Six Ways You Can Advertise With Facebook Ads

As one of the world’s largest social media platforms, Facebook is a must for brands to connect, engage and attract new customers to meet specific digital marketing goals. From videos, carousel ads and now Facebook’s innovative Instant Experience feature, businesses small and large can benefit from the variety of advertising opportunities that Facebook has to offer.

Why Facebook?

Currently, there are 2.38 billion people actively using Facebook per month. That equates to a lot of eyes that could potentially see your brand’s content, services and products. Depending on your digital marketing needs, you can use Facebook ads to create brand awareness, gain new customers, create more engagement and drive traffic to your website. It’s also cost-effective and makes targeting a specific audience easy, whether it’s based on demographics, such as location, age, income or psychographics, such as interests and hobbies.

There are numerous ways Facebook can meet your marketing needs through images, video and more through its different ad types. Here are some of Facebook’s best ways to get your brand’s message across.

Link Click Ads

Link click ads are one of Facebook’s most common ads that users see in their newsfeeds. These ads are also displayed in the side-bar, Facebook Messenger and Facebook’s Stories feature. They usually consist of an image, your ad copy and a link. This type of ad is fantastic for driving traffic to your website, blogs and landing pages. Link click ads also let you feature a call-to-action button for users to click, which include options such as: Shop Now, Sign Up, Book Now, Download and Learn More. These calls-to-action buttons specify what it is you want the user to do. Link click ads are simple to use and can be featured on both mobile and desktop applications and other social media platforms to reach larger audiences.

Video Ads

These types of ads are great for product demonstrations, testimonies, engagement and more. Like link click ads, they can be placed on mobile, desktop and other social media platforms for a greater audience reach. These are high-performing ads due to their autoplay feature in Facebook’s mobile application, which rake in 3 billion video views per day. In fact, video ads are viewed 65% more on mobile and outperform image-based ads by 20%, making them an ideal choice to consider in your digital marketing strategy.

A highly successful example of a video ad we ran on Facebook was for OrlandoRealtors.com. We conceptualized and produced an upbeat video that showed how happy a homeowner was when she sold her home above asking price with the help of her REALTOR®. This engaging video ad generated over 26,000 10-second views at a cost of less than 50 cents a view. This just goes to show how powerful video can be for companies implementing video Facebook ads.

Boosted Page Posts

Any time your brand creates a Facebook post, there’s an option to boost the post’s reach to expand your audience. Here, you can target your audience by their demographic, such as age, location, income, gender and up to 10 interests. You completely control the ad’s budget, how long you want the post to be advertised and more. Boosted page posts are best used to showcase your own content and promote exclusive deals to new customers, for example. There’s great flexibility with this type of ad, and it can be showcased across desktop and mobile newsfeeds.

Carousel Ads

These types of ads feature a hybrid of images and videos in a seamless format. Facebook allows up to 10 images or videos to be shown in a single unit. Users are able to side-scroll on their mobile devices to see what your brand is featuring. It’s perfect to use in e-commerce to feature products ads, video demonstrations or to simply create brand awareness by telling a story. This also offers great flexibility because your brand can provide links, calls-to-action to attract leads to your website, conversions and more to suit your needs.

Page Like Ads

Engagement is an important asset for your brand on Facebook. Page like ads are beneficial because they provide an immediate call-to-action button for users to like and follow your brand’s page. You can target potential users who you think might be interested in your page based on their interests or location, for example. This is ideal for small businesses looking to attract more local customers to buy their products or use their services, or even just follow their content to see what’s happening with their brand. When running a like campaign on Facebook for our own brand, we increased monthly like growth by over 300%, and expanded our audience on Facebook to reach people who might not have found us otherwise.

Facebook’s Instant Experience Feature

Formerly called Canvas, Facebook’s Instant Experience feature is just how it sounds. Consumers can click your ad on their mobile devices and instantly dive into what you have to offer in a full-screen experience. Here, you can feature a video, a sign up form, a carousel of various product ads and more all from one place without leaving the page. It’s 15x faster than loading a mobile web page, it’s measurable and it’s easy to use. The Instant Experience feature offers different templates to showcase your products or services to create a visually striking experience for the consumer and cater to your marketing needs.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of Instant Experience, we created one for Plasticity^®Brain Centers, a neurorehabilitation facility that provides life-changing treatment for brain injuries and neurofunctional disorders. The Instant Experience campaign had a click-through-rate 3.7x higher than the industry average and a 4.3x lower cost-per-click than the standard. These results show how this Facebook feature immerses users in your content and leads them down a sales funnel much like a landing page.

New additions to Facebook story ads

Facebook recently announced their addition of interactive ad options to engage with consumers through stories. The new ad options include polling, augmented reality and playable ads.

The additions will resemble the ads on Instagram stories, potentially reaching consumers in a new way on Facebook. With the rise in social media advertising, Facebook and other platforms should adapt and cater to audiences in the digital environments they frequent the most.

For example, let’s say a company wants to poll consumers on their product. By using the polling ad feature on Facebook, companies can easily gauge consumer interests on a topic and gain valuable feedback to use when crafting future marketing efforts.

The overarching goal of these new ad options is to provide a more playful take on marketing tactics, offering a creative user experience. After all, people want to see less copy and more visual appeal with an increased reliance on smartphone technology.

The takeaway

Whether it’s creating brand awareness, new leads, or page likes, Facebook ads can do it all — well, maybe not “it all.” With the help of an expert, your digital marketing strategy can excel by knowing which ad type is right for your brand’s needs.

Need some guidance? We’re Facebook experts. Appleton is an award-winning, full-service digital marketing and advertising agency located in Orlando, Florida. Appleton works with local, national and international clients to deliver custom content, persuasive online ads and expertly crafted campaigns. By implementing valuable and shareable digital content strategies, Appleton can create the perfect social and digital marketing experience for your brand and audience. Your Internet advertising goals are worth a conversation: contact us at 407-246-0092 or info@appletoncreative.com.