What Are Facebook Brand Awareness Campaigns?
But why is that?
Your favourite brands have built their reputations over time to a point where they become household names. This road trip to world dominance is driven by strategic brand awareness campaigns and these campaigns are not just limited to big players. It’s something that can be achieved by any-sized business, with relative success.
In this post, we will introduce you to our favourite ways we can increase your brand awareness and help grow your business using Facebook.
We’ll cover the do’s, the don’ts – as well as, teach you a few tricks along the way. So whatever size business you are, buckle up and take a look through our best practices for Facebook Brand Awareness Campaigns.
What Is A Brand Awareness Campaign?
Firstly, before we go any further, we need to make sure everyone understands what brand awareness campaigns on Facebook actually are and the benefits they offer you and your business.
The Basics of A Brand Awareness Campaign:
Facebook Brand Awareness campaigns target new audiences who may not have come across your brand before or have interacted with your brand in the past. It also provides the opportunity to raise awareness for something like a product or service to existing and new customers alike.
Benefits of Using A Brand Campaign on Facebook:
Facebook brand awareness campaigns offer numerous benefits to businesses of all sizes. Firstly it’s cheaper than other platforms. You can spend much less on a platform like Facebook for a Brand Awareness campaign and test its many ad formats without breaking the bank.
On top of this, you can increase the size of your younger audience thanks to the large demographic of younger people who frequently browse Social Media. Facebook offers incredibly granular and targeted demographic targeting that you can leverage in your ad sets.
Also, let’s not forget about those who have already interacted with your brand. Customer retention is important, and Facebook Brand Awareness campaigns provide an opportunity to connect with those who have previously interacted with your brand, known as ‘Ad Recall’. Combine this with a new customer retention brand awareness campaign and you’re onto a winner already.
Estimated Ad recall is a metric that measures a rough count of how many people can remember your ad within two days of viewing, and/or engaging with it. If they can recall your ad, they are becoming more familiar with your brand, which is important for building your brand.
Creative Specifications For Facebook Brand Awareness Campaigns.
Let’s delve into the creative best practices for Facebook Brand Awareness Campaigns first as this is one of the most crucial elements. Your creative is what is initially going to catch your user’s eye.
Remember customers on social media are constantly scrolling so ensuring your creative is eye-catching and worth staying for is a must.
The best place to start here is with what is required to create an Ad and the best practices for these including sizes, character limits and formats. It’s crucial you get these right as here is nothing worse than a horribly formatted ad that scares potential new customers away.
The top recommended sizes for Facebook Image Ads are 1200 x 628. The images should have minimal writing on them, and the file types need to be a .jpg or a .png.
Now that you know the format, how do you choose the best size?
You can see the best practice sizes below and how they show across different devices. Making sure you pick the correct one for your brand is key to ensuring your ads are of the highest possible quality.
Facebook is not just limited to still imagery either, video is a key player in the brand awareness mix. Below are the best practice sizes for video as well:
- For a landscape video, the size should be 600 x 315
- For a square video, the size should be 600 x 600
Videos can be tricky to get right as quality is crucial, remember users don’t always browse with sound on so optimising for sound off users is something to keep in your back pocket.
The maximum filesize for a video is 4GB but you shouldn’t need to worry about providing your video is short and snappy. You don’t want to scare away users with overly long video creative so keeping this between 15-60 seconds is a good idea. Video also needs to be either .MP4 or .MOV format so keep that in mind when briefing creative.
You need high quality, appealing videos and images that show off your brand. These need to showcase the products or services you offer. This is important when creating ads to catch the attention of your target audience. They need to be easy to understand and ensure they present your products and services well.
What To Include In Brand Awareness Creative?
There is more to creative than just sizes and image quality. It’s important to structure your creative in a way that will attract customers and lead them to take your desired action to deliver on your objectives.
The creative can follow all of the recommended specifications in terms of sizes and quality but the semiotics (the elements that make up the actual imagery) are just as important.
The best place to start is to understand what you’re trying to convey, be it a product, a product category, a type of service or just a top-level view of your brand.
Once you understand this and the objectives of your brand awareness campaign you should have a rough idea of what you want to do with the creative and what needs to be included to meet these objectives.
