Some Effective Facebook Ads Just Need Good Timing

I get asked fairly regularly during my coaching calls with clients how to run Facebook Ads that are effective and will bring a return to their business without breaking their bank account.  Some of the ways you accomplish this can take some really intricate work.

A good amount of strategy can also be involved in targeting a group of people in which the target market is not too large, but also not so small that you don’t get many leads.  I’ve spent hours and sometimes even days in the past just setting up my ad, target market, and budget just to run a Facebook ad for a few hours.

While I’ve spent that amount of time before, I also learned long ago that not all ads need to have that much thought put into them to be effective.  Sometimes, you just need a good idea, and then wait for good timing.  I ran an ad a while back that I literally spent about two minutes creating and it was one of the best ads I’ve ever put together.

The ad was designed for me to turn it live whenever there would be an outtage by one of my big competitors blog services.  I would simply monitor the social networks for someone to say “Ugh! ****** is down again!” and I would then start my Facebook ad running.  I’d let it run a few hours while the competitor had problems and when I saw those complaints slow down, I’d simply turn off my ad.

During that brief few hour span, I would watch my ad get clicked on a few hundred times driving several leads my way just because the users of the other platform were in complete frustration of a product they were paying good money for that wouldn’t perform like it should leaving both them and clients stranded.

Here’s a few simple things to consider when making a good Facebook ad:

What Problem Does Your Facebook Ad Solve?

The first step to getting an effective Facebook ad would be to create a title & text for your ad that is going to either fix a current issue people are facing, or offer a product that will help make something easier for your target audience to accomplish.  As you can see from the text I used in my former ad, the problem I was wanting to address was blogs that were down.  I then offered a solution using the term WordPress that would be known by most of the people who would see the ad on Facebook.

Is Your Image A Good Representation?

Now, here’s where I see a lot of A/B testing taking place that can really help to tweak an ad to be more effective.  In my case, I just went looking for an image of someone that looked angry and that would catch the attention of people on Facebook.  A quick search over at MorgueFile found the angry looking man and I had my picture.  I probably could have found other images and done some A/B testing to see if others would bring better results, but I was really happy with what I was already receiving so I didn’t test any more.

Advanced Target Marketing

This is the area where most people miss it.  I could have run this ad and targeted the 163 million people on Facebook in the USA.  But I didn’t need that.  My target audience in this example was chosen in under thirty seconds.  I simply targeted  a precise interest: The fans of their Facebook page.  I figured the most likely people to not only be using the product but also on Facebook would be those who are fans of their Facebook page.

In that box, you can type in not only things people may be interested in like Dancing, Golfing, or Music, but you can also type in specific things like a Facebook page.  I added the name of their Facebook page and I had a great segment to target of around 15,000 people.  This type of targeting will bring you great results.

Once you have all of this you are almost ready to run your ad.  Just a few more things to consider before you go live.

Squeeze Them Hard

Before you go and waste tons of money on an ad that just drives people to the home page of your site or your Facebook page, make sure you drive traffic to a landing page that will result in some sort of action taking place by the person clicking.  For example, one I ran with this ad would give people to check out my WordPress Starter Package.  I could write a whole post on squeeze pages for your Facebook Ads, but my friend Mike already wrote one that sums up Facebook squeeze pages pretty well.

It’s All In Timing

So in closing, sometimes the most effective Facebook ads are not the ones you have tested and researched for days and weeks.  Sometimes it might just be having a good idea that you run at the right times focused on the right audience.