As my company has been managing pay-per-click advertising since the dawn of the medium, I've been thrilled to turn its attention to the Facebook advertising platform's amazing targeting abilities. We stumbled a lot at first, however, and went through millions of dollars of testing before we learned to walk (and finally run). Here are the five biggest lessons we have learned about using Facebook ads.

The default to emotion is part of the human condition.

To better appreciate the role of emotion and what it allows an audience to do, we need to take a brief detour into evolutionary biology. The human brain can be understood as three separate brains working in tandem, if not completely integrated with each other. The primitive brain and the limbic brain collectively make up the limbic system, which governs emotion. Within the limbic system, there is a structure called the amygdala, which leaders need to understand.
 

Landing pages are a critical tool for meeting your ever-increasing lead generation goals. Actually, only 8 percent of marketers reported that dedicated landing pages were ineffective, according to MarketingSherpa's 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report. I'm not sure what those 8 percent are doing, but the effectiveness of landing pages for the other 92 percent of marketers hinges on one component that isn't often discussed -- visitors have to trust you enough to give away their personal information on your landing page forms to obtain your offer.

We all know great design has a critical role to play in building a great brand. But how do we go about making that happen? I recently had the opportunity to speak to three top designers about that very question: Robert Brunner, founder of the design shop Ammunition and author of Do You Matter: How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company; Joe Doucet, founder of Joe Doucet Studio; and David Hill, vice president of design at Lenovo and author of the Design Matters blog. Through these conversations, it became clear that the link between design and branding is important, and that having a top design team is to crucial to having a winning brand.

Here's what I learned:

When you walk to your seat in a movie theater for one of the "Live in HD" broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, your experience begins with the sound: the instantly recognizable, immediately comforting hum of instruments tuning and the audience stirring, piped in live from the Met itself. I heard it when I stepped into the Murdock Theater in Wichita, KS last November to attend the screening of Philip Glass's Satyagraha, part of a season in which I traveled throughout the country, attending the Met's 11 HD broadcasts. It was the same reassuring bustle, whether I was about to see Verdi's Traviata in a theater over a casino in Las Vegas or Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the middle of a snowstorm in Boston.

Laura Fredricks, a fundraising consultant, say she has noticed a disturbing trend. Too often fundraisers use the same formula to seek a gift, whether they are asking for $10,000 or $50,000, instead of tailoring each interaction with a potential donor to the person’s interests and values. That practice wastes time and ensures poor results.

Conversations with donors are too important to use a standard template, Ms. Fredricks said. A guarantee that fundraisers are doing the right thing: They should be a little nervous every time. Otherwise, it’s a sign they are coasting.  She offered her five steps to improving conversations with donors:
 

It's every advertiser's worst nightmare: consumers so distracted by a dizzying array of media choices that they no longer notice the commercials supporting them. And its time might be closer than you think. A recent study found that consumers in their 20s ("digital natives") switch media venues about 27 times per nonworking hour—the equivalent of more than 13 times during a standard half-hour TV show.

Image courtesy of lomokev on Flickr