There are hundreds of different elements you could include in your creative and many will be unique to your brand however there are key best practice points you need to ensure are included in your brand awareness creative:
- The product/service/brand is in focus front and centre of the creative.
- A sense of how it will be used or what problems it solves.
- A clear brand identity, so even if they glanced at it they can tell it’s yours.
- Ensure your logo is present throughout – whether that’s in the corner of your still creative or at the beginning or end of your video.
The Keys To Killer Brand Awareness Ad Copy.
Next, you need some killer ad copy, when it comes to Facebook this comes in a few forms such as headlines and link descriptions.
It is best to ensure it is straight to the point. The text would need to be within 125 characters, the headline would need to be 25 characters and the link description would be 30.
As you can see, you don’t have many characters to work with so ensuring your creative follows the above steps is key to conveying your message.
That doesn’t mean it has to be boring. You can play around with it a bit and try things like:
- Incorporating Emojis: can bring a sense of informality and playfulness to the copy if used well and in the right circumstance (industry dependant)
- Including The Price: This is particularly important is your industry is very price sensitive.
- Using A Customer Testimonial: This gives your copy that extra bit of social proof
- Addressing Common Competitor Issues: This is a cheeky way of highlighting why you’re better.
Equally as important as the ad copy is making sure the ad style aligns with your brand. This includes any particular colour schemes, key phrases or messages you want to portray.
So what does this look like in practice? Let’s take a look.
Facebook Audience Best Practice for Brand Awareness.
When setting up your Facebook Brand awareness campaign, you would need to set up your audience targeting. This stage allows you to build your target audience for those you want to target your brand awareness ads to. You can include age, gender, or the interests of those you wish to include as part of your target audience. You can also target location, say if your business is a local store or based in a particular country.
Top Tips For Facebook Brand Awareness Campaigns.
In addition to everything we have already detailed, there are a few extra tips that will help you give you a competitive advantage over your competitor and allow you to get the most out of your brand awareness ads:
- Select Automatic Ad Placements: It is best to select automatic ad placements and the algorithm will work to target those you wish to. As this is a brand awareness campaign it is important to select Ad Recall Lift as the ‘Optimization for Ad Delivery.
- Don’t Make It Look Too Much Like An Ad: A key tip is to make sure your ad doesn’t look too much like an ad. . This can make it boring for the user to look at, and increase your bounce rate.
- Stick To Up-Beat Imagery: The Facebook Ad Algorithm shows favour to people smiling in pictures and avoids pictures that may be offensive. This is important to consider and follow, as you want to make the most out of what you spend.
What To Avoid When Creating Facebook Brand Awareness Campaigns.
So, what do we want to avoid with Brand Awareness Campaigns?
- Poor Quality Videos/Images: First impressions count! The quality of the images or videos in the ads can reflect how much you invest into your brand and impact the ad recall.
- Chunky Texts: Yes, words are important to tell your brand’s story but long, intimidating and boring paragraphs are not the best way to tell it on social. Instead, keep it concise and engaging.
- No Call To Actions: How are people supposed to know what to do from just looking at your ad? By not including these, people may just skip past your ad as there are no obvious actions for people to take.
- One Variation of Ad Format: If you have multiple products or services, why limit yourself to showing one in the same variation? Facebook offers a variety of different ad formats that can deliver differing results. It’s crucial to ab test and run multiple different formats of ads to understand what formats work best for your target audience.
Separating your different ad formats by ad sets is a wise move, this way you can edit audiences individually allowing you to get much more granular with your testing across Facebook’s ad formats. This will also make reporting and understanding what’s successful sop much easier. Below, we have highlighted the main Ad Formats Facebook provides that you can utilise:
In Summary.
Once you’ve taken the time to carefully identify your ad formats, brief your creative and write your ad copy following the above best practices, you are ready to go! Brand Awareness is something any brand can do, no matter the industry, service or products you offer. Consistency is key. Cliche, I know, but Running one Brand Awareness campaign on Facebook and expecting it to thrive is just not how it works. The best practice for this would be constantly investing in your brand and being patient with results are key. It is important to start a Brand Awareness campaign with no intention to have immediate results. It is a gradual process, and therefore expecting a large turnaround from a singular campaign is setting yourself up for disappointment.
