— August 30, 2018
The Facebook Ads brand awareness objective is undoubtedly underused.
The majority of Facebook advertisers want to generate leads and sales as soon as possible, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t dedicate a small proportion of your ad budget to brand building.
In fact, one of my top Facebook advertising tips is to dedicate at least 10% of your Facebook ad budget to brand awareness campaigns.
Whilst Facebook advertising can deliver fantastic short-term results, I think the real value is in the long term.
Facebook ads are still under-priced. Reaching the equivalent number of people on platforms such as Google and LinkedIn is considerably more expensive.
This means you can get your message, your methodology, your products and your services in front of your prospects repeatedly, with a relatively small budget.
The Brand Awareness Objective
Before I get into the details of how the brand awareness objective works, I want to quickly explain how Facebook ad objectives work, and what selecting a particular one means.
The Facebook advertising platform is very powerful and sophisticated. Facebook’s algorithms can optimize your campaigns to achieve specific objectives.
Therefore, if you select the brand awareness objective, Facebook will try to get you as much brand awareness as possible.
But what does optimizing for brand awareness mean?
This is what Facebook says:
Optimizing for brand awareness is all about recall. When you select the brand awareness objective, Facebook will serve your ad to people that it thinks are most likely to remember it.
Ultimately, that’s what increasing brand awareness is.
If more of your target market know about, and remember, your brand and what you offer, you have more brand awareness.
Why Brand Awareness Matters
Ad platforms like Facebook provide highly accurate reporting data that can be used to assess campaign performance.
For every campaign, ad set, and ad, you can easily calculate ROAS (return on ad spend).
This has facilitated a lot of short-term thinking in the digital marketing world. And it has moved marketers away from longer-term brand building approaches that used to dominate TV advertising.
But there is still a huge amount of upside to be gained from increasing your brand awareness. In fact, I would argue that a brand awareness approach is easier and more effective for most companies.
The specificity with which you can target people on Facebook makes brand awareness advertising much more affordable. By identifying the hyper-responsive prospects in a target market and only advertising to those people on a consistent basis, even single person businesses can effectively build their brand.
And more brand awareness makes all your other marketing objectives much easier to achieve.
Brand awareness stands you apart from your competition, which allows you to raise your prices without losing large customer volume.
It also makes it much easier to convert your prospects into customers.
And most importantly it puts you on top of your prospects’ minds. So that when they need your products or services, they immediately think of and then buy from you, instead of someone else.
Brand Awareness Campaign Ad Creative
Brand awareness ads can take many forms, but my favorite is definitely video.
Not only do videos stand out in the Facebook newsfeed and grab people’s attention, they can also convey a lot of information in a short time period. And very importantly, they are easy for your prospects to consume.
Video ads that demonstrate a product or service providers’ expertise are very effective brand awareness builders.
Here’s an example of one of my own brand awareness video ads on Facebook:
Be Patient With Brand Awareness Campaigns
Brand awareness does take time, and it’s important you know that before you start running brand awareness campaigns.
Don’t bother unless you are going to commit to at least 6 months, and preferably 12.
But the long-term rewards can be incredible. I have seen the effects on my own business and with a number of our clients.
Don’t bother unless you are going to commit to at least six months, and preferably 12.
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