Why Facebook Ads Fail: The Missing Brand Awareness Strategies

You’re sure you’ve tried every advanced strategy possible, but your Facebook ads still aren’t driving the results you want. What’s the deal?

Most digital marketing professionals assign Facebook advertising failures to one of a few reasons. “Because social media marketing doesn’t work” is one of the most popular. Or, they’ll typically blame on-site factors, like a poor call-to-action (CTA) or landing page design.

The facts?  Your problem might not be at the bottom of your funnel at all. It’s likely at the top.

You want your pipeline to be full, so brand awareness and top-of-funnel investment will always be important. After all: Your conversions will continue to suffer if no one knows who you are.

Read on to learn the ins and outs of Facebook brand awareness, and the 12 secret hacks that will bring your brand awareness Facebook ad campaigns from zeroes to heroes.

Google Ads and Facebook Ads aren't the same

People go to Google to find, research, and buy something specific.

But that’s not how it works on Facebook. People don’t go there to shop, they go there to kill a few minutes, talk with their friends or family, stalk their past classmates, and avoid doing their next report.

It’s during this time that people stumble across ads on Facebook. Something catches their eye and interrupts the scrolling just long enough to grab their attention. This means that throwing an “Irvine Tax Professional” ad on Facebook will probably tank (unless you’re running a retargeting campaign for those who showed interest in such a service off the platform).

Social media is built for connection. Not sales. That’s why you can’t really ask a total stranger to buy your product or service right away on socials. You need to have a longer funnel that leverages ads and nurtures your leads—from discovery to conversion. .

Your awareness campaigns only have one job:

Generate members for your custom audiences as quickly as possible, using the power of brand awareness.

In other words, they don’t (and shouldn’t) sell for you. 

Instead, they act as very convincing ushers that lead people into your Facebook marketing funnel. 

The real measure of success with these bad boys are site visits or on-Facebook engagement, like video views or page likes.

Awareness and interest are intrinsically tied together. 

It’s not about whether or not someone knows your brand name—it’s about whether or not your brand matters to someone.

That’s where this list of battle-er-Meta Ads Manager-tested strategies comes in, helping you build audiences that are both heavily aware and seriously interested in your brand and offer. This magic comes together and translates to more bottom-of-funnel return on investment for you…

…and more cold, hard cash over time.

Now: Without further delay…let’s get into our list of hacks you can’t ignore if you want your brand to be a featured authority in your clients’ minds.

Yeah, it seems simple. But so many people aren’t doing this foundational, extremely necessary step. 

Why? 

Chances are, you sell different products and services to lots of different people. And that might dilute the communal understanding of who your ideal audience is and what they expect.

This is especially true if you have more than just one segment of customers. 

You need buyer personas to bring each audience member to life.

Meta gives you a leg up as you start this process. All you have to do is go to your Meta Ads Manager. Then, go to the left-hand menu and click “Insights.” 

Once you do, you’ll see a handy “last week in review” panel that covers any Meta asset that’s assigned to your Facebook Business Manager. 

The Insights tab offers plenty of, well, insights. Check around the different tabs and learn who you’re trying to sell to—then make it align with your ideal audience.

A great place to start is your Audience tab, where you’ll be able to see location and gender-based attributes of your audience. 

Did we mention Meta’s Insights page has a “Potential Audience” dashboard? 

You’ll also notice your potential audience, like in our screenshot above, has an added section for top pages liked by that audience. Now, you can already start making smart conclusions about who is or could be interested in your brand.

Google Analytics can also provide demographic data on your existing traffic across channels once you’ve configured the platform to do so.

Demographic data is a solid start, but you can’t stop there. Now that you’ve got the numbers down, you have to dig into their psyche. 

More specifically, you need to know what their goals are, and what’s keeping them from reaching those.

It’s work-intensive. But when you know your audience to that level of granular detail, you can accurately sell them the solution to their obstacles.

To do this, you’re going to need additional data points, and the best way to get those is by carrying out real-life conversations.

If you’re thinking, “Now, hold on, I can just ask existing customers questions to see what they like best?”

The answer is: Yes, you can.

Micro surveys are a fantastic way to get the information you need and identify new areas of opportunity for your business. There are plenty of accessible options out there. Some of our favorites include Pollfish, Typeform, and SurveyMonkey. 

Now that you have a little background knowledge on each persona, it’s time to start finding out where those people hang out on Facebook.

Facebook’s interest-based ad targeting gives you the ability to target wide-ranging interests, like “gardening.”

But as you can imagine, that’s not always helpful. You might get hundreds of millions of people in your audience when your specific buyer persona is only a tiny fraction of them.

Facebook allows you to shortcut this discrepancy by selecting people interested in other brands, bloggers, sub niches, and related media outlets.

This provides one really major benefit: You can instantly target a specific cross-section of like-minded people that closely align to your buyer persona(s).

