If you own a Business, you can’t afford to ignore Meta Ads.

It is one of the best outbound advertising platforms available for businesses today.

We can’t discuss Meta ads without mentioning Facebook ads because Facebook renamed them as “Meta” in October 2021. 

They want themselves to be a social technology company, not just a social media giant.

Meta now has more than a billion people signed up on its platforms namely Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Therefore chances are high that your customers are already using these platforms.

By using Inbound Advertising platforms such as Google ads, you get the right target customers to visit your website because they are searching for you.

But in outbound marketing, the most challenging thing is targeting the right customers who may like to buy your product or service.

Let’s assume that your product/service is designed for Painting service providers. If you Advertise it in magazines or on TV, there is a very small percentage of Painting Service providers.

As a result, you would waste a lot of Marketing Budget by showing ads to a large number of people who are not interested in your product.

But with Meta ads, you can show your ads only to Painting service providers by detailed targeting.

It’s just like having a sniper in your hands to hunt down the Well identified clients.😀

As Meta has so much information about their users that targeting the right customers becomes very easy.

By having the power of targeting at such a narrow scale, a lot of businesses have come into existence. These Businesses do not exist earlier because there was no way to target a very small segment of people with existing marketing platforms.

So you can use the power of quality meta ads to grow your existing business or create a new business.

In this conversation, I would give you a detailed overview of how meta (Facebook) ads can make you an Alpha Business.

Let’s dig in…!

What is Meta Ad?

Meta Ad allows advertisers to reach targeted users on one of its platforms (Facebook, Instagram,…) through boosted posts, videos, photos, Stories, messenger, carousel, slideshows, playable ads, and instant experience.

Meta target the right customers based on their:

• Demographics
• Interests
• Location
• Education
• Relationship Status
• Workplaces
• Life events
• Other profile information

After creating an Ad, you can set an ad budget and bid for each click or thousand impressions the ad receives.

Bidding and other measures might be overwhelming now but we can discuss them later on.

Benefits of Meta Ads:

• More Accurate Targeting
• High Business Performance due to the accuracy of Targeting
• Get reach on multiple platforms: Facebook, Instagram, …
• Tracking Ad performance in real-time.
• Rotation of Ads
• A/B testing

Why Meta Ads?

Out of 5.3 billion global Internet users, 3.71 billion people use at least one Meta app every month: Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

According to World Population Review, India has 416.6 million registered users in India.

India has Facebook’s largest user base followed by the USA at 240.0 million.

Indonesia has 176.5 million Meta users and Brazil has 139.0 million.

Around 80% of internet users use Facebook and Instagram.

So Meta has the most information about its Users and hence it has the best targeting advertising in the World.

Facebook ads are also the cheapest form of advertising online and it also helps you measure your ads spending and track your ROI.

You can also build your audience and retarget them using a Facebook pixel.

Why Meta Ads are important for Businesses?

Meta advertising enables you to customize your campaigns to specific goals, which include the multiple levels of the marketing funnel.

If you decide to advertise on Meta, you will be able to appear your ads in seven different places Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger. The appearance of ads varies according to your goal.

Meta ads appear on:

• Feeds
• Stories and Reels
• In-stream
• Search
• Messages
• In-article
• Apps and sites

In a Business, if you want to reach the masses with your messaging, Meta is the best place to do so, thanks to its wide range of ages and demographics.

With such a wide customer reach, you can also use the platform’s data to target by age, gender, interest, and behavior. 

You can also use owned data to create lookalike audiences or use audience lists for account-based marketing (ABM).

You can also monitor your campaigns and ads regularly by using Meta’s dashboard.

Meta ads Also offer creativeness and cost-effectiveness in its ad campaigns by providing Immersive ad sets like Meta’s instant experience ads.

Instant experience ads mean that users can be instantly transported to an app-like brand experience using a full-screen interactive concept that allows brands to tell a story.

And storytelling allows you to highlight content marketing pieces that would otherwise go unnoticed on a website. 

Meta ads Vs Google ads

You always need to take both platforms seriously. They both are digital ad giants of the world.

