Online advertising is vital for any business that wants to create awareness and build their brand’s reputation. The good news is that with the diversity of social media channels, it’s become faster and easier to reach the right audience without having a huge advertising budget.
The largest social media platform for advertisers is Facebook; it continues to grow year over year with nearly 2.5 billion monthly active users. Due to the sheer number of users, it’s likely that your target audience is on Facebook. While your audience may be there, the key to successful Facebook advertising campaigns is targeting. Luckily, their ad platform offers many ways to refine your audience so you can reach the right people.
In this article, we’re going to answer all your questions about Facebook advertising. We cover:
- How Facebook Ads Work
- Benefits of Facebook Ads
- How to Get Started
- Types of Facebook Ads
At the end of the article, you’ll be ready to create effective Facebook Ad campaigns that get you more customers.
Let’s get started.
How Do Facebook Ads Work?
Advertisers (e.g., business owners, marketers, and agencies) buy Facebook ads on an auction basis. The payment is determined by clicks, impressions, or actions.
Here’s exactly how it works:
Facebook ads are aimed at users based on their location, profile details, demographic, behavior, etc. When you’re done creating your ad campaign, you’ll be able to set a budget and bid for the clicks or impressions on your ad. Once your ad is published, users will see your ads on the sidebar and within their feed on Facebook.com.
Facebook ads are now available in different formats. You can advance your page, post on the page, and view user activities on your page or website, although the Facebook algorithm works better when you’re not taking users off Facebook pages. If you can engage users right on their own feeds, then you’ll quickly boost your Relevancy Score.
Most marketers prefer to send users/potential leads to a landing page where they can capture their email address and begin the follow-up process. Either way, Facebook advertising will serve you right. Facebook ad targeting is based on visited pages, location, demographics friends, pages you follow, and many more targeting criteria.
When you’re done creating an ad, you can choose a budget and offer for each click, action, or impression that your ad gets. Facebook users can see your ads (visual, video, slideshows, etc.) on their feeds while browsing through Facebook. Here’s a CoPromote Facebook ad that displays on the user’s feed.
What Are the Benefits of Facebook Advertising?
Advertising on Facebook comes with some tremendous benefits as it exposes your business to your targeted audience through location, visited pages, demographics, and other options. These are benefits that most businesses are out to achieve in both the short- and long-term.
1. Well-defined Audiences
Facebook currently receives a minimum of 1.6 billion daily active users, and 88% of them access from a mobile device. What would you do with an additional 10,000 to 50,000 new visitors to your website each month?
We’re being conservative here because you can generate hundreds of thousands of website visitors from Facebook if you have the budget. If you’re an eCommerce brand, that would result in hundreds of thousands of sales, depending on what you’re selling. Even if you’re into software sales, then you’ll have recurring customers who will continue to pay for your software for months and even years. Most often, what every business needs to succeed is “traffic.” As long as you can send potential customers to a relevant page, some of them will convert into buyers.
2. Easy to Use
With the help of Facebook Ad Manager, it’s simple to set up and control your marketing campaign with its easy-to-use features. With one button, you can also share your ad on Instagram, and reach even more people. Facebook is primarily designed for people to share personal updates and information, such as memories, events, causes, new songs they’ve discovered, vacation photos, and even relationship statuses, with other people in their network.
That means users already have detailed profiles with rich data that you can tap into when creating your ad campaigns. Access to that data makes it easy to hone in on the exact demographic that will buy your product or service.
3. It’s Cost-effective
Advertising on Facebook costs very little compared to other social media channels. Since it has a well-integrated and structured platform, it gives your business “more bang for its buck.” For as little as $20/day or less, you can run ads on Facebook and reach hundreds of people, depending on the cost per click (CPC) for your industry or niche.
However, make sure you’re giving Facebook ads the best shot by allocating enough budget to achieve your company’s goal. Once your ads are live, you should allow Facebook to test it out. This is the period when Facebook’s algorithm analyzes your data and starts optimizing accurately so that you can meet your objectives (e.g., engagement, clicks, site visits, leads). After this analysis, you should be able to make informed decisions based on the data you get from Facebook concerning your target audience. Then you can choose to either increase or reduce your daily ad budget.
4. Easily Measurable
With the use of Facebook pixels, it’s quite easy to know how well your advertising campaigns are performing and get insight into things like what percentage of your clicks resulted in an email opt-in or downloaded your white paper. Thirty-four percent of marketers on Facebook want to increase brand awareness while 10% are aiming for more traffic to their websites. Whatever your goals may be, you can easily measure them on Facebook.
Facebook enables you to save data so you can remember their actions, whether they bought anything, pages they visited, and other activities.
Types of Facebook Advertising
1. Acquire Leads Automatically Through Facebook Lead Ads
Facebook lead ads give customers an easy way to reach out to a business. Essentially, customers do not have to leave Facebook or get redirected to a page where they have to fill out a form. They can engage with your ad within the Facebook platform. Facebook lead ads give the customer access to your product or service while they’re still chatting with friends, posting new vacation photos and having a nice time.
Just by clicking the “Submit” button, they’re added to the marketer’s customer list.