But where should you start if you don’t know much about the intricacies of a given space?

Here’s one idea: Go look at who’s already advertising or showing up for top queries related to your products. You can run these searches in Google with big, generic phrases and see who else pops up.

For example, let’s say you want to sell to a crowd of younger homeowners that are also highly interested in gardening. They probably will want to start a garden in their own backyard.

You can start with the obvious targets, like big-name magazines they might be reading or shows they might be watching. You can also start searching for things that these people probably need, like “garden bed,” to see what brands are advertising their products.

A half-hour or less of this basic research can help you compile a dozen brand names, bloggers, and media outlets to start with.

Then, you can create a new detailed targeting audience on Facebook, and narrow your broader-interest audience down with these additional interests, building out a list of your closest persona matches.

Note: Not all brands will be available to target as interest audiences, but bigger brand names typically will be.

Selling to multiple personas is tricky. It can become really complex, really fast.

You’ll now need not one, but two (or more) interest-based audiences to hit each persona. Mixing personas and audiences up will tank results, otherwise.

One trick is to help people tell you exactly who they are. You see this a lot on pricing pages, when businesses name their pricing plans after the user persona that would need that plan. It’s not lazy, it’s a strategic choice: Clear and consistent ad copy can help guide customers to self-select into the appropriate segments.

Businesses then gather data about a person based on what plan they select, what pages they view, or even what posts they click on, reverse-engineering which specific persona “buckets” they fall into.

Admittedly, this is a little more complex. That’s why most choose to test this in small doses with organic posts first.

This is done by publishing different content types that might be of interest to each persona. After you publish your pieces, you let them get you intel on autopilot. Simple, easy, and effective. 

Once you get your data, look for clues for where you should start and which topics resonate most. That way, you’ll know exactly what to do when it comes time to decide on creative direction and ad objectives.

Brand awareness campaigns need to hit a sweet spot with audience size in your ad set.

If they’re too big, you’re going to waste money advertising to uninterested people, or you’re going to blow through your budget too fast.

If your audience is too small, however, it’ll never get off the ground, and you’ll never reach enough people to make a dent in sales down the road.

The solution here is to start with a number of people of around 2-10 million. If that sounds high, remember that larger audiences result in lower costs-per-thousand impressions (CPMs).

In the beginning, you’ll need to keep adding interests and brand names to build up that list over the recommended 2 million person threshold. But once your list size peaks at or over 10 million, you’ll want to start reducing the number to the ideal size by adding audience exclusions.

Make sense?

Now: Let’s go back to our example from a few minutes ago.

We want to reach young homeowning gardeners, but only the ones who are actually home to do their gardening.

We can add audience exclusions to remove anyone who’s currently away from their hometown:

Continue narrowing this audience by defining your audience further with more interests or adding more exclusions to hit that sweet spot.

You might need to repeat this process several times if you’re going after multiple personas, or if you’re going to test similar audiences against each other (which you should). So, take a second and give yourself permission to do that. 

Once you’re done, it’s time to talk creative.

Under Armour’s “Rule Yourself” campaign with Michael Phelps became one of the most shared ads ever weeks after it debuted during the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Just one year’s Olympics generate over $1+ billion in ad spend. That eclipses the amount spent during each year’s Super Bowl.

So, there’s a ton of competition. Every brand imaginable is going after the ~5 billion eyeballs watching around the world.

The interesting part about this ad was that it featured Under Armour products sparingly, and they weren’t the primary focus of the message.

The only goal of this ad was to resonate emotionally with their customer personas.

Viewers who watched this Michael Phelps ad told AdWeek that they felt “inspired,” “amazed,” and “prideful.”

The “Rule Yourself” campaign emotionally resonated with its target audience 

Obviously, the size, scale, and scope of this Under Armour campaign are off the charts.

The good news is that you don’t need to go anywhere near it to get many of the same benefits.

Remember: Facebook awareness campaigns don’t sell a single thing. Your custom audiences will do that down the road. Instead, your goal here is to reach as many people as possible so that your custom audience fills up to the brim.

If your ads emotionally resonate, they’ll stand a better chance at getting shared or remembered–especially Facebook video ads. (Video is the high-engagement medium of choice these days, let’s not forget.)

Your fans will do the distribution for you, so you can come back to target their friends later on.

In some areas, AI can be hit or miss.

Not this one, though.  

Facebook’s budget and placement optimization tools ensure that ads are delivered to the right people at the right time. This helps increase brand awareness and drive more conversions; ultimately boosting ROAS with little-to-no effort.

Big, emotional campaigns won’t always work.

You might still need a powerful, built-in motivator that you can use for dry, technical sales, too.

After all: People in technical industries still have problems. And when you boil it all down, those problems usually end up hurting them financially.

Whatever the case, most B2B customers have an inherent motivation that you can leverage. That’s where the classic copywriting formula, PAS, comes into play.

