How to Boost Your Sales Through Facebook And Instagram Ads in Nigeria

Just to put it out here: we teach Facebook Ads in our social media marketing course on Market Ardent. However, we also know that not everyone wants to purchase a course that gives them step-by-step guides. So, we have decided to write a blog post teaching you how to make sales through Facebook and Instagram Ads in Nigeria.

One of the questions we get often is: how do I make sales on Facebook ads? How do I ensure my payment method goes through? How do I market my products/services through Facebook and Instagram?

It’s not rocket science, neither is it magic. We have consistently helped our clients make sales on Facebook and Instagram Ads and taught others how to do so.

We’re going to show you how to optimize your Ad campaign using Facebook so that you can get a higher Returns on Investment (ROI) every time you run a campaign.

Before we get started, let’s look at what the state of Facebook Advertising looks like.

The State of Facebook Advertising

Potential Reach

There are over 2.8 billion users; I mean active users every month on Facebook. That’s a whole lot of people, if you ask me, which can then translate to a lot of potential customers for advertisers depending on their target audience?

Make no mistake; if you advertise to the wrong people and the wrong reason, you’ll get negative results.

Advertising

In the 4^th quarter of 2020, Facebook generated 27.19 billion U.S. dollars in ad revenue. Damn! That’s a whole lot of money in just three months; those Businesses putting their funds into running Ads with Facebook can’t be all wrong.

Targeting

Facebook keeps changing the way they want businesses to advertise from time to time. However, advertisers still have options to find their target audience and reach out to them using Facebook Ads campaigns.

Having said that, let’s get to the nitty-gritty of how you can Strategically advertise on Facebook. I can bet you’ve never heard about some of these strategies before.

How to Boost Your Conversion on Facebook And Instagram Ads In Nigeria

1. Understand Your Audience

This means two different things: Understand who your audience is and how to target them on Facebook.

Before you think about marketing on Facebook or Instagram, you need to have a strong understanding of your target audience. Why? This will help you lower your advertising cost and make sales because you understand who you’re speaking with.

You need to know their:

1. Age
2. Level of education
3. Income
4. Location
5. Needs and pain points
6. Motivations

It might seem like a lot of stress. However, we wrote down a three-step method to research your target audience in this article. After researching them, build your buyer personas and create audience segments. How to do that is also in that article.

2. Use Your Target Audience Research When Setting Up Facebook and Instagram Ads

One mistake that many businesses make when marketing through Facebook Ads is not using the targeting options on Facebook or not using it well enough.

Firstly: EVERYONE IS NOT YOUR CUSTOMER! That is a fact, and given that, you shouldn’t attempt marketing to everyone. That would only lead to a massive waste of your marketing budget. Plus, when you do that, you end up with no results or minimal quality results.

Here’s what you should do instead:

Step One: Narrow Your Audience

If you’re setting up ads through the business manager, you can narrow your audience while setting it up. Based on your target market research, you can pick interests, pain points, and more. Even exclude audiences that you’re sure will never be your customer. 

Take a look at this set up:

Initially, I used only location and age. That is usually what most people do. Some don’t even check the age area, and some don’t do location. I once saw an Ad from a restaurant in Benin City, Edo State, for shawarma that could only be delivered in Benin. I am in Lagos; I shouldn’t be getting that ad. That was a waste of money for them.

Look at this method instead:

Now, I have made the age targeting better, user interests, and language. As you can see, our reach is still a lot. However, we can get better. We can still ensure we are only delivering our ads to people in locations that we work with, add more interest, and exclude some audiences.

If you’re setting up your ads from Instagram, you can also do this as well. The settings allow it.

Step Two: Consider Lookalike Audiences

After customizing your audience, you might want to include groups that you didn’t think of. You’re human; you don’t have all the information of everyone in the world in your head. To be on the safe side, you can include lookalike audiences.

Those are groups with similar interests and demographics to your page audience. They come in handy when you want to reach people who are similar to your existing fans.

