Make the Most of Facebook Advertising With This Guide

While it might seem as though there’s a new social media platform every day, Facebook is still the most popular social media platform among active users. This is important for small businesses because even if your entire audience isn’t using Facebook, statistics show a decent percentage likely is. And depending on your current goals, your company’s next customer could be there, too.

Having a Facebook presence for your  business is smart — using the Facebook Ads Manager to create strategic advertising campaigns is even smarter. We’ll cover the steps to getting started and review a few optimizations to help you get the most from this useful tool.

How to Set Up Your Facebook Ad Campaign for Success 

First, you must have a Facebook Business page before you can access Facebook Ads Manager. Then, start building your first ad using these instructions.

Choose your campaign objective

Successful marketing campaigns need clear objectives. Facebook lists several different ad objectives in three categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Choose the objective that best matches your current marketing strategy.

Create your audience

Depending on your campaign objective, you can design your audience to be extremely broad or highly selective. It depends on the number of characteristics you choose and how many details you specify in each category. Some of the basic characteristics include:

• age

• location

• gender

• language

• education

Businesses aiming for a more specific audience can drill down further in categories like behaviors (or specific user interactions with your brand) and interests, such as hobbies aligned with your offering.

Approve ad placement

Facebook suggests ad placement depending on your campaign objective. The automatic placement suggestions are ideal for anyone new to managing Facebook ads because the platform will automatically place ads in a way that maximizes your budget.

Set a budget

Setting a budget tells Facebook how much you’re going to spend either daily (great for campaigns building ongoing brand awareness) or over a set period of time, such as when your business is running a limited-time offer. 

Depending on the campaign objective, you won’t need a huge budget to reach your audience, but you might need to specify which ads require a bigger percentage of the total budget.

Choose a format

Format options currently range from static images to carousels to various video formats. Luckily, Facebook takes some of the guesswork out of choosing the right ad. The company’s research showed advertisers are typically interested in lead generation and retargeting, so Facebook matches ad formats with objectives to guide advertisers in the right direction.

Submit for Approval

Facebook reviews every ad before publishing. Once your submission is approved, you’re set. Monitor the ad’s performance to see which format and message have the best results. You can adjust the current advertisement, budget, or schedule, or use that information to plan your next campaign.

How to Narrow an Ad’s Focus for Better Results

Between the objective options and all of the possible audience configurations, there are many ways to reach current and future customers. The great thing about Facebook Ads Manager is it’s just as easy to design a broad, far-reaching ad to attract a huge audience as to create a niche, conversion-specific ad for a more select audience.

One way to do this is through selecting ad placement. Although Facebook automatically makes placement suggestions, you can choose different preferences based on previous campaign information.

Adjusting the budget is another way to focus your efforts. In addition to setting a timeline for your ads, you can set the ad to run during the hours of the day when your audience is online. This is especially helpful for tight budgets trying to maximize every dollar.

Audience is also a great feature to optimize. Excluding specific groups of users is smart if your primary goal is to find new potential customers. Spend your budget more efficiently by excluding current fans of your business page and focus instead on advertising to new users who fit your buyer persona.

Something else to keep in mind: as you add more audience characteristics, Facebook provides an estimate of how many users your campaign will reach, preventing you from creating an audience that’s too narrow.

Optimize Facebook Ads Through Creative Testing

There are many types of Facebook ad formats to choose from:

• Photo

• Video

• Carousel

• Stories

• Collections

• Messenger ads

• Slideshow

• Playables

Different audiences both prefer and need different tactics. What works for customer retention won’t necessarily work for lead generation or awareness campaigns. Facebook provides the option to advertise on Messenger and Instagram as well, but audiences may expect different content on these platforms.

Testing a variety of styles, formats, and designs will help you determine what works best for each platform. Facebook provides insights and examples as well as the ability to A/B test your ads based on several different variables, including creative format.

By monitoring each campaign’s performance, you can adjust your Facebook advertising strategy to create even more compelling ads in the future.