Facebook Ads are a great way of helping businesses reach their target audience and sell more of their products or services. With over 2.8 billion monthly active users, it’s a no-brainer to consider Facebook in your paid marketing strategy.
However, Facebook Ads can be overwhelming. There’s so much to learn about the back end of your ads, and that’s not even touching the ads and ad formats themselves. Luckily, I run a Facebook Ads agency, so I have the knowledge to help you make Facebook Ads work for you.
Today, I’ll be specifically focusing on video ads within Facebook, as they are a popular and highly engaging ad format, so learning how to make them work for you is in your best interests if you want to attract Facebook users by creating video ads that are captivating from the start.
Why consider Facebook video ads?
Let’s start by chatting about why you should consider Facebook videos over other ad formats like single-image ads, which are arguably easier to set up.
- UGC (or user-generated content) is very strong. This is a great way of making your business stand out without being too salesy. UGC also tends to get higher engagement, which can lower the costs associated with running these types of ads.
- Higher engagement rates. Video advertising helps you show off your content in a way that images simply can’t. Plus, the fact that it’s not just text and a static image means that your audience will be much more engaged, as your ad has a higher chance of capturing their attention.
- Enhanced targeting capabilities. Facebook has great algorithms that allow you to reach specific demographics based on your ideal customer’s interests and behaviours, which means your ads will be seen by people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
There are diverse video ad formats. You can place your video ads within a feed, a carousel post, or a story. This allows you to use Facebook video ads in a way that makes sense for your business.
The downside
Everything good must have some cons attached to them, and with Facebook video ads, the con is the fact that they can often be much more expensive to run. There may be higher fees associated with these ads, and the effort of setting these ads up is also more time-consuming and expensive.
Of course, this is often worth the investment thanks to the returns it may yield, so it can be helpful to hire a creative agency to help you come up with compelling videos.
How to create effective video ads
Now that you’re (hopefully) convinced that video ads deserve a place in your ad campaign, you probably need to know exactly how to create your video ads. This will naturally vary depending on your business and what the goal of your ad is, but there are a few steps that can help you.
- Set clear objectives: you need to know what you want to achieve with your ads. Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or make sales? Having a clear campaign objective will help you design an ad that aligns with your desired outcome.
- Make compelling content: be creative! Your ad needs to not only capture your audience’s attention but also keep it. Try to make it interesting from the beginning until the end.
- Optimise for mobiles: remember that some users will view ads on their phones, and others on bigger screens like laptops. You need to ensure that your ads are optimised for all screen types. Don’t neglect mobile optimisation, as you will be shooting yourself in the foot. Your ads need to use as much real estate as possible, regardless of which device they’re being viewed on.
- Use Facebook’s tools: Facebook has an arsenal of tools ready for you to use, so use them! They have a video creation kit with templates that you can customise, as well as advanced analytics that can help you monitor your ads’ performance and A/B test different ads to see which ones work better.
Monitor and adjust: don’t just set up your ads and hope for the best. Regularly check in to see how they are doing, and don’t be afraid to make adjustments if enough time has passed for you to definitively say that an ad isn’t working.
Extra tips
Because I love talking about this stuff, I need to cram in some extra bits of advice that you should keep in mind when running Facebook video ads.
- Keep it short and sweet: you don’t want users to get bored, so try to keep most ads relatively short to increase the chances of someone watching the whole thing rather than scrolling away because they get bored. Most video viewers will watch just a few seconds of your video, so make those seconds count.
- Highlight benefits early: try to put important information, such as the benefits of your product or service, quite early in the video. This way, even if someone does scroll away, they have a good chance of seeing the good stuff before they do.
- Use captions: this will help you reach a wider audience by being inclusive of those with hearing impairments. Some people also watch ads on mute, so if you don’t have captions, your ad won’t convey its message to them.
- Test, test, test: I’m a big advocate of testing ads. The truth is that you simply won’t know which ads work and which ones don’t if you don’t test them. Test different copies, creatives, formats, and audiences against each other to see which ones perform best, and use that data to do further testing so that your ads improve with each round. Look at some Facebook video ad examples if you need inspiration!
Have a strong CTA: finally, you need to encourage people to take a specific action. Have your website link there or a link to an enquiry form. Try to get them to take action while the ad is still fresh in their minds.
Final words
This was a very brief overview of Facebook video ads. The truth is that there’s much more to learn. You can deep dive thousands of things. But you need to start somewhere, and my hope is that this post gave you a solid foundation that you can use if you’re ready to take the next step and run Facebook Ads.
And if you are ready for that step but you’re not ready to spend ages learning the ropes, fill in the form below to see how my ad agency can help you!