Facebook is now one of the best known and most used social networking platforms in the world.
In addition to its traditional social networking aspect, Facebook has become an important essential tool for businesses and e-businesses to connect with potential buyers online.
Did you know that more than 1.6 billion people worldwide connected with a business via Facebook in 2021?
Therefore, if you’re an entrepreneur and your online market is large, creating Facebook Ads campaigns must be of interest to you.
Inside this guide full of great tips, you’ll find all the resources you need to create Facebook Ads, or Facebook Ads, and understand how they work, whether you want to reach a wider audience, build visibility for your business, retarget users who visited your website but didn’t convert, or use the social network’s advertising capabilities as a sales funnel for your business.
Here are the main steps we will cover in this guide:
Why advertise on Facebook?
How to set up your Facebook Ads account?
Types of goals that Facebook Ads can achieve
Types of Facebook Ads for each business goal
How to create a Facebook ad?
- Why advertise on Facebook?
You probably already know that Facebook is one of the biggest social networking platforms in the world, which gives access to more than 2 billion active users, but let’s try to see in more detail what positive things the American company can bring in the field of online advertising.
Here are the top 5 benefits that Facebooks Ads can bring to your marketing strategy and business:
- Robust analytics capabilities
Facebook Ads can offer you robust analytics on your target audience that you won’t find anywhere else. This means your ads and marketing strategy don’t need to be built on assumptions. By analyzing the metrics offered by the social network, you’re able to make the right decisions when setting up your Facebook Ads campaigns. - Micro-targeting capabilities
Facebook Ads allows you to “micro-target” your audience based on their age, interests, behaviors, relationships, location and demographics. Unlike other marketing channels and tools, Facebook allows you to combine and layer these filters to ensure you’re targeting only the users most likely to convert.
- Remarketing opportunities to interested audiences
On Facebook, it’s possible to retarget, or remarket, to contacts who have interacted with you but haven’t yet converted to customers. With tools like dynamic ads and the Facebook pixel, you can get back in touch with prospects who have interacted with your business, based on their position in the sales tunnel. - Find new audiences
Once you’ve found an audience that interacts with you and converts through your Facebook Ads, it’s easy to generate new leads that have similar behaviors and interests using the “similar audiences” feature in Facebook’s Business Manager campaign manager.
- How to set up your Facebook Ads account?
You need a Facebook Ads account to manage and monitor your ads and their performance.
It’s quite simple, and you just need to follow a few steps after logging in to Facebook Business Manager.
This is not the main topic of this article, so please refer to the Facebook website to do this procedure.
(Create a Business Manager account/Add a Facebook Ads account)
After setting up your Facebook Ads account, it is essential to get to the heart of the matter: examine and understand the different types of objectives that Facebook campaigns will allow your company to achieve.
- Types of goals that Facebook Ads can achieve
Before you begin creating a Facebook Ads campaign, it’s essential to have a specific marketing goal in mind and match it to the types of ads Facebook offers in order to get the results you want.
Choosing the right Facebook ad type will provide you with the data you need and help you convert your audience into loyal customers.
Before we dive into the types of ads offered by Facebook Ads, let’s take a look at the 3 main goals that Facebook Ads can help you achieve:
- Awareness goal
If you want your audience to know more about your business and how you can add value to their daily lives, your marketing goal is to increase brand awareness. This is going to be an ad at the very top of the funnel where you’re going to reach out to everyone interested in your industry.
For example, if you have an eco-friendly cosmetics company, you can create an awareness ad campaign that showcases your products and their unique features, such as products with 100% plant-based ingredients, etc.
- Goal of consideration
If you want your audience to take the next step and interact with your business by looking for more information, including on your website, mobile app, or social media messaging, your marketing goal is to encourage your audience to spend time interacting with your business.
This is a type of advertising that is in the middle of the funnel, and is only for the portion of your target audience that has interacted with your brand.
For example, if you want your audience to know more about your eco-friendly cosmetics, how they’re made, your brand’s history, the range of products and services you offer, etc., you can create ad campaigns that will redirect your target audience to your website and encourage them to learn more about your brand.
- Conversion goal
Now that part of your target audience has shown a real interest in the added value you provide, your next marketing objective will be to encourage them to buy your product or service.
This is at the very bottom of the sales tunnel, and your Facebook Ads campaign should be aimed at conversion.
For example, presenting your best products on your website and offering a discount for a first purchase should encourage your prospects to buy your product.
Let’s now look at the main types of ads offered by Facebook Ads.
- Types of Facebook Ads for each business objective
- Photo Ads
Are you looking for a simple and clean format to reach your audience? With an attractive photo or image and impactful copywriting, your Facebook photo ad is still a simple, yet effective way to raise awareness of who you are and what you do.
You can choose this format if you want to capture the attention of your audience or if you want to distribute a special offer to your customers.
It is also a good option to redirect your prospects to a YouTube video, your blog, your e-commerce or online store.
How to get the most out of your photo ads?