The beauty of the Facebook lead ad is that it automatically fills out the user’s information such as name, address, phone number, etc., using the information in their Facebook profile.
2. Video Ads
Facebook is an effective platform for video advertisements, as the majority of Facebook users watch videos. You may argue against this, but a study from Small Biz Trends shows people watch more videos on Facebook than they do on YouTube. What this data shows is that a user on Facebook may watch up to 10 videos per day, whereas a YouTube user may watch only three videos.
Video ads make it possible for you to display videos of your products or service, which will attract potential customers and prompt them to make a purchasing decision. Video ads also help to build brand awareness and refocus targeted audiences. Here are some video ads on Facebook.
Facebook video ads provide a lot of data on viewership and give insight into how frequently your video was viewed or whether viewers completed the video. To engage your loyal audience, you can even target your video ads to users who frequently watch your videos.
3. Image Ads
Image ads are more effective than regular Facebook ads. They are built to help businesses create more online engagement, increase traffic, and drive targeted leads. Carousel ads can display several pictures on the same ad unit and are compatible with both mobile and desktop views.
4. Slideshow Ads
This type of advertisement gives you a fast and easy way to create a video-like ads using existing still photographs, graphics, or video clips. They use motion, sound, and text to tell your brand story. You can use photographs from your media library or you can select photos from the Ads Manager’s stock photo library. The slideshow ad is like a video, except it uses less bandwidth and they’re often cheaper to create. It is an effortless and engaging way of drawing attention to your brand using powerful graphics.
5. Collection Ads
This is a Facebook ad strictly for mobile devices. The Facebook collection ads format gives you the option of displaying a maximum of five products that customers can click on to purchase. It’s mostly used by eCommerce platforms that have a variety of products that they wish to promote at one time—think “economies of scale.”
Facebook collection ads are optimized for a smooth transition from discovery to purchase. By removing barriers, like slow loading websites and distracting elements, it increases customer acquisition.
How to Create a Facebook Advert Page
In this section, we’ll cover a few steps that will get you up and running when it comes to Facebook advertising. You’ll need a Facebook page for your business to start running ads. Once your business page has been created, you then create a business manager account. The business manager account is what allows you to run advertising campaigns on the Facebook platform.
Here are the simple steps:
1. Create an Account.
After creating an account, log in with the email and password you have used to create your business manager account.
2. Download and Install Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel is the tool Facebook uses to recognize the people who will visit your page. It also helps them to build a list from this audience and display your ads to them. You can also create an audience of specific people with this tool. To use this tool, go back to the Business Manager and click the “Select Audience” option from the list.
You are now ready to create your Facebook advertising campaign.
How to Create Your First Advertising Campaign on Facebook
If you don’t have a business Facebook page, then follow the steps above on how to build one. But if you already have one, here is how to build your first advertising campaign on Facebook.
To start, you choose “Create Ad” from the drop-down list in the top right section of your business page.
Next, you select the ad format for the campaign that you’ll build (these are the ad types we discussed the in the previous section). Now let’s dig into the specifics.
1. Choose Your Objective
These are the things you want your ad to accomplish. It includes how you want to introduce your brand to customers, generate a targeted audience, increase traffic and page likes, other engagement options, etc.
2. Name Your Ad Campaign
Here, you have to scroll down to name your advert or select your essential set-up test. You also get to choose to turn your budget optimization on or off.
3. Prepare Your Ad Account
If you already have created your account, you will be asked to click a button that will direct you to the next step. But if you don’t have an account, you will see a “Set-up Account” page. Click it to register your name and other personal information, then click “Continue.” Be sure to enter the correct details in order to curtail problems down the road.
4. Target Your Audience
Now, you will have to select the page you want to promote. You will scroll down to see options like choose your audience, their location, age, number, etc.
5. Select Ad Location
This is the geographical region where you want Facebook to place your ad. For digital sales, the best option is for you to choose the “Automatic Placement” option because this will allow Facebook to showcase your ads in places where you can get the best result.
However, if your business derives a large portion of sales from in-store purchases or only conducts local business, you’ll want to select the region near your physical location. For instance, an eye care center’s patient base is typically located within a 10-mile radius of the store. It would be a waste of their ad budget to target a larger geographic region where patients would never choose a provider that far away.
6. Set a Budget
This is the monetary aspect of it. You have to choose the amount of money you wish to spend on the campaign per day. It includes budget duration, dates, etc.
7. Create Your Ad
The final step is to choose your text and media options for your ad, then click on “Create.”
Now You’re Ready to Reach More People Through Facebook
The benefits of Facebook advertising in the business world cannot be overemphasized. Facebook has provided a platform where you can directly connect with customers where they spend a substantial portion of their time.
Even if you have little to no digital marketing experience, the Facebook advertising platform is ideal for you–it’s a go-to platform for bootstrapped entrepreneurs and small businesses that don’t have a huge advertising budget. An added benefit is that it’s easy to use. If you spend time learning the basics of Facebook advertising, you’ll be able to grow brand awareness, generate leads, and fuel business growth.
If you’re interested in Facebook advertising but need help developing your strategy, feel free to reach out to us. We’re happy to help you grow your business through effective social media advertising campaigns.