure each campaign is successful. For more information on how to create a successful sales funnel, check out this article from the Digital Cartel Media blog.
Managing Your Ad Spend
Start Small
A key part of managing your Facebook story ads is understanding how to economically spend money on your ads. Make sure you start small before making any large investment into any kind of pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
I recommend spreading your money out like this. Let’s say you have a budget of $100 per day. I’m a believer in running multiple ad sets at once. Some will be winners and some will be losers.
The more ad sets you run, the more you learn what works for your specific audience.
These are Not Like Other Ads
Only people that are friends with you can see these ads. So they must be very targeted and probably less salesy that your other ads. They should be quick jabs to get them to listen to your other sales material.
I do not recommend using Facebook story ads as a daily coupon. People don’t trust brands that constantly devalue their product. Offering a special every once-in-a-while is a good idea, but not all the time.
Perhaps, when you have another product coming out in the next few weeks, you can sell your older products for less money. That would definitely be a strategy I could get behind, but offering a sale right away will not help your ad spends on a long-term basis.
Apply this Strategy to Other Platforms
After you understand how to make your Facebook story ads work for you, try using Instagram story ads which are essentially the same thing. Snapchat is similar too, so give that a shot too.
The principles are essentially the same when it comes to advertisements across all social networks. Make your products and brand the best they can possibly be, then draw traffic to your sales funnels with great content, and reinforce that content with ads to the product.
The bottom-line is trust. If your customers trust what you say, do and create combined with a need for what you sell, your products will sell. It’s truly that simple. If you want increase profits, don’t stress on the quality of the ad as much as the problems you solve. If you focus on that, your products will sell better than your competition, plain and simple.
For more information on building a business using social media, check out this article on branding your business with integrity over all else.