These photo ads offered by the Facebook Ads platform are mainly displayed on the users’ news feeds. This is where they engage and interact with the posts of their family and friends.
Use images of people using your product that will fit perfectly into this family-based social fabric, not photos containing only your product.
- Video Ads
Use Facebook Ads videos to get your audience to engage and interact with your business. More and more people are watching and interacting with videos on Facebook and all social networks. This is one of the main reasons why companies and marketing agencies are prioritizing video spending in their marketing budgets in 2022.
Your Facebook video ad can be placed “In-stream”, i.e. on the main video that people are watching, in your audience’s feed, for example on the homepage, or even within the famous Stories.
Opt for the video format if you want to provide your audience with a little more information about your company and what you do, or show how your product can add value to the daily lives of your prospects and address a specific issue.
It’s also a great ad choice if you want to share user-generated content and testimonials, with the goal of creating social proof.
How to get the most out of your video ads?
Make sure your videos are no longer than 45 seconds. If you post a video that’s too long, your audience will definitely skip certain parts.
Get to the point in the first 15-30 seconds. Your video ad should focus on your marketing objective and give your audience enough reason to follow your call to action.
Just like your photos, your videos should be visually appealing. If you can’t shoot in high resolution, your ad may not catch the audience’s attention.
Finally, use Facebook Stories to give your audience a more inclusive and authentic experience. Stories are a completely tailored solution for getting prospects to interact with brands, and it’s a quick and seamless way to bring your target audience to your website.
- Messaging Ads
Having direct conversations with your target audience remains one of the best ways to get them to convert.
And thanks to Facebook Ads Messenger, that’s exactly what you’ll be able to do.
If you want to give individual attention to specific customers or prospects, and help them solve a problem or give them more details about your products and services in order to facilitate a conversion, Messenger Ads are proving to be formidable.
To make the most of the power of this type of Facebook Ads, adopt a brand tone that your users will easily recognize and associate with your business.
- Carousel Ads
If you can’t express everything you have to say with a single image or video, Facebook Carousel Ads give you the opportunity to showcase up to 10 images and videos.
If you want to showcase multiple products and redirect your future customers via a single click to your sales platform, a specific landing page, or highlight the different features of a single product to explain a complex process that requires splitting, Carousel Ads are a formidable weapon.
How to get the most out of your Carousel Ads?
With Carousel Ads, you need to tell a compelling story that actively engages your audience.
It’s a great advertising medium to showcase your best-selling and most relevant products, and give your prospects the opportunity to click on the ad to make their purchase directly on your website.
- Collections Ads
If you have a catalog of products, why not showcase them to your customers right here on Facebook? The Collections Ads format allows you to display your best products and gives your audience a chance to see what you have to offer and then make a purchase without waiting.
So, in case your business has a lot of products to offer, you can allow your customers to complete their entire shopping journey on the social network platform, from discovery to payment.
To make the most of Collections Ads, display your best-selling products, which will certainly attract people, and preferably present groups of products that go well together, such as clothes with accessories and shoes, or a single product with its different color variants.
- How to create a Facebook ad?
To create your first Facebook ad, click on the Create button in the left corner of the “Campaigns” page in the Ads Manager dashboard, your ad manager, and you will be directed to the campaign selection page.
This is where you will need to choose your marketing objective for your Facebook Ads campaign.
You can choose from a multitude of options, such as reach, brand awareness, lead or traffic generation, engagement, mobile app installs, conversions, catalog sales, etc.
If you want to create a Facebook ad for conversions, catalog sales, or traffic, you will need to install Facebook Pixel on your website or your client’s website.
Facebook Pixel is a small code that when installed on your website header will allow you to track what your audience is doing on your website. You will then be able to know which products your visitors are clicking on, what they are adding to their cart, what they are buying, if they are reading your blog, etc.
This code is the perfect tool to track the buying behavior of your audience and it allows you to optimize your ads specifically for purchase.
Now let’s take a closer look at the different steps to create your campaigns and ads.
Creating campaigns
Step 1: Choose your marketing objective
The first thing you need to do is choose your marketing objective. As we have seen before, it can be installing a mobile app, generating traffic, or conversions.
Step 2: Give your campaign a name.
Be sure to give your campaign a name that you can easily remember, especially if you plan to run a large number of campaigns and ads.
For example, try to include relevant details, such as product name, audience type, and goal type.
Step 3: A/ B testing
In the next step, Facebook will ask you if you’d like to do split testing, or A/B testing, comparing the performance of this campaign with another.
This is a great option to choose if you have two campaigns running and want to know which one works best.
Step 4: Choose a budget for your ad
You’ll have the option of choosing a daily or lifetime budget. If this is your first ad, a daily budget of a few dozen dollars is perfect to start with.
Step 5: Select your country, currency and time zone
Just add these last details, and your Facebook Ads campaign setup is complete.
You will then be redirected to the “Ad Set” page. This is where you will be able to choose the target of your Facebook ad.
