How to Create Facebook Video Ads that Actually Convert

Facebook Video Ads

Facebook has over 2.6 billion monthly active users, but trying to reach them solely through organic methods would be a huge mistake. As Facebook’s reach for organic posts is extremely low. 

The only way to combat this is with ads. And not just any ads, video ads. Facebook video ads generate more views and clicks than photo ads. They can also be 270% more effective at converting. 

So, to ensure you create Facebook video ads that convert properly and help you generate a positive ROI I have made this quick guide.

Check it out below:

Find out what your audience wants:

There are mainly two components of an ad that will affect the conversion rate. These are the ad itself and the landing page it leads to. The ads should help you get the clicks while the landing page should do the rest of the job of converting traffic to leads or sales (whichever your goal is). 

And the best way to do this is to give your audience exactly what they want. So, conduct surveys, interviews, and other forms of research that will help you understand your audience. 

You can also ask for answers directly on Facebook by publishing question posts and polls on your page and in groups. 

creating high converting facebook ads

Along with this, you should also do some competitor analysis and analysis of your own website and Facebook pages to see what your audience wants. For this, make sure you use a good analytics tool. 

You can also refer to your CRM for this. This will not only help you learn more about your audience and their wants and desires but also about what types of posts or activities lead to a sale. You can repeat those tactics and drive more sales. 

A tool you can use for this is Nimble. It has a social insights feature that will pull data from your customers’ social media accounts. 

nimble crm

This will help you understand them better both individually and collectively. It can actually make it very easy to develop a persona. 

Create a video:

As I mentioned before, video ads drive more clicks and conversions than photos.

So, here are a few tips for creating the Facebook video for your ad:

Keep it short

Your Facebook video can be up to 240 minutes long, but Facebook itself recommends you to create a video that is less than 15 seconds long. Short ads work better as people are busy. They don’t want to spend time going through videos that are several minutes long. 

So create short videos. Try and create different versions that range from 5 to 15 seconds. You can split-test them to see what length brings about the best results. 

Use the right dimensions

For landscape ads, Facebook recommends an aspect ratio between 9:16 & 16:9, and for portrait ads, they recommend the aspect ratio of 4:5. You should also create a video with a square aspect ratio if you plan to create an Instagram ad too. 

You can either create different videos of different dimensions or just create one video and crop/resize it. 

For this, you can use Screencast-O-Matic’s video editor

video editing apps

You can import your video onto it and crop and resize it for the different Facebook ads and ads on other networks. 

Screencast-O-Matic can also be used to automatically convert the speech in the video to subtitles. This is something you must do as 85% of video views occur in mute. Subtitles will make it easy for them to follow the video. 

Use video thumbnails with less than 20% text

Video thumbnails will attract attention and drive more plays. But to get a high ROI you need to ensure that they contain less than 20% text. Facebook limits the reach of this text limit is exceeded. 

Add the video to the landing page:

The next thing you should do is add the video to the landing page or another version of it. This will boost the conversion scent between the ad and the video. 

conversion scent

This can then have a strong effect on converting more of the traffic into leads or sales. Even if you don’t embed the video on the landing page at least make the video’s design appear similar to that of the landing page. This can help boost conversion scent too. 

When people find the same video on the landing page or notice the similarity in the design they will sense a familiarity. This will make them feel more comfortable. 

A good example is this ad from NMA.

They published a short version of the ad on Instagram. 

new masters academy instagram ad

And when you visit their homepage you see a longer version of the same video promoting the subscription. 

new masters academy facebook ad

This should increase conversion scent. 

You should be able to create something like this by using a video hosting company like Vimeo to create a distraction-free video. And to create the landing page you can use a landing page builder like Leadpages or a website builder such as Pixpa.

Set up and launch the ad with a small budget:

The next thing you need to do is set up the ad. You can do this on Facebook’s ad manager. You need to simply upload the video, write a description, and choose the placement. Think about your audience while writing the description. Also, think about your audience when you choose the targeting. Your ads need to reach your ideal audience. 

After you set up your ad, you can launch it. In the beginning, you should set a small budget of $5 to $10/day to just test out the ads and make sure they are profitable. Create multiple versions of your ad with different video lengths, descriptions, target audience settings, etc. to see what converts best. 

Gather data and scale up the budget:

When you run the ad at a low budget your main aim should be to gather as much data as possible. This is why you should create multiple versions of your ads and test them out. 

Once you know what’s driving the best results you can make minor tweaks to your ads and increase the ROI even further. After that, you can scale up the budget and increase your revenue. 

To get the data, make sure you analyze both the insights on Facebook and on your website. Your CRM can help you gather data from your website.

Use the data to launch live video ads:

Live videos are very popular on Facebook. They drive 3 times more views than videos that aren’t live. This is because they have the same effect as webinars. They are live just the one time and people get to interact with the presenter. 

But did you know that you can run live video ads on Facebook? 

This will get your live video in front of more people. 

You need to meet certain requirements to run a Facebook ad.

These include:

  • You have to be a page
  • You need to have more than 50,000 followers/fans
  • The live video that you want to promote has already reached 300 views
  • Your video’s been live for at least 4 minutes

So make sure you meet these prerequisites before you turn your live video into an ad. 

Conclusion:

This is how you create Facebook ads that convert. Start by choosing the goal. Then do all the necessary research and create the video and landing page. After that, you can launch the ad. But don’t stop there. Launching is just the beginning. As you need to monitor the ad and make sure it consistently converts at a good rate. 

So, keep an eye out on the data and constantly modify your ads to generate better results.