Ana Gotter — January 10, 2018 — January 10, 2018
Your brand is everything. It defines your business more than anything else. In some cases, your brand and its story can actually matter even more than the product you’re selling. Think about it; there’s likely a few thousand competitors out there (and at the very least a few hundred great alternatives) for most businesses, so what is it really that sets them apart?
Brand building is something that needs to happen consistently and mostly organically, but you can absolutely use PPC campaigns like Facebook Ads to speed up the process. Facebook Ads can put you in front of the right target audience and introduce them to your brand and what you do through careful targeting and remarketing campaigns.
In this post, we’ll take you through our step-by-step guide on brand building with Facebook Ads. No matter how established your business is, this is one that you’ll want to take note of, as brand building is something all businesses should prioritize.
Set Specific, Measurable Goals
You know that you want to build your brand, and build brand awareness in the process. Great! That’s an excellent first start. But brand awareness and brand building are a lot more difficult to measure than things like lead generation or conversions. With those objectives, you can easily see that you’re spending $ 1.25 per lead; how do you measure brand building?
There are several different key performance indicators (KPIs) you can look at, depending on the campaign. These include:
- Engagement
- Impressions/reach
- Video views
- Clicks on your content
Before you launch your ad campaign, decide which KPI you want to focus on for each and what goals you have. Maybe you want your video ad to be viewed 400 times, or to have a 35% viewer completion rate. You should know what you’re willing to pay for these in terms of individual results, the effect you’d like it to have based on the message you’re sending, and your total budget for each campaign. Facebook recommends that you map it out something like this:
Understand the Audience You Want to Connect With
This is another crucial factor that you must consider before even starting to create your ad campaigns. What type of audience do you want to connect with and introduce your brand to? Are you going for general appeal, or trying to win over niche segments of your target audience? Sometimes, going for the segmented marketing can be a lot more effective because you’ll be showing ads that are most relevant to those individuals.
When considering your audience, ask yourself the following questions:
- What use cases of your product will appeal to them most?
- What pain points resonate most deeply with them?
- What sort of thing do they value? Do they want to save money, or invest in a business who helps the world, or do they want to purchase something truly unique?
You can use Facebook’s audience insights and what you know about your own customers to answer these questions, and then prepare to create ads tailored to different segmented groups.
Utilize Storytelling to Define Your Brand
Facebook Ads gives you the opportunity to build your brand both with introducing your brand to new customers, and utilizing re-engagement techniques to reconnect with those who haven’t been as involved with your business lately. No matter which strategy you’re using, you can always build your brand most effectively with storytelling.
Storytelling helps people connect with you emotionally, and it makes you memorable. It makes your business one that they want to root for. As a result, they’ll become a lot more loyal and a lot more invested into your brand and business. You can learn more about how to use storytelling in video here.
You can keep your stories simple but still make them effective. Video ads are an excellent format for storytelling, but carousel ads and single image ads with the right text can work just as well, too.
Run Diverse Ad Content
One of the best things about Facebook Ads is that there’s so many different options to choose from. You can target incredibly specific groups of people, choose exactly where you want your ads to appear, and how you want your ads to be displayed.
There are a number of different ad formats to choose from, including videos, single images, carousel ads, canvas ads, and Instagram Story Ads. You can embrace each ad format uniquely to build your brand uniquely.
Video is the most powerful ad format when you’re looking to share your brand’s story, but carousel ads can detail your business’s journey when used correctly.
When the copy is great, even single image ads can be shockingly effective brand building tools when you’re highlighting what makes you and your business unique, like the example below. Adidas isn’t just selling shoes; they’re selling endless possibilities. Never mind the fact that you’ll wear these shoes on a treadmill you hate running on; you can imagine a healthier, fitter you running along the mountainside. Endless possibilities, after all, right?
Test out different ad formats and see what resonates with your audience. No matter which you choose, though, remember to always use gorgeous, engaging visual components that represent your brand well. Use only high-res images and videos that look professionally edited (even if they aren’t).
Monitor Your Campaigns & Adjust as Necessarily
This is the last step in the continuous, hopefully never-ending cycle that is brand building: monitoring the success of your ad campaigns. Facebook Ads can be a little volatile, especially if you’re new to it, so watch each campaign closely and frequently to make sure that costs haven’t skyrocketed over several days.
As you monitor your campaigns in Facebook’s Ad Manager and general brand awareness and engagement with Facebook’s Insights, you’ll be able to detect what messages are working to attract the most engaged, high-value audience members to you. Create more of that content for your future campaigns to help you shape the perception of your brand exactly as you want it.
Final Thoughts
Building your brand is a crucial part of succeeding in business. While it will naturally take time to firmly establish it, brand building with Facebook Ads can give you a few shortcuts. Because brand building isn’t necessarily as clear-cut as ROI from campaigns driving sales, follow all the steps detailed above to optimize your campaigns and be able to accurately measure them to evaluate your progress.
What do you think? Do you use Facebook Ads for brand building? Did we cover all the steps you follow? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!
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