Baking the Perfect Facebook Ad: 3 Key Ingredients for Ad Campaign Success

Jul 30

Written By Sophie Griffiths

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Baking the Perfect Facebook Ad: 3 Key Ingredients for Ad Campaign Success

What's this episode of the lionhearted ceo podcast about?

Transform your ad strategy from Pinterest fail to showstopper with this simple recipe.

Are you feeling like you're trying to bake a Facebook ad cake without a recipe? In this episode, I'm sharing the three key ingredients that will turn your ad strategy from a soggy bottom to a star baker worthy creation!

Here's what we're whisking up:

The perfect campaign objective (no more hoping it'll rise on its own!)
How to choose between warm and cold audiences (get the right temperature every time)
My secret recipe for scroll-stopping ad creative (the cherry on top!)
Tips to avoid common Facebook ad kitchen nightmares

You'll learn how to approach your ads like a true Lionhearted CEO, mixing the right elements to create a campaign that's both delicious and converts. Whether you're a baking novice or looking to add some extra flavour to your current strategy, this episode will give you the confidence to create ads worthy of a Hollywood handshake.

AUDIENCE BUILDER COURSE:

Ready to turn your Facebook ads from flat to fabulous? Pop on your apron, preheat your oven, and let's get baking! Finally stop throwing spaghetti at the wall and nail your ads with the Audience Builder Course: https://sophiegriffiths.co/abc

Hi! I’m your host Sophie Griffiths, a Meta ads expert and business growth strategist.

The LionHearted CEO podcast is designed for impatiently ambitious women who are ready to scale and often juggling motherhood alongside their thriving online businesses in coaching, course creation, or service-based business.

If you enjoy the podcast, here are some ways you can continue the conversation:

Social:

Love Instagram? Click here to watch a video I made on the Warm audience trap (hint, it's something almost every client struggles with!)More of a LinkedIn fan? I'm there too! Come and follow me here: Sophie Griffiths

Free Resource:

Ready to grow an audience of people who WANT you to sell to them? Radical idea I know, but it shouldn’t be! Click here to get access to my step by step guide to using simple, effective ads to build & nurture a community of superfans,

Work together:

Ready to build an audience of superfans who are excited and ready to buy from you?
Whether you are just starting with Meta (Facebook & Instagram) Ads, you have dabbled but want to build your confidence with your first funnel, or you're already killing it and you're ready for fast growth - I can help! Click here to choose the best option for you

Got questions?

DM me on Insta or LinkedIn
Email me here: hello@sophiegriffiths.co

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Read the transcript:

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors.

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this week's episode. So today 

[00:00:03] we ain't going to talk about the three elements of a really high-performing ad campaign so that every single time you were building a campaign, you can ask yourself three questions 

[00:00:12] to help, you know, that you're going to reach the right people, they're going to be doing the right thing and you're going to get the result that you want. 

[00:00:18] Okay. So the way I like to describe this to clients is often what happens is you decide you want to start running ads. Okay. So you go into ads manager, you've got a rough idea. Maybe you've watched like a free master class. You've maybe done an ad before and it did. Okay. You go into ads manager and there are so many options. 

[00:00:35] It feels like it's options upon options. Do I want an awareness campaign or do I want an engagement campaign? Do I want this audience or that audience? How many ads should I be running? There are so many variables.

[00:00:47] It's a little bit like walking into a supermarket and someone saying in the shop with everything you need to make the perfect cake. You just need to go and find it. But you kind of know roughly what you need, like, okay, I'm going to need some flour. I'll probably do some [00:01:00] eggs, maybe some butter. But in terms of making this specific cake that you want, maybe it's a birthday cake you want, you need to make it look appetizing, or it needs to be gluten free, or, What substitutions do you need to make sure that it's the right cake for what you need? So to help you. I have created these three questions. 

[00:01:17] Which essentially give you this recipe. So that every time you build a campaign, you know exactly what you need to ask yourself. And then you can go into ads manager and just select the thing you need rather than feeling overwhelmed. And like, you've got no idea what you're doing and just keeping a fingers crossed and hoping for the best. Let's jump in with a question. 

[00:01:36] Number one. What action do I want? Okay. So every time you start a campaign, you're going to start with the actual campaign. Objective. Okay. Now what this is saying to Facebook is I want you to find me people who okay. And then the objective you select. We'll determine on how that sentence finishes. 

