Your Guide To Starting Facebook Advertising!
With the Facebook Platform ever-changing their algorithm, it can make it challenging to keep an excellent organic reach across your business profiles. This is where a good Facebook Ad Campaign can come into their own and are more likely to get your products or services in front of your desired audience. With how targetted a Facebook Ads can be, it can be the best advertising method in terms of cost as you only pay to reach your desired customer.
In this guide, we'll go through the different ad types and the other targeting options.
TYPE OF ADS
IMAGES
These simple ads are a great way of getting started. You can create one with a few clicks by 'boosting' your post (not quite as good as a proper ad campaign but still good at increasing the reach of that post!).
An image ad is as it sounds; it promotes the image you select to your desired audience with the CTA that you choose.
VIDEO AD
Probably the best type that you can use for engagement with a cold audience. We recommend using this type of video to give a general overview of your business, product or service for brand awareness before using other Ads to compliment. That being said, it can also be used for a warm audience to give more in-depth information on a product or service.
CAROUSEL ADS
This format can incorporate ten images or videos that can be flicked through. It can be used to showcase several different products/services or to display more information on one product/service. If you are feeling creative, it can be used to create one big panorama image.
DYNAMIC ADS
These can be huge in getting products in front of people that you know are interested in them.
Without going too technical, this works by using data from your website's pixel and then displaying an ad based on what that person may have viewed or added to their cart. This can re-ignite that interest in the product or remind them to complete the purchase, which can be very useful for your marketing strategy.
STORIES
Stories are one of the most used aspects of Instagram (less so on Facebook, but it is getting there). Stories can be a great way of generating interest and getting the most from your marketing. Taking up the whole screen, it gets your company in front of that person for 15 seconds with no other distraction or content on their screen.
HOW TO START ADVERTISING
Firstly, you need a Facebook Business page (If you already do, head straight over to Ads Manager). If you don't have a business page, you'll need to create one first.
Step 1 - Objective
After logging in, clicking campaigns and create - you'll be presented with the below:
Here you can see 11 objectives that you can select depending on what you want to accomplish with your ads. Here's what each means:
Brand Awareness: Get your brand in front of new people.
Reach: Expose your company to as many people in your audience as possible.
Traffic: Drive traffic to a specific webpage, app or your messages.
App Installs: Get people to install your app.
Video Views: Get more people to view your video.
Lead Generation: Get new prospects into your funnel
Messages: Push traffic to message you.
Conversions: Get people to take a specific action on your website (e.g. make a purchase).
Catalog Sales: This is used when combined with your Facebook product catalog, it will showcase your products dynamically.
Store Traffic: Drive nearby customers to your brick-and-mortar stores.
Once you have decided which objective suits your campaign, select this.
STEP 2 - TARGET AUDIENCE (AD SET)
When defining your audience, you will first see an option to select a custom audience. We are going to create a separate blog on custom audiences, so here we will focus on targeting options.
To being, go through and select your targeting location, age, gender and language. As you go through, you will see the Audience Size on the right-hand size change to give you an insight into what the potential reach of this audience could be.
You'll also notice that there is an estimation of other metrics (changes based on objective) to show how this may perform based on your ad set. I suggest keeping these in mind as you play around with the targeting options.
Next, we move onto detailed targeting. Striking that right balance on your targeting is the key to maximising your ROI - with how much data Facebook holds, the amount it is possible to be very exact with your audience.
Detailed Targeting: This field is to specifically include or exclude people based on interests, demographics and behaviours.
Connections: Here, you can target or exclude people that have an existing link to your page. For example, if you could exclude people who like your page, so you only target people that aren't already aware of the brand.
STEP 3 - PLACEMENTS
If you are new to advertising on Facebook, I would suggest starting with automatic placements initially. When this is selected, Facebook will automatically display your ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network. After a while, you can look to see which placements have worked best for you and then alter future ads to suit.
The possible placement options can be the following:
Device Type: Mobile, Desktop or both.
Platform: Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network or Messenger
Placements: Feeds, Stories, In-Stream, Messages, etc
Specific Mobile Devices/OS: iOS, Android, feature phones, or all devices.
STEP 4 - BUDGET
This is where you decide on how much you want to spend and for how long you want to it to run.
You can select between a daily budget and a lifetime budget, then set a start and end date or select for it to begin right away. It goes without saying that the more you spend, the better results you will see.
STEP 5 - THE AD
On this step, the first decision to make is the format - this will depend on the objective selected.
Facebook Ads Manager gives you a preview tool at the bottom of the page, where you can go through the different placements to check how it will look. This is perfect; you can play around with different images or videos and see how they fit and feel within each placement before deciding on the one to go with.
Once decided, click the confirm button and your ad will be sent for review and will hopefully begin running soon!
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This brief guide should get you on your way to creating Facebook Ads for your page and boosting the reach of your company page!
At Mac Marketing, we create and manage bespoke Ad Campaigns, if you would like some more information and a discussion on how we can help you start performing and getting the reach that you deserve, please don't hesitate to get in touch!
mac@mac-marketing.com