Alternatively, you can set up A/B tests on Facebook, one being your custom audience only, and the other variation is both custom and lookalike audiences. Based on the conversion results, you would know which works for your brand.

Step Three: Save Your Audience

Always save your audience after creating them. You might need them for another Ad. Give your audience a name you can use to recognize them. For example, if this audience was for mums only, save it for that. That way, when you want to create another ad for mums only, you don’t have to go through this process again, except if you have learned more about that audience since then.

3. Incorporate Facebook Messenger Or D.M. Ads

One of the most powerful ways to reach and interact with Audiences is through Facebook messenger and Instagram D.M.s.

Customers always expect instant answers to their questions, and this is where Facebook Messenger ads and Instagram D.M. ads come to play. This feature gives customers a direct link to you. It also gives you an open channel to offer targeted Ads.

The major difference between the Facebook Messenger Ad and other types of Ad is the call-to-action (CTA). Instead of guiding customers to a website landing page or a Facebook page, Facebook Messenger Ads invites customers to start a conversation with you.

It allows you to set up pre-programmed responses based on popular questions or comments that you receive from customers.

With this feature, your ad works to engage customers and offers them the needed information quickly on the go.

4. Remember Mobile

Facebook has more mobile users than desktop, and we don’t expect that to change anytime soon. Plus, the ad revenue we mentioned at the beginning of this article was mostly generated on mobile devices.

So, it would help if you considered mobile-friendliness when running an Ad campaign on Facebook. These are what you should take into consideration:

1. Mobile ads will show a few lines (mostly one to three) of your caption before it gets cut off with “Continue Reading”. This means you need to keep your copy to three lines or less or place the more important part of your caption first with a statement that arouses interest so that they want to read the rest. 
2. Get your image size right. The aspect ratio used to be 2:3 but is now 4:5; if it doesn’t fit exactly, Facebook will awkwardly crop it, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that. Also, preview! Preview!! Preview!!!

It’s also important to test and consider mobile-first formats like Story Ads, Collection Ads, etc.

5. Use Videos Often and When Using Images, Use Less Text

Videos can stop users, especially on Instagram; they love to interact with videos. However, it is understandable if you can’t offer videos – they are more costly to create after all.

So, when using images, ensure that you don’t pack so many texts on the image.

Previously, if the text on your image was more than 20% of the total image, Facebook would either reject your Ad or give you a lower quality score. That stopped in September 2020. However, having too much text on images also affects user experience and conversion rates. 

If you use too much text, the reader would be too distracted to focus on your central message. So, use text only when necessary to your image. Put the majority of the text in your caption.

6. Use Dollar not Naira as Your Currency

This doesn’t affect your conversion rate, but it is likely the reason why your debit card keeps getting rejected, and you can’t run an ad.

Due to DCC (Dynamic Currency Conversion) restriction in Nigeria, you can’t be charged in Naira when whoever is charging you is not in Nigeria. Here’s the thing: you might see Naira on the site, but in the background, they are actually charging you in dollars and trying to use the CBN official rate, and given that banks charge more than that, your transaction will not go through.

So, Instead, when setting up your billing on your Facebook business or Instagram account, select U.S. dollars as your currency and Nigeria as your billing country.

You Can Make Sales with Your Facebook and Instagram Ads If You’re Strategic

That’s how to make sales with Facebook and Instagram ads in Nigeria. Note that there’s so much that goes into a single ad campaign that even the above list isn’t exhausted. We didn’t look at ad creatives at all. That means that you need an effective and well thought out Facebook Ad strategy to get it right.

You don’t want to do this the wrong way and lose your money by running ad campaigns that don’t work for you. That would be a huge expense Instead of an investment. If you don’t do it carefully, you’re more likely to be hit with disappointing results that don’t live up to the campaign’s full potential.

Here’s the thing. If you still feel overwhelmed after reading this post and would rather focus on running your business than marketing, send us an email, call us at +2349086160358, or book an appointment with our Social media advertising team.