When it is about connecting with the world instantaneously, Facebook is the best platform. It plays a major role when you want to use this platform for the purpose of advertising. Advertising on Facebook is one of the easiest ways to connect your business or brand with the audience from all over the world. Facebook ads can put your products or services in front of potential customers who will most likely purchase them.
If you want to get the best out of advertising on Facebook, first you need to know the types available and how to use Facebook ads in the most efficient manner.
Image Ads is what you should start your Facebook advertising journey with. These type of ads are simple and can be created in just a few clicks. You can boost an image post that is already there on your Facebook page. Make sure they are not boring for the viewers even if it is just an image.
Next comes Video Ads that usually appear as ‘in-stream ads’ in longer Facebook videos or you can run them in News Feeds or as Stories. This way you can display your products in action such as a short tutorial or a quick demo. Create GIF-like graphics or similar animation to grab more attention.
Video Poll Ads
A better option than regular video ads, Video Poll Ads let you create more awareness about your business. However, this video format is only available for mobile versions. This ad format is really popular and is the latest addition to paid Facebook advertising.
Such type of Carousel Ads promotes your product or service using its 10 images or videos. This way you can show all the useful features of a single product, show all the products you have or create a panorama, whatever suits your business or brand.
You know what are slideshows, right? A type of short video where you can combine a number of photos, text or videos that will be shown as a Slideshow Video Ad. Such ads tend to be appealing and also use less bandwidth so a slow internet is not a problem in this case. It is an easy way to grab the attention of your target audience.
They are a form of paid Facebook Ad and only work in mobile devices. You can display five of your products and customers will click on the one they are interested in buying. Collection Ads let people buy your products without logging off from Facebook, making online shopping easy.
They are also known as Canvas shown in a full-screen ad format and loads 15 times faster than a mobile website outside Facebook.
This format is only available for mobile and enables your potential customers to give you their contact information in an easy way. Through Lead Ads, you can collect newsletter subscriptions, get people signed up for a trial of your products, or let people ask questions from you.
These ads are one of the best ways to market your products to targeted audiences. It is one of the ways to remind customers that a product is in your cart and they should complete their purchase. This ad format can play an important role in your Facebook Marketing strategy.
You are aware of the fact that Facebook Messenger is a popular way to promote your business. The Messenger Ads let you reach out to the 1.3 billion people. Yes, you read it right, a huge amount of people access messenger every month. So while creating an Ad, you can choose Messenger and then select Facebook Feed. You can also run ‘click-to-messenger’ ads in the News Feed. Doing this will display a call-to-action button that will open a messenger conversation along with your business page.
This includes creating a game-like experience to engage your audience in a better way.
After you know the types of ads you can choose from, it is the time you should get started with promoting your Business Page. If you’ve one, you can directly go to the Facebook Ads Manager or Business Manager to create your ad campaign. If you don’t have a business page, you will need to create a Facebook Business Page.
If don’t know a single thing about advertising, here are the steps that will help you to advertise on Facebook:
You need to be logged in to your Facebook Ads Manager account and select the ‘Campaigns’ tab and click ‘Create’ to begin the campaign. There are 11 marketing objectives provided by Facebook and you can select the one that matches with your business goals.
You need to choose an objective based on your goals for the type of ad you have selected.
Next, you have to choose a name for your Facebook ad campaign and select whether to turn on budget optimization. You can also select if you want to set up an A/B split test. This test checks your creative, placement, audience and delivery optimization strategies.
If you are a beginner in the Facebook advertising world, you will need to set up an Ad account. Click on the option that says ‘Set Up Ad Account’, enter all the required details. Mention your country, currency, time zone and press ‘Continue’.
If you already have an Ad account, you can directly move to the next step. Make sure you have entered the details correctly otherwise you will be required to make a new ad account.
On the screen you see, enter the name for Ad Set and mention the page you want to promote. Now, start building the target audience for your ads.
First, add the audience who have already interacted with your business in one or other way. Select the target location, age, language and gender. On the right side of the screen, you will see the audience size indicator that will show your potential ad reach.
Apart from this, you can check the number of page likes. If you have run campaigns before, the estimates will be more accurate as Facebook would have the previous data to calculate the estimates. Further, you will get two fields to make your audience more specific:
Here you can include or exclude people who are already connected to your Facebook page through any medium. If you want to add new people, select the option ‘Exclude people who like your page’ and for the contrary situation, select ‘People who like your page’ to use the existing audience.
This section allows you to add or deduct people on the basis of demographics, behaviours and interests.
Next, you have to decide where your Facebook ads will appear. For beginners, it will be convenient if they select ‘Automatic Placements’. Doing this will let Facebook to automatically place your ads across all the social platforms.
