Whether you're a small business just starting out or an established business looking for new ways to reach your customers, Facebook advertising can be a helpful tool if you know how to use it.
Some business owners are intimidated by the idea of setting up a Facebook advertising account, and if you've never managed paid ads before, that's understandable. At first glance, Facebook advertising can seem very complex; however, if you break it down step by step, you can get your first Facebook ad set up in no time at all!
Here at Designer Websites, we run a variety of Facebook ads for our clients. Facebook has proved to be a valuable platform for increasing brand awareness, engaging with customers, and running sales campaigns and promotions.
Setting Up Your Account for Facebook Advertising
In order to start creating Facebook ads, you'll first need to set up a Business Manager account. To do this, navigate to the Business Manager homepage. From here, you can create your account using the same logins as your personal Facebook profile (simple so far, right?). Just fill in the form, then click 'finish'.
Next, you need to link your Business Page to your Business Manager account. To do this, go into Business Settings, and under Account, click Pages then Add page.
Once you've connected your business page, it's time to create your Ad Account. Facebook will prompt you to fill in your business name, time zone, currency, and payment details. Once you've got all the setup out of the way, you're ready to start making your first Facebook ad!
Creating Your First Facebook Ad
- Choose your objective
So, you've got your Facebook Ad account set up, and you're ready to start running a Facebook ad. The first thing you need to do is choose your objective. Facebook has 11 different marketing objectives that you can use, so you should pick one that best suits your business goals.
If your main goal is to make more people aware of your brand, you might choose Brand Awareness. However, if you want to drive traffic to a particular page on your website, you might opt for Traffic instead. Here are a few other ad objectives that you can choose from:
- Engagement - to reach a wider audience and increase the number of likes, shares, and other engagements.
- Messages - to encourage people to contact you through Facebook Messenger
- Conversions - to get more people to take a specific action, for example, buy a product
- Name your campaign
The next step is to name your campaign. This bit's pretty simple! If you're running a campaign for Black Friday, give your campaign a name like Black Friday Sale. This will help you differentiate between different campaigns and will also make it easy to navigate back through the data when you're looking back at previous campaigns you've done.
- Define your budget and schedule
Now it's time to tell Facebook how long you want to run your ads for and how much money you want to spend. You can either choose a daily budget (which tells Facebook how much money to spend each day) or a lifetime budget (the total amount of money you want to spend from start to finish).
- Choose your audience
This is one of the most important steps. If you target the wrong audience, you might not see the results that you'd hoped for. When creating a custom audience you can define your audience by selecting demographics. You should think about your existing customers, their age, their gender, their interests - and base your first custom audience on these characteristics.
You can even target people by location, meaning your ads can reach people in the local area or further afield. Don't worry, if you notice your ad isn't performing very well after a few days, you can always go in and tweak your audience.
- Select your placements
The next step is choosing where your ad will show (also known as ad placements). If you'd rather leave Facebook to decide this, you can use automatic placements. However, if you'd like a bit more control you can define the placements yourself. You can show your ad on Instagram, in the Facebook Newsfeed, or even in Messenger. Choose the placements that make the most sense for your business and ad type.
- Create the ad
Now comes the fun part: uploading your ad creative! You can use a video, a carousel of images, or even a single image if you want. The formats will vary a little depending on the objective you chose earlier on in the process, so you may need to play around with it a little bit to get the desired ad type. Add some snappy copy, titles, and buttons and your ad should be good-to-go.
Here at Designer Websites, we find that carousel and video ads perform particularly well because they're more engaging than standalone image ads. We'd recommend testing several different ad types to see what works best for your business.
Facebook Ads: Tips and tricks
Now that you've got a rough idea of the Facebook ad basics, we can share some of the tips and tricks we've learned over the years to help you run effective Facebook ads every time.
Think about your copy carefully
One thing that's often overlooked during the ad creation process is copywriting. Pictures may speak a thousand words, but people are influenced by your ad copy too! Keep it short, sweet, and in-line with your business's tone of voice.
If you take quite a relaxed approach to your business, don't be afraid to experiment with emojis. If your business is more corporate, break down key information using bullet points to make your copy easier to digest.
Be consistent with your call to action
Most ads encourage users to take a particular action. For example, 'buy this product', 'give us a call', or 'book online'. One mistake that marketers often is to include a number of different calls to action (CTAs) in the same Facebook ad.
You want the users who see your ad to understand exactly what you want them to do and how they should do it. Giving too many instructions in a single ad can lead to fewer goal completions overall.
Don't be shy to talk numbers
It's likely that you'll be showing your Facebook ads to people who have never heard of your brand or products before. If you can't give them an idea of price right off the bat, they might not bother to click through to your site and find out more. People love a good deal, so if you're upfront with the price during a sale or promotion, people are far more likely to take an interest.
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