What started as a small scale social network for college students has quickly become the most used social media platform around the world. With over 2.4 billion users, Facebook is one of the most visited social platforms available. Roughly 70% of Americans have a Facebook account, and 73% of all those users check the app at least once a day. With so many people using Facebook every day it makes for an ideal place to advertise your business and products on.
Getting Started With Facebook Ads
Once you’ve arrived at Facebook and signed in you can start creating ads in your manager account. You’ll go through the different prompts step by step to set up your ads account, then begin building campaigns and ads from your dashboard.
Before getting started with building your campaign you’ll want to have done your research on what you want the goal of your campaign to be. Unlike Google Adwords, Facebook allows you to set a marketing objective to help you reach your goals. These objectives could be to increase brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, promote product sales, and a lot more. Just be sure to think about what you want to get out of this campaign.
Marketing To The Right People
Once you’ve selected a marketing objective you’ll need to select some demographics and who you want your ads to show to. Be sure to do your research on who exactly your target market is to avoid showing to people who are uninterested in your ads.
You’ll need to select the geographic locations for your target audience, set an age range, pick specific genders, and add any languages they may speak. Additionally, you can add specific interests to your ads that may fall in line with your business. Some available interests on Facebook are physical fitness, gardening, DIY crafts, and a lot more. You can also select specific industries in which you think your target audience works in.
Setting a Budget
Like most advertising platforms you have to set a budget to let your ads run. With Facebook you have to do the same thing. You have the choice to use a daily budget or a lifetime budget.
With a daily budget you can set your ads to run continuously throughout the day every day. It will limit the amount of money you spend to the set daily amount, and will also help to keep performance running at a similar clip.
The other option is a lifetime budget which you will set if you want your ads to run for a specific set of time. It could be a few days, a week, months or longer, all depending on what your goals are. Once this budget is set it will spend that amount of money over the course of the time period until the end date. Both are useful budget methods, it just depends on how you want to run your ads.
Creating Advertisements
This is the fun part of the process where you get to build your creative assets with imagery, headlines, and descriptions. You’ll start by choosing the ad type you want to run. There are a few options such as a single image, a slideshow, a video, or a combination. Once you select a style you’ll need to upload your images or videos to help you showcase your business or product.
After you’ve selected what images to use you’ll need to add your headlines and descriptions. Be sure to include language that entices people to click on your ad. Don’t use vague or flowery language, be concise and direct so people know exactly what you’re offering.
Lastly, you’ll need to decide where to place your ads. You can have them show up on desktop, mobile, featured posts, instagram, or a variety of them. While desktop may be your initial thought it is still wise to test the other locations to see how they compare and which location brings in the most qualified users.
The Takeaway
The main takeaway is that Facebook Ads are a great way to help you reach your target audience in a cheap, effective, and simple way. Facebook takes you through the step by step setup of your campaign and helps you set yourself up for success if you’ve done the necessary preliminary research. Be sure to give Facebook a try if you’re looking for new ways to branch out your marketing efforts.