Posted by The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Keith Krance and Thomas Meloche’s book Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising. Buy it now fromAmazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound
The following framework will help you quickly create winning Facebook ads, multiple ad variations for testing, optimizing and reducing ad fatigue. You can mix and match the different ad blocks any way you want. Some ads will have all seven building blocks, and some may only have two or three.
1. Curiosity
Curiosity-based hooks are some of the most battle-tested and proven strategies for grabbing someone’s attention and getting them to read on, watch on or listen on. You can ask a thought-provoking question, use shocking statements, make a statement that goes against conventional wisdom and many more.
Related: 14 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Page Engagement
2. Challenge, frustration, pain or desire
The best and easiest way to get these type of ad blocks written for you is to survey your audience. I have two questions regarding challenges and desires that I use in my deep-dive surveys to help create potential ad building blocks:
- Frustration or challenge. “What’s your number-one single biggest challenge or frustration with using Facebook to drive traffic and sales right now?” (Please be as detailed and specific as possible. Go beyond saying “too confusing” or “too expensive.” The more specific and detailed you are, the more likely I’ll be able to cover your topic.)
- Desire. “Why do you want to grow your business using Facebook ads or any online channel? What is the biggest reason why you want to master this or have someone master it for you?”
Tweak these questions for your own business so you can discover what your customers’ biggest challenges or pain points are regarding your product or service.
3. Benefits and desires
What is the desire or benefit that your customer will achieve? What is the true, deep down, desire they’re looking to achieve? To see if you can get deeper with your audience, you just need to add the three words “so you can” or “so that” to the end of any benefit you already have. Try it — it’s kind of fun! Just be aware that with Facebook’s stringent ad policy, sometimes using benefit-driven statements can violate ad policies and get your ads disapproved. Please carefully read through the Ad Policy section online at Facebook.com.
Related: Top Tips to Create Facebook Videos to Market Your Business (Infographic)
4. Credibility or authority statement
Why should people listen to you? What credibility or authority do you have in the marketplace to make people want to pay attention to you, trust you and do what you ask them to do? This is one of those ad blocks you want to be strategic with. If you’re not careful, you can come across as boastful. However, you’ll get better and better as you get more experience.
5. Give an “Aha!” moment
What information can you reveal or what story can you tell that can give someone a sudden insight or realization? How can you expose a common belief as being a myth, inaccurate or recently changed in some way? How can you give someone a revelation?Make them aware of something they didn’t know existed, didn’t know was available, didn’t know was possible or something else that will give them an “Aha!” moment?
You won’t be able to do this in all your ads, but when it’s appropriate, either within your ad copy or within a video, it is powerful on many levels. It makes people immediately trust you and want to learn more. And it makes your ad much more shareable. This is huge in terms of Facebook’s algorithm — the more shareable your ad is, the more Facebook rewards you with cheaper clicks, cheaper impressions, cheaper views, more impressions and higher ROI.
Related: The Starter Guide to Facebook Groups for Business
6. Call to action (CTA)
What action do you want the viewer to take next? How can you have natural CTAs woven into your ad copy or into a video? If you don’t make it crystal clear what you want the reader or viewer to do, then they won’t do it. Remember, people are very distracted and are probably just skimming your ads.
7. Overcoming objections
We’ve run many experiments where the conversions increase even after we added an overcoming objections section in the ad copy. Even if it makes the ad copy much longer, it ends up building trust and giving you higher relevance scores and higher conversions. We’ve even used a mini FAQ to overcome objections and build trust. And it flat-out works.
Those are the seven ad building blocks! Now it’s time to start making your blocks so you can build killer ads.