Here’s a perfect example from HubSpot:

The problem here is that sales can be stressful.

They agitate the problem by mentioning how spreadsheets can only make the problem worse.

The solution is what you get when you click on their ad.

Once again: the ad doesn’t focus on the tool itself. That would be more appropriate for a middle or bottom of the funnel customer who’s already on the fence about purchasing the tool.

Instead, they focus intently on the problem and finding a solution for it.

It’s clever. It’s clean. And it works because they get you to resonate with that first because that’s what top-of-funnel audiences care about most.

Your solution might not be something they want to buy right now, but anyone who’s done sales can empathize with the guy in this ad. And when they’re ready to pick a solution down the line, they’re going to remember one thing: that you understood what they were going through before you tried to sell them anything.

Do you know how many customers trust influencer messages more than a brand?

About 69% of them, on any given day..

That means if people aren’t getting their product or brand introductions through an image ad, it’s likely coming from an influencer.

Beam Coffee, for example, uses its many influencer relationships to spread the word about its products.

The problem? Traditional influencer relationships can be tough to measure.

Facebook’s introduction of Partnership ad variants gives you a platform to help get in front of new audiences while adding to your credibility through paid partnerships. Oh, and because it’s an ad unit, you get transparent metrics on all interactions in Meta Ads Manager , so you know exactly what you’re getting for the money spent.

You’ll just need to add your brand partners to your branded content after acquiring your Paid Partnership Label, and you should be good to go.*

*This feature is only available for Instagram accounts at the time of this publication.

As you go, it’s important to remember that your goal isn’t to advertise anywhere and everywhere. You want to make the most of your money, so create ads in the places that make the most sense for your brand.

For example, if high-priced, low-engagement desktop ads are a concern, you can exploit mobile ads instead.

More people browse the internet on their mobile phones than on desktop devices. And where’s the majority of that time spent? 84% of it is in apps like Facebook.

That’s why mobile ads are so darn powerful.

As you build your ads, know that your space is limited and time is short—shorter than you’d expect with other ad types, even. Use creative that leverages this small, on-the-go placement option.

Instant Experience ads (formerly Canvas ads) are a totally different ad type.

They’re high-quality interactive ad units that allow you to showcase all kinds of media, from videos to GPS data. Users can scroll through them, pan left and right in them, and click links within them.

Plus, they load about 15x faster than a typical mobile site–and we all know that loading speed wins the race with people’s short attention spans these days.

“Free” is about as close to a magic word as you can get.

It's the gateway to a response, and it lowers the entry barrier for new leads so that you can earn their trust.

But the key to “free” is that it has to be used as a way to offer something of real value and validity that supports your core offer. As you might imagine, it’s used often—so when you use it, you really have to have something outstanding to make it work for you.

The perfect free value proposition is a bit of a moving target. In the beginning, it can be anything from free content to lead magnets:

Once again, SumoMe leverages social proof and “100% Free” to grab your attention. If you're at all interested in growing traffic, there's no way you're passing this one up.

Some brand awareness campaigns can really do well using free offers to capture leads and interest. Typically even “free” content or services are gated, meaning users have to at least hand over their email and name or create a sign-in to access it.

This step also provides a little extra value to your brand awareness campaigns. 

Sure, you might not be selling anything, but you're giving people things to remember your brand by, and you're collecting little tidbits of their information, which can be useful for something like an email marketing campaign. And you’re establishing yourself as an arbiter of helpfulness and expertise in their area of need—laying the foundation for sales and brand advocacy down the line. 

Before you convert, you have to raise the bar for how people see you, where they see you, and how they interact with your brand in order to increase brand awareness. 

Better brand awareness objectives lead to better bottom-of-funnel opportunities down the road, which means more money for you. 🤑

Talk about a win.

Now that you’ve read this guide, you're now your business’s brand awareness expert. 

Now all you need to do is put that knowledge to work.

If you're already on top of your brand awareness game, and you're ready to start working your lower-funnel strategies, check out our next post on using Facebook lead ads to supercharge your conversions.

Building brand awareness campaigns on Facebook requires a fundamentally different approach than Google Ads. While search ads capture existing intent toward the bottom of the funnel, social media marketing thrives on interrupting the scroll with compelling content that generates interest before asking for the sale—filling that top funnel faster than you can say “hey, let me sell you my offer?”

Another primary key to successful Facebook advertising lies in generating custom audiences through strategic top-of-funnel campaigns. This step allows you to engage with potential customers through site visits and on-platform interactions before moving them deeper into your marketing funnel.

Mobile ads consistently deliver lower costs per reach across industries, making them an essential component of any brand awareness strategy. When combined with tools like Facebook's Instant Experience ad type, they create interactive opportunities to capture attention (and brand loyalty) while users scroll through their news feeds.