As Facebook’s advertising offering continues to evolve, those of us that are looking to make the most of the world’s biggest social media platform are presented with more and more ways to achieve our marketing objectives.
Facebook’s platform gives you a multitude of ways to target users with mobile friendly ad formats. With mobile users making up a bigger and bigger proportion of the online audience, ensuring our ads are mobile friendly is only becoming more important.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the more recent mobile-first additions to the Facebook advertising platform, and how you should select the right ones for your marketing campaigns.
Keeping your objective in mind
When a new advertising opportunity presents itself, it can be easy to get excited about the flashy new way of promoting your business.
It’s important to remember that your marketing, and wider business, objectives need to dictate the kinds of advertising you use within your campaigns – Facebook advertising is no different.
We’ll look at the kinds of marketing objectives each of these marketing methods is best suited to. From your perspective, keep you goals in mind and scrutinise each other through that lens.
Canvas
“Canvas was built to bring your content to life in a fast-loading and seamless experience on Android and iOS. Leveraging the same technology used to display photos and videos quickly in the Facebook app, Canvas loads quickly, as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile web.” – Facebook
Canvas is a great way to put interactive, engaging content in front of mobile users. With the ability to put video, imagery and text in front of users in a format specifically designed for mobile allows you to get around some traditional problems many businesses have with advertising on mobile.
While you can include calls to action and links out to external destination – for example, out to a converting landing page on your website – we’ve seen the most success when using canvas in a way that keeps users within the Facebook experience.
This makes Canvas perfect for driving brand awareness, reaching out to users within the Facebook platform and engaging them with imagery and content that shows them the best of your brand.
Collection
“Collection is an ad format combining a video, slideshow or image with product images taken from a product catalog on mobile.” – Facebook
Collection gives you the ability to display related products alongside a video or image. Users that tap on a product will move into a shopping experience, again within the Facebook platform – making this another mobile friendly way of promoting your offering to prospective customers.
Within the platform, you can then showcase a variety of products that might be of interest to the user. Once the user taps on a product they’re interested in, you can drive them out to a conversion point on your website.
Collection allows you to make shopping a more mobile friendly, visual experience. It gives users the chance to discover your products within the Facebook platform, only leaving Facebook when they are ready to take action.
This makes Collection a great way to educate prospective customers about your products.
Perhaps more exciting though is Collection’s ability to drive conversions out from social media – combined with the fact that it’s been designed to do this specifically for mobile users makes it a powerful tool for businesses looking to make more sales.
Lead ads
“With Lead adverts, potential customers can sign up for what you’re offering, and you’ll get accurate contact info to follow up with them.” – Facebook
Lead ads are, at the time of writing, one of the newest additions to the Facebook mobile advertising offering.
These ads allow you to include a lead capture form within your Facebook ads – when a user opens up the form, it’ll already be filled in with any information they’ve shared with Facebook. All they need to do is fill in the gaps. You can tailor this form to only capture the information that is relevant to your business, so you won’t be inundated with information you don’t need.
Once again, this ad format has been designed with mobile in mind. It’s also another option that doesn’t require users to leave the Facebook platform – rather than interrupting their journey through their Facebook feed, you convert them right there and then.
While you receive this information as a set of leads, you can also use the people that have showed interest in the ad to create a custom audience – and then create a look-a-like audience based upon these people. Lead ads is going to open up a set of new opportunities for digital marketers to expand and improve their Facebook advertising strategy.
With regard to objectives, the clue here is in the name. This is a great way to generate leads, and as we mentioned earlier it allows you to convert people while they are still in their Facebook feed, rather than trying to convert them by interrupting that experience and sending them off to a landing page.
If your social media objective is lead generation, then this might just be the method for you!
Get more paid media insight
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