[00:01:55] Now the thing to keep in mind here is that Facebook knows the kind of interaction that, that you [00:02:00] have with ads and with organic posts. So for example, if you're someone who is likely to comment, like share on a post on Instagram or on Facebook, Facebook is going to show you more ads that are asking you to do that type of action. 

[00:02:13] If you're someone like me that is likely to buy from an ad. I buy all the time from my Facebook and Instagram feed because it's a highly curated feed and it shows me exactly what I want. Then it's likely to show me more sales ads because it's like, Hey, she's likely to buy it. Let's put some sales ads in front of her.

[00:02:31] So at Lee. If you're someone that's likely to sign up for a freebie, you know, your name and email address, maybe you're not likely to buy, but you'll probably sign up for the free thing. Then you're going to get show more ads like that. So let's go through the six core objectives that are going to help you decide which objective to use. So the first one is engagement. 

[00:02:48] So I want Facebook to show this ad to people who are likely to watch my video, save my post comment. Like, okay, this is engagement. You want to use engagement campaign? If you want people [00:03:00] to take an action like that on your post. That is the next objective is sales. Unsurprisingly you use this one. 

[00:03:08] If you want Facebook to find you people who are likely to buy from your ad. Now, this primarily is used for e-com. However, I do use it for clients with their low-cost offers.

[00:03:17] The next one is traffic. Okay. , we're going to select the traffic objective if we want Facebook. And when I say Facebook, I always mean Facebook and Instagram. We could just say matter cause it covers them both, but it kind of confuses people. So I'm going to say Facebook, but just know that, I mean, Facebook and Instagram. So we're going to use traffic. 

[00:03:34] If we want Facebook to find people who are likely to click on our content and go somewhere else. That could be going through to your website. It could be going through to a landing page. It could be going through to your Instagram account. If you're on Facebook, for example. So traffic is when we want people who are likely to click and go somewhere else. We're going to use the leads. 

[00:03:54] Objective. If we want Facebook to find those people who are likely to give us their contact [00:04:00] details, that's usually name and email address. And they they're people who are likely to get the free thing . Those are the kinds of people that are going to get these ads. Then there's awareness. 

[00:04:09] Now this is the one that trips people up the most. So the premise of this one is I want Facebook to show my ad to more people. Now, there isn't actually a people who are likely to because this awareness one just shows it to as many people as possible. And a lot of small businesses get a little bit tripped up on that because like, yeah. 

[00:04:27] I want to know the people to see my ad, because if I can just get my stuff in front of people, then that's all I need. However, often as small businesses, we really want people to take an action. Okay. So actually we don't just want people to see it. We want them to like him. 

[00:04:41] We want them to comment on it. We want them to click through on the button. We want them to sign up to our email list. We want them to come and see our Instagram content and follow us on Instagram. We actually often don't just want them to see the ad. We want them to take a next step. Okay. So that's where we'd use one of the other objectives as relevant for what we want. Now awareness is [00:05:00] really good. 

[00:05:00] If you've got a local business where you have a much smaller pool of people. So generally, you know, when we're talking about online businesses, we can go across the whole of the UK or, you know, anywhere in the world. If you've got a limit on the amount of people that you can actually have in your audience, because the people you want to speak to are quite local. Then awareness can work really well. And it will give people in the local area. And awareness of your business for future. 

[00:05:24] So for example, let's say you just opened a new hairdressers on a high street, and you just want everyone to know that you're here. You know, you're not necessarily expecting them to take any action right now. You just really want to let people know that you're there so that when they're thinking about having the hacker in the future, then they're kind of aware that you're there. Also works really well for very big businesses. 

[00:05:44] Like Coca Cola, British airways. You know, British airways will probably be running awareness ads around like January time, because it wants to remind people, you know, When you're looking at holidays, make sure you look at us. And people like Coca-Cola like, you might see an ad for Coke, but you're not going to click through and buy a [00:06:00] Coke from the ad. 

[00:06:00] Are you. It's more just so the next time you go to the shop, you're like, oh yeah. I'm going to buy Coke. So that's the purpose of awareness ads. And then the last one is app promotion. I'm actually not going to go into that. I mean, you can guess the premise. It's going to find people who are likely to download an app. From your ad? 

