How content strategy can improve your Facebook Ad performance

Paid Media / February 27, 2018

Get tips from a content marketer on how to make your Facebook ads perform better

So you’re running Facebook ads and they’re doing all right, but not stellar. People are telling you that Facebook is the place to spend your hard earned ad budget, that they are seeing great results. But you’re struggling. What gives?

We agree that setting up a Facebook campaign is a bit of a runaround. The interface isn’t intuitive. And there are a lot of niggly little details.

Rather than burying yourself in the interface, apply a little content strategy to your Facebook campaign. It’s not rocket science. Step back and think about who your customers are and what they are doing on Facebook. Once you understand their needs and patterns, it becomes much easier to develop and target ad content that draws them in.

Below, three things you can do make your Facebook ads, targeting and timing more relevant to potential customers:

1. Base your creative and targeting on customer personas

Before you start developing ad creative and setting up targeting, take the time to create personas that describe your ideal customers. The more fully you can flesh out these personas — who they are, what they enjoy, what they need, how they shop — the better you will be able to create ads that speak to them and set up targeting that puts your ads in front of the right people.

2. Find out the best days and hours to run your ads

Don’t run your ads 24/7. Do some digging in your website analytics to determine the most profitable hours of day for your business. In Google Analytics you can make a custom report with transactions or revenue as the dimension, and day of week or time of day as the metric. Facebook’s Breakdown report also enables you to view your ads performance by the hour or day of week.

Once you figure out the most profitable times of day and week for your audience, use Facebook’s ad scheduling tool to automatically run your ads on the optimal days and hours.

3. Refresh your ad creative often

When we say often, we mean a couple times a week. Social media users have the attention spans of goldfish. Fresh ad creative will keep them curious and engaged. According to Webtrends, a Facebook ad’s CTR peaks 72 hours after it goes live. It’s all downhill from there; less engagement means CTRs and higher CPCs. Keep content-hungry Facebook users engaged by refreshing your creative as often as you humanly can. And wherever possible, pull in relevant trends, events and memes to keep things fresh and entertaining.

Don’t think about how to sell, think about how to engage

Better performing Facebook ads are simply a matter of putting a little strategic thought into what your customers are looking for. In other words, advertising on Facebook is a lot more like content marketing than you may think. Social media users are online to consume content. They want to be intrigued and engaged. Meet them half way and they will come hither.