Looking for some tips for your next Facebook Ads campaign? We've put together our top 10 tips and best practices for Facebook Ads that will help get your sales cooking.

#1: Don’t Cast a Wide Net, Aim for Niche

Less is sometimes more and that’s certainly the case when it comes to creating audiences for your Facebook Ad campaigns. These days, you have access to oodles of audience data, either directly or indirectly, and it makes sense to use that to sell to the people who are interested in your product and not target an audience who doesn’t care and won’t convert.

Luckily, Facebook’s targeting makes this an easy process. But before you start setting your ads, make sure you’ve done your homework and created your customer journey maps and researched your ideal customer. Ultimately, having a comprehensive understanding of your perfect target audience, makes it that much easier, and more cost-effective, to actually reach them.

Armed with that, head over to the “Interests” field of your Facebook ad and narrow your audience based on known interests. Try combining those narrow-focused interests as well and you’ll soon have created an audience that you know are engaged and interested in your product.

#2: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Have some social content that performed really well in the past? Maybe you have an ad that was engaging and chock-full of "social proof"? If so, consider reusing some of them for one of your new ad campaigns.

When you do so, you’re not only being more efficient, using content you know has proven engaging and able to raise awareness, but you’re growing your audience, opening up new sales opportunities, and generating buzz around your business.

Evergreen content like blog articles or videos (these perform much better than articles) are great for sharing or focus on using those past ads that had tons of clicks and comments on a new audience, just don't forget to not just duplicate that ad but reuse it so it retains all that good social proof.

#3: Get Them Across the Finish Line‍

We’ve spoken many times about how effective working with abandoned carts can be. One of our automated email triggers is built specifically for this purpose. Statistically speaking, 70% of your customers who add an item to a cart will abandon it, but a massive chunk of those lost sales are recoverable.

If you don’t know how to set up Facebook’s dynamic ads, you can learn more about it here. Once you’re set up, you’ll want to make sure your ads feature those products they abandoned with tailored texts that triggers their recent shopping experience and make them want to complete the purchase. While you’re at it, you can always incentivize them with a discount.

We’d be remiss to not mention our own solution, abandoned cart email triggers, that automatically send personalized emails to shoppers who have abandoned their cart. With both of these as part of your marketing mix, with a little bit of checkout optimization mixed in, you'll be well on your way to recovering.

#4: If at First you Don't Succeed

What about the other majority of visitors who didn't add a product but were browsing your e-shop? Remarketing to these interested visitors can be just as potent as marketing to those who abandoned their carts.

When it comes down to it, remarketing based on website traffic has up to 3x better engagement than just a standard Facebook ad so why wouldn't you? It makes sense since these people have already shown interest and you're simply doing your part to guide them through their customer journey.

The only thing to consider is frequency and distribution. While there are many ways to go about it, one good strategy is to create a mix of ads, with varying content (e.g. blogs, videos, products, etc.), spread them out over individual ad sets, and then set each to the same frequency and audience.

#5: Utilize Lookalike Audiences

Utilizing Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences is another “if it worked before, why change it” type of marketing approach similar to reusing social content. In this case, your all-valuable customer list is brought to the forefront and used to target people who currently don't know you, but would likely purchase from you if they did.

For those unfamiliar with lookalike audiences, you can learn more here. Essentially, you’re going to boil your customer list, people who have proven to convert, down into a segmented audience and then try to find others that match those qualities (e.g. interests, demographics, etc.) and display your ad to them.

The longer and more detailed your customer list, the more accurate your lookalike audience will be. But make sure you set your lookalike audience small, all the way down to 1%, as a lower audience has been proven to have a larger ROI.‍

#6: Use Great Images and/or Video

It comes as no great surprise that your Facebook ads should feature great visuals. But what is a “great” visual? While much of what attracts a person to the visual component of an ad is very subjective, there are some things that have been proven to work well:

• Try to keep your text overlays to a minimum, at most, 15% of the overall space...
• And when you do it, make sure you're utilizing a value proposition like "Free Trial" or "Win $100 Gift Card"
• Images with faces tend to convert better and if the person is using the product that’s even better
• Scroll tests have shown that contrasting colors help images stand out
• Use carousel ads to tell a story over or across a series of images

#7: Use Engaging, Action-oriented Copy

With great visuals must come some compelling and relevant texts to go along with it. Like its visual counterpart, what to write can be very subjective but here are some simple tips to help guide your copywriting skills:

• More often than not, you're going to want to keep your texts clear and succinct
• Address common needs, frustrations, or pain points, showcasing your solution
• Where applicable, instill a sense of urgency to help motivate people to act
• Most people will only read your headline so make it count!
• Depending on the context, emojis can make your ad stand out

Lastly, this might go without saying but make sure you're writing for each specific audience, creating compelling copy that speaks to their needs and wants.

#8: Build Your Email List

While Facebook Ads can be great, they won’t get you the same results as effective email marketing campaigns will. That’s why it makes sense to use Facebook Ads as a means of enhancing your email marketing.

Instead of focusing on the short-term, aim for the long-term and get them to share their email address using a lead-generation ad that motivates them to convert with a special offer or discount.

Since Facebook is just part of your overall marketing mix, you can look to email to help guide them through the funnel. These days, marketing automation solutions like Samba make this process simple and cost-effective, and in the case of Samba, offers the ability to integrate with Facebook and use your audiences in custom campaigns.

#9: Use Multi-Product Ads

Facebook Multi-product ads give you the ability to show multiple products in a single ad. By giving your customers more options to choose from, you have a higher chance they’ll find something relevant and convert.

A recent study showed that multi-product ads produced at least 50% higher CTR rates and higher engagement that lead to lower costs per click and higher conversion. Going a step even further, if you use user-generated content, or UGC, you save even more on CPA and CPC, with even higher CTR rates.

But you don't have to use it just for selling products. You can use it to tell a story, explain a process, showcase that aforementioned UGC, and so much more. Like our last point below, being creative can really make you standout and help get you better results.

#10: Get Creative with Custom Audiences

Facebook's Custom Audiences really open up so many possibilities for not only who you market to, but how you market. Digging into them and learning all the ins and outs can be a bit intimidating, but all that knowledge will pay off in the end.

Some ideas you can consider when building your Custom Audiences:

• Target your most loyal customers with some exclusive deals/sales or new products
• Get a new lead-generating video or blog article in front of people who have already viewed that respective content
• Increase your Facebook fanbase by getting customers to become fans
• Cross-sell or upsell based on the products they viewed or purchased
• Try to think from the funnel out, creating ads for each step of the way

There's honestly so much you can do with Custom Audiences that we could spend many articles covering just the tip of the iceberg. All we can suggest is that you continually work with your custom audiences, experimenting with new ideas, and iterate on what works.