Facebook is running out of ad space. Not only that, it is also getting harder to reach audiences. The reason? People are not sharing as much personal information on the platform now. So how do we guarantee audience reach? We find ways to capture people’s attention and make it work.

Objective

One of our first Facebook advertising clients was a dentist office. There really was no stated objective and they had not advertised with Facebook before. This provided us with a bit of a blank canvas to come up with short and long-term campaigns.

Campaign

When we were presented with this opportunity to create a campaign, we had decided to focus in on the services this dental clinic offers and build attractive ways to showcase these.

One campaign proved to be successful and it involved this GIF here.

What we did

After watching this GIF about 500 times (and laughing each time), we thought that it would be an attractive way to showcase the dental clinic’s implant service and target an older demographic. After running a split test for two weeks, we were able to gather some more information on the people engaging with this ad. So, we changed the copy and retargeted the ad using those metrics … twice!

Key Results

  • 43 shares
  • 145 reactions
  • We tripled the reach after optimizing the ad a third time (from 4,000 to 12,000!) = lower cost per click
  • Increased page likes by 50+

What we can learn from this

  1. Don’t fix what ain’t broke!

After we saw the success of this ad the first time we ran it, we didn’t want to scrap it. Instead, we used the data we were given and optimized the audience targeting which proved to have been successful.

  1. Videos work

Humans have an attention span of about 8 seconds. Videos work. Make them short and sweet.

Here’s a tip – square videos perform better for those on mobile phones because it takes up more room on the screen!

  1. Humour works

We were able to use shareable content because of the impact it left on people.

  1. Use your data

This is probably the most important thing we did during this campaign. After running the ad the first time, we were able to use data like demographics, how people were viewing the ad (desktop vs mobile), and the age group. This is all without using a pixel too! Facebook ad manager provides us with some very valuable information to help you out with this during and after a campaign. We wrote a blog about it, which you can read here.