Social media marketing has exploded in growth, becoming one of the primary ways brands now reach their consumers, subscribers and followers. While search engines largely dominated marketing strategies in the past, there are an increasing number of brands that rely on nothing but social media marketing – whether that be organic, paid, or both – to grow their reach. In order to reach large numbers of people in a relatively short timespan, most brands rely on paid ads. On Facebook in particular, countless pages and entities have had great success at boosting their visibility. How can you be sure to get the most out of your Facebook Ads campaign? We’ll review the basics behind creating the best ads you can imagine.

Start by A/B Testing

Every niche is different. When you’re pinging links to various people on social media, everybody will react differently. It stands to reason that every variation of an ad will receive different reactions from different people. In order to build the best ad campaign possible on Facebook, you have to do some initial experimentation. Using all of the valuable insights regarding ad creation, you’ll want to devise several variations of the same broader ad. You can start by tweaking the ad copy, images, landing pages and other elements used in the ad – all while adhering to a similar theme. Once you’ve run the experiment a few times, you’ll begin to get a better idea of which elements generate the most engagement. You can then proceed to create the ultimate Facebook ad by combining each of the best-performing elements into an ad campaign.

Target Familiar Audiences

Depending on the nature of your brand, you should have a satisfactory-to-innate knowledge of all relevant audiences for your ad campaign. In order to make Facebook ads that truly resonate with an audience, you need to be familiar with their desires, interests and culture. Initially, focus on creating ads for audiences that you’re very familiar with – this will give you a bit more wiggle room in terms of experimenting with what works best for an ad campaign. As you perfect your strategies with these audiences, you can begin to incorporate broader strategies into your marketing arsenal that’ll be useful in reaching out to audiences that aren’t as familiar to you.

Understand Your Goals

What are you trying to accomplish with your Facebook ad campaign? You need to be aware of the goals – something beyond simply “expanding your audience” or “generating more sales” – in order to truly build the best ads possible. What specifically do you want to sell, and to whom? Where do you want traffic to increase on your website, and what specific actions do you want them to take? A generalized ad campaign will generate generalized results; if you truly want to succeed in Facebook marketing, then you need to delve deeper and imbue your ad campaigns with very specific goals and purposes. This will ensure you get the most out of each ad campaign that you’re running.

Running successful Facebook ad campaigns isn’t just about pinging links. It’s about building a lasting rapport with audiences, growing your visibility, increasing brand loyalty and many other things. By experimenting with your ads to find out what works, understanding what the goals of the campaign are and targeting audiences you understand, you’ll get the most out of each Facebook ad.