Tips On Using Facebook Carousel for SMBs
June 12, 2017
If a picture is worth a thousand words, it stands to reason that 10 pictures are worth…well…ten thousand words.
In advertising, that’s a lot of content.
Better yet, why not make those images move? With fast moving, social media feeding audiences, a dynamic image or video gets people to stop and pay attention.
That’s the basic idea behind Facebook Carousel Ads, which is an ad format that lets you display a series of images or videos.
Display a line of products, the features of a single product, explain a process, or even tell a story.
Within the ad format, you can create multiple calls to action, test images and sequences, and mix media including video shorts. And of course, these ads are easy to thumb through on a phone screen.
It’s always an advantage in digital advertising to be able to get your point across fast. Consumers today are hyper-impatient.
Carousel ads fit the bill. Here are some tips and examples for inspiration.
Product Display
A natural for the carousel format is to show multiple related products. Match the perfect scarf with that hat…it’s an automated upseller.
For example, Neiman Marcus displays their new spring collection:
Restaurant menus and food services are an obvious choice for this:
Also, you can show multiple features of a single product:
Product ads are the perfect choice to display your existing customer audiences to entice interest and encourage repeat business.
Informational Marketing
You might be wondering how this will work if you offer a service instead of a product.
It can work well when you put together related resources into a kind of a quick moving infographic.
This is also effective when you want to explain a process in quick steps.
Tell a Story
In marketing, we often talk about the power of storytelling. Virtually every ad – from cheeseburgers to retirement planning – improves when clients vicariously experience the product’s benefits.
With digital marketing, storytelling takes on new elements and structures. This is not the “Once upon a time…” structure you learned in high school English.
In fact today, stories take clips from everyday life and are driven by realism. We share stories from our lives on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook.
You can think of Facebook Carousel as a way to tell a social media short story. You have a connected series of images that move people through an experience.
For example, these bracelets go beyond being just jewelry and become part of a living story, a day at the beach:
This ad comes across as kind of Snapchat story, which is a great way to hold people’s interest.
This business, which turns old t-shirts into quilts, uses images sent by customers of them receiving their quilts.
These are exactly the kinds of images that get shared on Facebook. The more people share your content, the more free advertising you get. This company saw a huge gain in customers taking images with their quilts and sharing them on their own networks after this campaign.
You know your social media advertising is working when your customers start telling their stories – with your product at the center – and sharing them with their friends. You can’t buy advertising that powerful.
Facebook Carousel ads are yet another tactic you can try and test. Display them to custom audiences the same way you target any campaign. The more engaging your images, ideas, and stories are, the better you’re likely to do.
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