If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest on Earth. Over 900 million people visit Facebook every day. If you’re looking to get your business’s name out there to as many people as possible, Facebook is the go-to place.

Are You A Beginner? 

Facebook makes it simple to start up your first ad campaign.  With simple transitional tools, Facebook Ads allow a business, agency or individual to easily tailor their advertising.  With options ranging from simple set-ups to complex conversion strategies, it’s important to decide on your marketing goals and understand how campaigns work before getting started.  Keep in mind, simple low-budget campaigns are easy to set up, but when larger budgets and more complex strategies come into play, it always pays for itself to hire an expert!  Have questions about setting up your campaign?  Ask us!

Choosing Your Campaign

First you need to decide which type of campaign would be most beneficial for your business and align with your marketing strategies. These options consist of:

• Post Engagement – Sponsored posts to increase actions (likes, shares, comments) to your posts.
• Page Likes – Increase your most important asset, your fans!
• Clicks To Your Website – Drive clicks to your website.
• Website Conversions – Create goals, such as reaching a contact page and track your conversions.
• Event Response – Create awareness of an event and attract visitors to attend
• Offer Claims – Provide offers with call to action buttons to get users to claim your special.
• Video views – As simple as it sounds; increase views on your video!
• Local Awareness – Get noticed by people who live in a specified radius of your business.  Options for Local Awareness are Page Likes, Call Now or Get Directions.

Every Facebook marketing strategy should have, at minimum, a page likes campaign.  Page likes are great place to start because it builds your audience and leads to a greater connection with customers.  Without fans, you have no audience!  Keep in mind that building your audience is not easy, but once a large base is there users are more likely to be interested in your page if they see that you have an established base of fans. Your fan following adds a sense of legitimacy to your brand. The more likes your page has, the more attention your page will continue to receive and the more engagement you’ll receive.

Create Your Ad

After you select which campaign best fits your needs, tailor your ad with photo and an appealing message to entice your audience. As you create this, you can see exactly what the ad will look like to viewers on a desktop and mobile device. But, there is the dreaded character limit, which may limit your message, so choose your wording carefully. Facebook news feeds are skimmed through by most users, so brevity is important.  Make your message count!

Choose Your Target Audience 
Who are you trying to reach?  After the design of your Facebook ad is in place, create your targeted audience. Targeting is essential as it defines who you are trying to reach with your ads.  With the wrong targeted audience, you will not only attract unlikely engaged users and spend more for your ads.

Facebook’s targeting tools make it easy to create custom audiences with targeting options like specific interests and behaviors, age, gender, location, language, and much more. This means your options are unlimited.  For example, you can create an audience targeted towards males age 18 to 25 living in Philadelphia interested – let’s say – turtles… and work in the service industry.  Remember you can get as specific or broad as you like, but a best practice is to find a balance between the two.  Overly targeted audiences may raise your costs significantly!

Controlling Your Budget

Next comes how you control your ad spend.  Remember, how you spend your money will affect your return, so choose your budgets wisely.  With Facebook Ads, you have full control over the money you spend on your advertising campaigns.  The options consist of a lifetime or daily budget and can be as low as $1 a day, depending on the time span and type of campaign.

Setting budgets is truly an art. It can be a frustrating to run a campaign for a month and not see any results. But then again, you are in control of what you spend.  If you are not seeing the results you would like to see – whether it be engagement, impressions or actions – tweak your budget to meet your expectations. If your ad is not performing well, take a look at your ad design (photo and text), which will greatly affect at how it performs.  Once the starting budget is set you are good to go!

Common Mistakes

Remember, it is best to set a goal from the start so you have a benchmark and attainable mission. Make sure you let your ad run for a few days before jumping the gun on altering anything. These performance metrics show every detail of what your ad is doing such as, clicks on the ad, likes to your page, impressions, as in the amount of people that say the ad, clicks to your website, total cost, cost per impressions, cost per click, cost per like and much more. These metrics give you real data to track and ensure you are on your way to meeting that goal, while spending only the amount you are willing to spend.

If you are not happy with the numbers, you can go right in and change whatever you feel necessary. But to really test what works and does not work, be sure to use different ad sets, varied campaigns, so you can compare one campaign to the next to see what works.  Changing an existing ad will make it more difficult to see what worked.

Keep in mind that trial and error is part of the process of tailoring your campaign to run as efficiently and effectively as possible.  This is important in every aspect of digital marketing; use your data to tell you what works and what doesn’t.  The truth is in the numbers!  Social Media, and more importantly Facebook, is a huge opportunity for marketing your brand, but it can be a daunting task to get started if you have no experience.  This is what makes Facebook so attractive as it offers simple tools to walk you through your first campaigns.

Final Thoughts

Facebook has a huge influence on consumers, 47% of users say it influences their purchases. More than 1.3 billion people use Facebook to connect with things relevant to them. Facebook also captures 70% of social media users making it the largest social network by a landslide!

Are you ready to get started?  What have been your experiences with Facebook Advertising?