[00:06:16] It's quite a specialist ads for app promotion. So I don't go into them generally, but that's what it's there for. So that's your first question, what action they want people to take so that Facebook can find me people who are likely to take that action. The second question is who do I want to see this ad? Now you've got two layers of questions here. The first question you're going to ask yourself is, do I want people who are already in my world to see this ad. Or do I want people who have never heard of me before to see this ad? Now, if it's people who already in your world, maybe you want to show them contents, you're creating organic content and that you feel like nobody's seeing it. 

[00:06:53] It's not getting hardly any week. And you actually think God, I've got loads of people that follow me. If they could just see this content, that [00:07:00] would be amazing. So we can do that. We can show people that we can create. What's called your warm audience on Facebook. So we feed data into Facebook. 

[00:07:09] These are actually called custom audiences when you build them in Facebook. And if you're interested in audiences and how to. To build audiences that really get you great results actually. I covered this in detail. Two episodes ago. So make sure you go and check that out. But as an overview, your warm audiences, you can create the ones I recommend initially are uploading your email list into Facebook. All of your people who follow you on Instagram and Facebook. Your website visitors. 

[00:07:36] If you have the pixel on your website, you can create an audience of people who've been on your website. And then video views. So people who've watched any of your videos or Instagram or Facebook, so you can give Facebook that data. You can create what's called custom audiences. 

[00:07:50] So I always say to my client says, is a great opportunity, especially when people are joining your world. So let's say you've got lead ads running and you're getting new people onto your email list all the time. [00:08:00] We really want to start making sure they see your organic content as well. 

[00:08:03] So , if you think, right, what are the three to five posts? Once someone joins my world, they might really want to see that would really help them understand how I can support them, the pain points that I can solve for them, the offers, the ways they can work for me, with me. You know, social proof of other people that have worked with me. 

[00:08:18] Okay. It's all this great content that you really want to kind of show them and bring them into your world, help them get to know you really quickly videos work really, really well for this as well. And then the other side of this is the cold audience. So if you want people who have never heard of you to, before to see your ads, then you're going to think about building a cold audience. 

[00:08:36] So this is likely to be used. If you are running lead ads. So, if you want to get new people on your email list, obviously you want to make sure it's people who've never heard of you that are seeing the ad. Also, if you want to grow your Instagram with new ideal followers, then you need to be showing it to people who've never come across you rather than people who are already in your world. So you're going to think, okay. 

[00:08:56] I want a cold audience and therefore my options are either an interest [00:09:00] based audience. So that is based on people's interest, demographics, job titles, all that great stuff. You're going to build that out again. That's I go into a lot more detail on that. Two episodes ago. Or you can do a lookalike audience, which is where you take all the data from all the information I've talked about from your warm audiences, all those custom audiences, like your email list, your Instagram followers. Your website visitors, you can say to face, but by take of who those people are and find me people that look like them. 

[00:09:30] So people that are similar now, my big word of warning here is that sounds great, but most people's audiences are not big enough and are not. Once they look pure enough, they're not. Full of people that are your exact ideal clients to do this well straight away. So if you're not running ads at the moment, if you're quite new to running ads, if you don't have a huge audience, then I would absolutely start with interest based audiences. 

[00:09:52] Lookalikes can work, but even with clients to be fair that have big audiences, I would usually start with an interest based audience. So [00:10:00] that's the second question. Who do I want to see the ad? You need to think. Do I want new people or people already in my world.

[00:10:05] Then the last question. The third question need to ask yourself to make sure you're building this really high performing campaign. That's going to get you what you want. Is, what do I want them to see? 

[00:10:14] And again, there are three sub-questions here. You need to ask yourself. Okay. The first thing is, what copy am I going to write? What image of video am I going to use? And then what call to action. Do I need, okay, so we just take the copy. You need to write your primary copy. 

[00:10:31] So that is like, it's a bit like a caption, if you think of an organic post. So it's the long bet. That you need to write. So that's called your primary copy. Or most ads, not all or most ads. That's also a headline as well. So that's the, if you think about a Facebook ad that you've probably seen, you have the image, then underneath you have the button and then to the left of it, there's like one sentence. 

[00:10:51] That's the headline. And then also you'll sometimes have copy on the image as well as you to think about what you want to write on the image. 