Many people see them as 2 different places where online advertising can be done and many people put them into the same bucket of “Paid ads”.

But in reality, both are very different, Google ads help new customers to find you and your product/services and Meta ads help you to find new customers.

Google processes over 8.5 billion new search queries daily and 99,000 search queries per second.

When it comes to searching Google rules.

It has 2 options in advertising one is ‘paid search ’ and the ‘display networks’. Google display network is supposed to cover 98% of the web.

(Of course, the dark web is not included)

Both Meta ads and Google Ads focus on quality and user experience delivered by advertisers. 

“The better user experience and relevance, the lower the cost of ads.”

Your target users on google are based on “what they search for” and on Meta ads, you target users based on “who they are”.

Google search ads are inbound advertising and they are also aligned with SEO.

Meta ads are outbound advertising and they are aligned with social media.

Google ads are generally text-based ads where as Meta ads are very visual with images, and videos & very social with likes, comments, and shares.

With Google ads “who they are” doesn’t matter much because the intent is very clearly established in the search query.

In Meta ads targeting the right audience rather than the wrong is very important.

Therefore ‘target audiences’ are a critical factor in Facebook to target while in Google ads targeting is done via ‘keywords’.

Understanding the Meta(Facebook) Audiences

As I mentioned that the target audience is the most important factor in advertising on Meta.

If you get your target audience right your ads will perform Vey well even if your ad copy is not excellent because the right people are seeing your ad.

The greatest Ad copy in the world still fails when it shows to the wrong target audience.

So We need to understand the types of Meta Audience before creating ads.

Types of Meta Audiences:

• Saved audience
• Custom audience
• Lookalike audience

A saved audience is the most basic type of audience set on meta ads.

When you get started with a brand new ads account and run your first campaign, you have to go with a Saved audience.

While running your first ad campaign you will have to create an audience based on demographics(age, gender, location,…) and psychic parameters(interests and desires).

This type of audience has limited scope for your business because targeting is not very accurate.

The second type of audience is called the ”custom audience”. An audience that is related to your business. This includes website traffic, app users, and a customer list.

The third type of audience is the “lookalike audience ”  where meta can develop an audience for you that looks like your custom audience.

What is Meta Pixel?

Meta pixel is just a simple javascript code that can be placed on all the pages of your website, and it will load in the background. The end-user will not be able to see this code visually.

It is one of the most important concepts of meta ads. If you do not have a clear understanding of Meta Pixel and if you do not implement Pixel in your campaigns, you will not be able to leverage Meta Ads to the fullest. 

Even if you don’t run any Facebook ad campaign, you only have to create a meta ad account And install the Facebook pixel immediately from the event manager.

This helps you to start building a custom audience.

Using Facebook pixel you can create lookalike audiences and custom conversions.

Pro tip:

Lookalike audiences will perform better if your meta pixel has been served 1000’s times.

Getting comfortable with the Facebook Pixel takes some time and practice. But once you understand the mechanics through implementation, you will be able to make the best ROI from your Facebook Ads budget.

Retargeting with Facebook ads

Once you install a Meta pixel on your website or any other property, you can retarget the visitors of your website and property users with your ads.

You can double down by creating dynamic ads that show people items they are likely to be interested in.

You could also create custom conversions for your thankyou page and run conversion-optimized ads by retargeting your users who visited your site, left items in the cart, or clicked on an ad.

Custom conversions are based on Meta pixels without them you cannot create custom conversions.

Custom conversions can be used for generating leads and sales. It helps meta to track what happens beyond the click that is being sent to the landing page.

With a combination of Custom conversions and Custom/lookalike audiences, you can drive insane results for your campaigns. 

The targeting will be so well-defined that getting a landing page conversion rate of 50% is possible.

Writing ad copies that convert

When you get the target audience right the next most important thing with Meta ads is getting the ad copy right.

The problem is many people create ads that look like ads and generally people don’t like ads.

So the thing you have to do is to create an ad copy that looks like a Facebook/Instagram post. When you write an ad copy that looks like a Facebook update post from you, then people will pay attention.

