The Klarna Summer Small Business Series continues, bringing experts to our small and medium-size business partners with clear, actionable advice on ways to improve their businesses and attract new customers. Our latest session was titled “How to advertise on Facebook like a pro” and featured Nicole Leinbach Reyhle, the founder of Retail Minded, and Josh Henry-Hicks, VP Paid Social at MuteSix, one of the most effective digital agencies in social media marketing.
You can view the entire session here, but below are some quick, important takeaways from the discussion:
Stop the scroll.
The average Facebook/Instagram user scrolls more than 300 feet in their Newsfeeds every day. Amidst all that, your brand needs to stand out enough in order to get people to stop and interact with your messaging. According to Facebook’s data, start with creating mobile-first creative.
MuteSix’s recommendation: Come up with a variety of three-second hooks, capable of grabbing scrollers’ immediate attention and representing your brand or products in an active way. These kinds of content items don’t have to be expensive (you can film on just your normal phone most likely) but they need to be representative and interesting enough to compete with all the other content in people’s feeds to create an early connection.
Solving your customers’ problems.
Consider how your audience makes decisions and start your content with how they’ll actually engage with your products. Winning video ads start with a captivating hook getting the user to slow their scroll, then show a specific pain point. Having demonstrated the problem, show how your brand or products provide solutions and solve it. Finally, prove your credibility and authority, showcasing the product’s successes (and you can also highlight other reviews and feedback on the product.)
Just showing the product isn’t enough to get people to stop—you need to explain the “WHY” for your product and demonstrate it effectively.
MuteSix’s recommendation: Demonstration videos are the top-performing type of video on Facebook and Instagram. People love to see the product in action and how it improves their life. Make it entertaining and informative and watch it perform better than anything else you’ve done.
Understand your audience.
Learn to love analytics. Facebook and Instagram both have robust data for your pages. Through Insights you can get full access to who your audience actually is, their age and income brackets, their education levels, and the other pages and brands they follow and like. The information of who they are and what’s important to them is there for you to utilize—get comfortable with it and better target your content into something that fits your audience’s specific needs.
Land the sale.
When it comes to customer acquisition for small and medium businesses, social media remains the fastest and usually cheapest way to get new shoppers, despite it feeling potentially like a saturated market. It’s not enough to just make the ad though; fully think through the landing page experience that ad is sending them to. Without it, it’s all wasted effort.
Ensure your advertising investment is well-spent by having strong landing pages with clear, actionable ways for shoppers to understand your products and value propositions, and then to actually purchase. The landing page is an integral part of the customer journey and your place to differentiate your products and brands. Good ads attract people, you need to then make sure the attraction isn’t just surface-level by continuing the experience in an engaging, aesthetically-pleasing, and informative way.
Get more specifics and detailed information from our experts, including what ad content items perform best, how to get started on TikTok, and what Apple’s recent iOS changes mean for you by watching the full recording here.
And for more actionable insights, check out the recaps of our first two Summer Series events, “How to build a stellar online shopping experience,” featuring maude, Juiced Bikes, and Maison Kitsuné. and “5 ways to improve your email marketing and boost sales” featuring Klaviyo and gr8nola.