It’s not rocket science, but it IS a bit complicated. Here’s a high-level view of what you need to know to get started advertising on Facebook.
Advertising on Facebook is still one of the most cost-effective ways to get dramatic results. Whether yours is a B2B or B2C company, it’s virtually guaranteed that your prospects are on this social media site – and you can reach them easily using Facebook ads.
Here are the basic steps for getting started:
First, you’ll need to set up your business manager account at www.facebook.com/business. If you have a personal Facebook account already, this step will be sweet and simple.
If you don’t have a Facebook page for your business, setting one up at the same time as setting up your Facebook Ads account is easy.
Once you’ve set your account up, you are ready to begin creating ads. There are three components to creating a successful Facebook Ad:
- Your Campaign
Identify your objectives for your ad(s). Objectives might include getting a certain number of people to click on your ads, view your video, or visit your website. You can have several objectives, but generally there will be one main objective. - Your Ad Set
The ad set reflects how much money you plan to spend on ads and the particulars of your target audience. You can customize your audience so that your ads are shown to a very specific group of people. This is especially relevant if you want to use a retargeting strategy. - Your Ads
This is the creative content your ads offer, including the picture(s) or video you want to use and the written ad copy that goes with the visuals.
How to Create Facebook Ads
There are three ways to create ads.
- The first way is the easiest. You can “boost” one of your posts so more people will see it. Anyone on Facebook can do this with a post. It may help you get more exposure for your business page. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with retargeting.
- The second way is to use Facebook Ads Manager. Ads Manager can be used for retargeting, but there is a limit to how many characters can be used for your headline, the text, and the news feed description. This may mean you have to be more creative or take more consideration to figure out how to make ads within those limits.
- The third way is using Facebook’s Power Editor. Power Editor is only compatible with the Chrome Internet browser. Power Editor is the most complicated method of creating a Facebook Ad, however it offers the most flexibility and impact for that ad. There are no text and character limitations unlike Ads Manager. I wouldn’t advise using Power Editor when you are just starting out due to the complexity of the tool. Instead, start with Ads Manager and use that until you have mastered it before using Power Editor.
Make Your Facebook Ads Reach Your Target Audience
Now that you have set up your account and put some thought into the content of your ads, you can start building your target audience in two ways:
- Email contacts. You can create a custom audience by uploading all of your email contacts to Facebook. When you have set up your audiences, you can then create ads that only those people will see.
- This is an enormously powerful retargeting tool. By creating and using pixels, you have can target very specific groups of people who have visited your website or blog, or just specific pages of your website or specific blog posts.
Being able to choose to select just people who have viewed specific web pages is incredible. What’s even more fantastic is the ability to choose only those who have visited certain pages but didn’t go to any other pages. You can even create custom audiences made up of people who haven’t visited your website for a certain amount of time.
Getting your messages out to different audiences using retargeting is simple because you have such flexibility in defining those retargeting audiences. If you want to target people who have visited your website in the last week, you can do so. If you want your message to be seen by only the people who read a certain blog post in the last 60 days, you can do that, as well. If you just want to reach those who visited your most recent podcast episode in the last ten days, you’re able to do that, too.
Putting your brand, products, and services in front of the people most likely to buy helps build the kind of relationship that leads to opportunities. Your prospective customers are on Facebook – so why not reach them there?
If you’ve got questions about how Facebook advertising would work for your business, we should talk. The process is a bit complicated, but you don’t have to master it yourself. Contact us today to start that conversation.
Meta Description: Find out what’s involved in running effective Facebook advertising campaigns.