Always write short sentences and talk directly to your target audiences. It is much better if you can narrate a story.

Try to talk in the first person.

Your goal is to retain the attention of your users while they are being bombarded with hundreds of other notifications from their Facebook or Instagram accounts.

You can also use the AIDA framework in your ads:

• (A)Attention: Draw the user’s attention to the ad with an attention-grabbing headline.
• (I)Interest: Get the user interested in your Ad copy by briefly describing the most important value of your product/service.
• (D)Desire: Create immediate desire for your product with a discount, free trial, or a limited-time offer.
• (A)Action: End the ad with a call to action.

Best-performing ads are the ones that create value with the post inside the Facebook/Instagram post.

Meta Ads Images

Meta’s platforms are very visual mediums therefore, a good image can give you a good click-through rate.

Your one ad can have multiple ad images and you can test which ad image gives the best performance.

There could be multiple ads in one ad set and meta will run the good-performing ad more than the other ads so that you get the best return on Investment.

When you set up an ad, you run it on multiple platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. So keep that in mind while choosing the image that Instagram is more visual than Facebook.

You can also use stock images within the Facebook library when you are starting to run the ads.

When you are getting serious about higher ad budgets, use a custom-designed image for your ad. (Get a designer to create a Facebook ad)

Don’t use low-quality images and images you don’t have the right to use. (Don’t steal images from google or any other source)

Create your pictures according to your target audience by using canva.com and similar tools.

Pro tip:

Don’t Use stock photos that look like stock photos. Find unique photos and edit them by changing filters or you might add things or two.

You can use Pixlr to edit your images.

Creating Landing Pages that Convert

Getting the clicks on your meta ad is the beginning, you still need to convert that click into your lead.

When you run Meta ads, do not drive traffic to a page where you have a corporate website or A generic e-commerce store.

Never run any ad campaign to the home page ever. The conversion rate will be low because there are too many links around and it is not focused on a single call to action.

Make sure to send traffic to a targeted high-converting landing page.

The best kind of landing pages to use with Meta ads are Lead Pages and Sales Pages.

For a Brand new audience always use lead pages so that you can capture people’s email ids and build your own list and tribe.

For an audience that is already in your email list, drive traffic to a landing page where you have the product for sale. (Click here to know more about leads, sales, and landing pages)

A consistent stream for your product will help you fund your ad campaigns and eventually it helps you to increase impressions on your ad.

Tracking Performance of Meta Ads

Let’s imagine….

You Do the Research.

Then create your ad campaigns, Wait for the results, and… nothing happens.

Impressions don’t come.

Leads don’t materialize.

Sales aren’t shooting sky High.

This generally happens with many advertisers.

That is why you need tracking and adjustments in Meta ads.

You have to track your meta ads performance. Metrics that are needed to be tracked will vary according to your goals.

Example: If you want to increase brand awareness then you have to track ad impressions and in case of generating leads for your email list then you have to track conversions of your landing page through custom conversions.

Tacking the meta ads includes many metrics these are:

• Click through rates 
• Conversion tracking through Meta pixel.
• Cost per click.

Use A/B testing to change variables in your ads such as images, ad copy, and audiences, to see which strategy works for you.

You can do this all in Meta Ads Manager without any hassle.

Conclusion:

Meta advertising is a great effective advertising platform for your business due to its wide user reach, specific audience targeting via demographics and psychographies, and of course, its Cost-effectiveness compared to other platforms.

Just remember these few things:

• Target Audience by using a specific interest
• Always use catchy visual images.
• Take care of your Ad copy and Landing Pages.
• Run ads according to your goals.
• Track every campaign you run on Facebook.
• Rotate ads on a weekly basis
• Use A/b Testing to get a strong strategy

After runnings ads for a few weeks, you will get to know which ads work better for your business.

In the end, I hope you get major insights about using quality meta ads for your business and stand as an alpha in the market.

If you have some more insights to add or have anything to share comment down.

I will appreciate your contribution and reply back.

This is my promise to you.

Cheers,

Manthan “A Meta ads enthusiast” Sharma