Once you gain experience, you can place your ads in the selected locations. You can use the platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger and you can place the ads in Feeds, Stories, Messages, in-article, apps and sites and on any of the iOS, Android or other devices.
You need to decide how much you want to spend on the ad campaign out of the daily or lifetime budgets. Set the start and end dates if you want to schedule it for later or you want to start it the same moment. You can also set the optional costs and bid controls to set the amount per action rather than for the entire campaign. The advanced budget options will let you decide how you want to spend your money.
Setting a schedule for your Facebook ads allows you to spend your budget efficiently. You can decide to serve during the time your potential customers are available on Facebook. Press ‘Continue’ to move to the next step.
Firstly, select the ad format, enter the text and media components. The format will depend on the campaign objective you selected in the first step. Preview the ad to confirm everything looks good, if you are satisfied with what you see, press ‘Confirm’ and wait for an email from Facebook that your ad has been approved.
Advertising on Facebook is not that easy as it seems and you need to be very careful while getting your Facebook images and videos ready for Facebook ads. The best Facebook ads are those that are made keeping the character counts in mind. If you go beyond the text limits, it will be cut off.
Here are the specifications that you must keep in mind while creating a Facebook Ad:
(In Characters) | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Type of Ads | Headline | Link description | Body text | Campaign objectives |
Image ads | 25 | 30 | 125 | All except video views |
Video ads | 25 | 30 | 125 | All except catalogue sales |
Facebook Stories ads | There is no set character count, you can leave 250 pixels text-free at the top and bottom of the ad. | Engagement, messages, catalog sales, store traffic | ||
Carousel ads | 25 | 20 | 125 | All except engagement and video views |
Slideshow ads | 25 | 30 | 125 | All |
Collection ads | 25 | NA | 90 | Traffic, conversions, catalog sales, store traffic |
Instant Experience ads | Text up to 500 words each | All except lead generation, catalogue sales, and messages | ||
Messenger Inbox ads | NA | NA | 125 | Traffic, app installs, conversions, catalogue sales, messages |
Here are some tips that will help you run Facebook Ads in a more effective way:
Facebook Pixel is a small piece of code that plays a major role in your Facebook ad campaign. Place the code on your website and you will be able to track conversions, remark products to the existing audience, etc.
Even if you are just beginning with Facebook ads, you should use it as your data will be ready when you will plan to optimize your ads.
Blurry and low-quality pictures are a complete turn-off. Pictures and videos are as important as text and can create the best first impression if they are of good quality.
In the beginning, you can target a lesser audience and later on move to a broader one. Expanding your audience slow and steady will give you a better idea of what is working and what is not. Audience targeting is also helpful to create different ads for groups related to your different business goals.
When you try something new, you must check if you are getting benefits from it or not. Similarly, for Facebook ads, whenever you try a new strategy, check Facebook Analytics if it had positively helped your business page or not. This will give you clarity regarding whether you are making improvements or not. There is no particular algorithm that will work for your Facebook ads. You need to define your own strategy by checking what is working for your audience.
Through the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, check how your campaign is performing. If it is not up to the mark, you must spend money on an ad that is working instead of that. For the learners, it would be better to run several ads with small audiences and budgets. Once you know what works best for you, you can use the same strategy for your campaign.
Now, you have so much information about how to get benefit from Facebook Ads, still, if you have no idea where to start from, here are some ideas you can involve in your Facebook Marketing Strategy:
There must be something on your Facebook Page that is more popular than other posts. You can use the same content for your Facebook Ads by creating a short video out of it.
To drive sales directly from a Facebook ad you can target people who have already thought of buying your product. If you genuinely have a good product and renowned brand, you can definitely generate direct sales from Facebook.
Along with promoting your online sales, you can work towards endorsing your offline sales too. Invite people to an offline event and create event engagement through Facebook. You can even apply the lead generation objective to get people to your offline store.
You should have a Facebook page or a website to run Facebook ads. If you don’t have any of those, you can’t run ads. However, you can simply run ads without a website by using all the Facebook ad objectives with the help of a Facebook page. If you don’t have a Facebook page, create one and start advertising.
An average small business advertising on Facebook spends around $1,000–$2,000 per month. However, it doesn’t matter how much money is being spent on Facebook advertising if your campaigns are low quality.
If you are talking about cost per click (CPC), Facebook advertising costs about $0.27 per click on average. If you want to know the cost per thousand impressions (CPM), it is about $7.19.
Only posting ads on Facebook will not provide you with money. You can make Facebook ads to increase your page’s popularity, followers, announce a product or service, and make money as an ultimate result.
A great cost-per-conversion doesn’t mean a Facebook campaign is profitable for you. However, if you are able to get more than $4.00 as revenue for every $1.00 you spend on advertising, you can call it a profitable campaign.