As a business owner, you want to optimize your Facebook presence with ad copy that hits its mark, but you may be in the dark about how to do that. It is Facebook, after all, which is hard to pin down in the best of times. In addition to finding your bearings, you also need to find your niche, and if you’ve already found your niche, competition can be fierce. If you don’t have the time, resources, or general wherewithal to invest in a steady stream of advertisements that have that wow factor, don’t worry about it – you can focus on the basics, which will serve you well, and The Web Guys can help you with that.

Facebook Ad Copy and the Behavioral Sciences

Facebook speaks to the masses, so it should come as no surprise that the behavioral sciences apply. A bit of insight when it comes to human behavior can give you an absolute leg up in relation to spending your Facebook ad budget wisely. Let’s dissect what’s meant by ad copy in relation to Facebook by breaking things down a bit. Consider the following:

Your ad copy is the text that’s incorporated in the advert in question, including the headline, description, and primary text.
Consumers are captured by the ad’s visuals and move on to the copy from there.
After pursuing your text, potential customers scan the ad for brand identification.
Finally, customers take a peek at comments because they want to know what they are considering getting into.

Your Visuals

The photos or videos in your ad obviously have to pop. Consumers have become – for lack of a better word – jaded by the inundation of online advertising, which means your unique visual offerings need to capture what it is that makes your products or services special.

Your Ad Copy

While pictures are the pizazz of your Facebook ads, they aren’t going to do you much good if you don’t have the copy to back them up. And when it comes to ad copy, the behavioral sciences deliver.

Social Norms – As humans, we crave social connections, and we’re interested in what our peers are up to, including what kinds of purchases they’re making. This is never truer than when we’re venturing into unfamiliar territory, and this is why quality ratings and customer reviews carry so much cachet.
Cognitive Fluency – Cognitive fluency speaks to the idea that shorter, simpler messages are more likely to move consumers to action and generate trust.
Authority Bias – Consumers value the input of experts and authority figures – especially when the stakes are high, or they don’t have much of a preference one way or the other.
Scarcity – The idea that a product or service is exclusive in some way or that it has limited availability can bolster perceived desirability.
Saliency – The more an ad connects with the consumer’s sense of urgency in the moment, the harder it’s likely to hit. For example, if your ad leads with a come-on regarding holiday shopping, and the potential customer in question is mired in holiday shopping mayhem, it leaves you in an advantageous position.

Keeping Things Short and Sweet

The prevailing wisdom when it comes to ad copy is that the shorter and more straightforward the message you’re selling, the higher its cognitive fluency, which translates to customer action. And there are tests out there backing this theory up.

The Battleground: Beauty Products vs. Valentine’s Day Gifts

A recent study in which advertising campaigns with both short and long ad copy for a luxury fashion retailer were pitted against one another. The first campaign through the gauntlet was for beauty products, and the second was all about gifts for Valentine’s Day. Both campaigns had a longer and a shorter version that amounted to three and one lines of ad copy, respectively, but the basic message in both remained the same. In the study in question, the ads went into the same ad set, which Facebook proceeded to do its thing with – determining the relative performance of each.

Neither the audience that was interested in beauty products nor the audience interested in Valentine’s gifts demonstrated a preference for either the longer or the abbreviated adverts in the original go-round. On the second spin, however, the shorter ad copy drove significantly more clicks – for both beauty and Valentine’s Day products. By the time you’ve caught a potential customer’s eye, in other words, brevity can work in your favor.

The Upshot

Facebook marketing boils down to producing algorithms that are designed to achieve optimal results by giving the people what they want – or what Facebook decrees that they want. Ultimately, specific ad variations play better in specific positions in the marketing funnel. Once you arrive at the point of retargeting an audience who has already demonstrated interest, less really is more when it comes to ad copy.

Leveling Up

You don’t have to pour unlimited resources into your Facebook advertising. The idea is to advertise smarter, not harder, and the cognitive-fluency takeaways from the battle of the luxury items discussed include all the following:

Optimal ad copy length and the intent levels of consumers are interconnected.
The higher the prospective customer’s intent, the more powerful one-liner advertising becomes.
The impact of short, punchy advertising increases in direct relation to consumer intent and brand awareness.

Take the time to tweak the length of your ad copy – with intention. The three well-written lines that attract attention at the outset will likely benefit from being pared down and punched up in their next iteration.

Helping Small Businesses Tweak Ad Copy Since 2005

You don’t have to splash out every time you need to shake up your advertising, and the digital marketing pros at The Web Guys have the savvy to help you maximize your Facebook marketing potential using the principles of behavioral science – with a dash of marketing magic. Go ahead, and learn more by contacting or calling us at (317) 805-4933 today.