[00:10:57] Now in my audience builder course, I actually have [00:11:00] copy that converts. Structures for you to use so that you can literally just follow exactly what you need to write, because it can feel quite. Overwhelming to write your ad copy with absolutely no guidance. So I actually have a tried and tested formula specifically for lead ads to get people to download your free thing. I have a tried and tested for me a lot. 

[00:11:17] I use all my own ads with my clients ads. And it works brilliantly. So that can kind of give you that headstart rather than you having to create your copy from scratch on your own. Now the next thing you need to decide is what kind of image or video you want people to see? So you have three options here. 

[00:11:32] You can do a video, a carousel or a single image. Generally speaking, I'd start with a single image. I actually have over 40 I Canva templates in the audience builder course that you can just change the branding and adapt for your own needs. So that is again, super simple to get you started. 

[00:11:50] Reels are working really well at the moment. Very simple, quite short point of view wheels. I had one that I created a few months ago now and it harmed my lead cost. [00:12:00] Literally just going from a single image. To using a real, so I definitely have a look at what kind of reels are performing well for you at the moment organically. 

[00:12:06] And see if you could use that in your ad. And then carousels, I do sometimes use, but generally speaking, I stick to images and wheels. And then the last question is your call to action. So you just need to think about right. What exactly is it they want them to do so you get a button. On most of the ads, especially like the lead ads. 

[00:12:23] So you would get a button you can choose things like sign up, download, subscribe, learn more. There's lots of different ones. You can choose you can't unfortunately type your own button. At the moment you just have to select the ones that Facebook gives you. So that's the first thing. 

[00:12:38] The second thing again is you can have your call to action in the headline, like I mentioned earlier, and also I'd really recommend you having a call to action in the copy as well. So at the end of your copy, I always recommend saying something like. Click the download button to to get your free guide today. So that's how you can weave in your call to action. 

[00:12:55] Cause you really want to make sure that people actually do what you're asking them to [00:13:00] do.

[00:13:00] And then you have it, those other three questions. That you can ask yourself when you're making any campaign. So just to give you a quick example, let's say you wa you've got a new freebie and you want people to sign up to it. So the first question is what kind of people do I want Facebook to find me? 

[00:13:15] Well, I want them to find me people who are likely to give me that detail so that are likely to sign up for a freebie. So we're going to use the leads objective. Okay. The next one is I want to grow my email list with new people. So is it a warm audience or a cold audience? Well, it's a cold audience and I'm going to go with an interest based because I don't currently have a huge audience. And the people that do follow me aren't necessarily my ideal clients. So I'm going to go for a new audience and only go for three to five interests. To make sure that I kind of give Facebook that guide and direction on who they are. And then finally, what do I want them to see? 

[00:13:50] So I'm going to write my copy to make sure that I have a nice hook at the top. That I share that I'm the authority in this area. And I give them a little bit of a taste on what's in the [00:14:00] guide. I'm then going to create a wheel, which is a bit of a point of view will say my one that I've done recently is like, Point of view, you stopped dabbling and ads and start growing your email list and you get DMS like this. And then I kind of start screenshotting the DMS underneath. So you're gonna use a real, and then the call to action is going to be download because let's say it's a guide that you're going to be sharing with them. So that, and then basically all you need to do is plug that into Facebook. 

[00:14:28] I know I make that sound really easy. But if you do want help with that, if you do find ads manager overwhelming, and you need some help with that, then again, in the audience builder course I have it. Short videos where I literally do it on screen and you can follow along with me step-by-step so it doesn't feel quite so overwhelming. But you have essentially the exact recipe you need, you just need to then go in and plug it all into Facebook and get those ads up and running. 

[00:14:53] I hope it's made you see that when you go into ads manager and see the millions of different options, actually, you don't need to worry about them all. 

[00:14:59] You just need [00:15:00] to stay super focused on what you need from this campaign. And don't get distracted. 

[00:15:05] I will put the link to the audience builder calls in the show notes, because I have referenced it a few times today. 

[00:15:09] And if you're looking for support, it's a brilliant way to get started and help you get those first few ads up without feeling that overwhelm. That can happen when you go into ads manager and you're not exactly sure what you're doing. So I hope this has been helpful as always, if you want to chat about it, share your wins. 

[00:15:26] Tell me your breakthroughs. Just come over to Instagram. I'm at Safie Griffiths co. And I would love to chat to you there.