In the past three years, there has been a huge shift towards paid social due to the relatively high ROI. I am sure we have all seen, those case studies of brands earning $900,000 of revenue from a measly $500 ad spend. There is no question that paid social is currently a gold mine.

Among all social networks, Facebook reigns supreme when it comes to returns on investment. Despite this latent potential, a lot of businesses have been hitting a brick wall attempting to achieve significant results.

If you are one of those businesses or just digital marketing connoisseur, well here a few simple and effective tips that are guaranteed to boost your Facebook ad performance in the new year.

1) Improve Your Facebook Ad Targeting

It doesn’t matter how good and engaging your product is, if you are advertising it to the wrong audience. Here are a few quick tips for more effective targeting

• Plug your email list of previous customers and Facebook will find their accounts show your ads to other individuals who have similar buying habits. This single trick, tripled the click-through rate for one of my clients.
• Use income ranges. Using A/B testing figure out what income range resonates with different ads/offers for your product.
• This is a trick majority of beginners are not aware of, but you can target employees of specific companies or individuals of a certain profession.

2) Optimize Facebook Ads For Lead Generation

A lot of brands still implement strategies with a CPM model in mind. I believe in the modern climate and especially if you are a small business, this is the wrong direction. CPM models require a relatively high amount of ad spend and their effectiveness are difficult to measure in the short term.

Individuals browsing through social media have a million things vying for their attention. You want your ad to be succinct, grab their attention and get their information or sale. Do not, i repeat, DO NOT send them to your website, no body has time for that. One of the most effective strategies to accomplish this; is offering something of value discounted or free.

Your offer can range from a free trail to a discount to an eBook or tutorial, literally anything that can be considered valuable to your prospective customer. Put yourself in your customers shows, what would a brand offer that would convince me to give them my attention.

Target specific pain points and make it clear how your service/product will alleviate that pain.

3) Implement Re-marketing Strategies

This is an area of opportunity i see a lot of businesses leave money on the table. Just because someone does initial put their information in your lead generation form or buy your product doesn’t mean they are not interested.

People who watched 50% of your video or visited your landing page or abandoned their cart are not necessarily lost sales. In fact, they are most likely interested but have not been shown enough value to get them over the edge.

You want to have multiple ads designed specifically to target this cohort. Personally, i run twice as many re-marketing ads as i run main ads. Building more valuable or providing a better offer will ensure you retain their attention until they are ready to pull the trigger.

You stand the risk for priming customers for your competitors when you over look running re-marketing Facebook ads.

4) Test Your Facebook Ads

I cant stress this enough, it is extremely important to perform A/B testing. Testing different ad formats for different audiences, testing similar ad formats on the same audience, or testing a lead generation ad vs a click funnel conversion ad. These are all tests you need to run to ensure you are using your ad spend efficiently.

You can have a situation where an ad performs poorly but upon further inspection to find out the ad was highly effective on a certain demographic despite missing the mark for a large majority. Now because of this insight, you can target that demographic with that ad whilst testing out different ad formats for the demographics.

Gaining insights and constantly adapting your ads is the key to not hitting a strategy. Trends and algorithms are constantly changing, to succeed you have to keep your finger on the pulse.

5) Write Good Ad Copy

This one should go without saying but you’d be surprise how often it is over looked. Here are a few tips to writing quality copy for Facebook ads:

• Proper Grammar
• Do not use the boost post function, if a post was not designed specifically to be an ad. Do not waste your ad spend boosting it.
• Have a clear advertising goal for your Facebook ad
• Have a call to action. It is not the customers job to figure out what you are trying to get them to do.