Use Facebook Ads to Promote your Business – Step by Step Guide

Facebook is much more than just a platform for sharing posts about your business. Many businesses that familiarise themselves with Facebook Ads Manager have seen excellent results. Facebook Ads is a powerful tool when it comes to promoting your business to the right audience in a cost-effective way. We all want to get the most out of our marketing and advertising budget….right?

This Marla Academy article focuses on how to promote your business through Facebook Ads. Follow the steps in this article and see for yourself how effective Facebook Ads can be for your business. You can advertise for as low as €1.00 a day to get your feet wet and to test what type of ads work best for your business.

1. Set up Facebook Ads Manager Account

The first step you need to take before running any Facebook ads is to set up a Facebook Ad Manager account. Facebook Ads Manager has an intuitive and easy to use dashboard that provides advertisers with an overview of all their campaigns.

The dashboard is important to advertisers as it gives an estimate of how much you’re spending each day for each ad. The dashboard is organised by columns, which makes it easy to filter through your ads. A really helpful feature of the dashboard allows you to create a custom view of your results. Key metrics such as reach, frequency, and ad cost are easy to view and analyse.

You’ll need to have a Facebook Business Page rather than a personal profile to set up a Facebook Ads Manager account. You can’t run ads through a personal profile.

Here are the steps to follow for setting up Facebook Ads Manager account:

• Visit: https://www.facebook.com/business/tools/ads-manager
• Click the button “Go to Ads Manager.”
• Confirm your information on the ad account setup page.
• Add your payment method.
• Save changes.

Once set up, Facebook Ads Manager will be your go to resource when running and monitoring ads.

Need to know more about Facebook tools? Here are a few of our popular resources to help you out:

– Our Top Five Social Media Tools for Businesses

– A few things you should know about Social Media in 2021

2. Start Creating a Facebook Ad

When you log into Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll notice a performance dashboard where all of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads will be shown.

To create a new Facebook Ad, click the green “Create” button on the top left hand side of the screen under the “Account Overview” tab. There are three other tabs beside “Account Overview” that you can click on which will give you the following information:

• Ad Campaign – this has all of your account assets.
• Ad Sets – this will show you the performance of your ad set if you are running multiple ads for different audiences
• Ads – this will show you the individual ads that you are running. This view will show you how each ad is performing on their own or as part of an ad set.

Do you want to run Pay Per Click Ads on Google? Here is a helpful resource to help you get the very most from Google Ads.

– Pay Per Click Tips for Google Ads Success

3. Choose Ad Objective

Facebook is a very intuitive advertising platform. How your ad will be displayed on Facebook will be dictated by the objective of your campaign. When you click on the green button for create, Facebook will give you eleven campaign objectives to choose from.

By choosing one of the below objectives, you’re giving Facebook a better idea of what you’d like to achieve with your ad. This information is important for Facebook to present you with the best-suited ad options.

• Brand awareness
• Reach
• Website traffic
• Engagement
• App installs
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Messages
• Conversions
• Catalog sales
• Store traffic

If you click the option for “Website Traffic”, you’ll be given the prompt to enter the URL you’re looking to direct people to on your website (ideally this should be a specific page for the product or service that you are promoting).

Need help with a social media strategy for your business? Here are some easy to follow tips that will help you get the very most from social media.

– Steps for Setting up a Social Media Marketing Strategy

4. Target the Right Audience

The best thing about Facebook ads is the targeting feature. This is where it is extremely useful to know the customer personas for your business. You can target relevant products or services to the right target audience once you know who you are trying to reach.

To help you refine your audience, Facebook’s targeting criteria is accompanied by an audience definition gauge. This handy feature analyses all of your selected targeted properties to come up with a potential reach number.

Sometimes you may want to reach a specific audience over a broad audience. If you’re objective is to drive website traffic then you’ll probably want to just target people that will be interested in the products or services on your landing page. If you’re looking to increase brand awareness or promote a very popular special offer then you might be best to advertise to a broader audience to maximise exposure.

Facebook allows you to target people based on the below attributes:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Relationship
• Education
• Work
• Financial
• Home
• Ethnic Affinity
• Generation
• Parents
• Life Events
• Interests
• Behaviours
• Connections

There is also an effective option that will allow you to select a Custom Audience. This option will provide you with the ability to target people such as contact’s on your CRM database or people who visited a particular page on your website. You will need to ask your web developer to embed the code for a Facebook tracking pixel on your website if you wish to advertise to website visitors.

Once you are happy with an audience you are targeting, Facebook allows you to save this audience to be used on future campaigns. This will save you considerable brain power and time when it comes to advertising to a similar market on the next campaign.

Want to learn more about buyer personas for your business? Read our easy to follow tips on free social media tools that will really improve your social media posts.

– Developing Digital Personas

5. Set Budget for Facebook Ad

When you advertise on Facebook you will be given the options to set a daily budget or a lifetime budget. A daily budget should be used if you want your ad set to run continuously throughout the day. This is an option you’ll want to go for if your ad is just running for one day. Using a daily budget means that Facebook will pace your spending per day. Don’t forget that the minimum daily budget for an ad set is €1.00.

A lifetime budget should be used if you’re looking to run your ad for a specific length of time. Facebook will pace your spend over the time period you set for the ad to run. Make sure to take your time on this section to avoid costly mistakes on ad budget and ad duration.

6. Develop a Facebook Ad

Now you can finally work on what your ad will appear like on Facebook. Your ad options are usually broken down into two formats which are Links and Carousels. Basically, this means that you can either display a single image ad (Links) or a multi-image ad (Carousel). Carousel ads can have three to five scrolling images.

Whatever option you choose, you’ll need to upload your images or videos. You will have to adhere to certain design criteria for each type of ad.

For single image ads, Facebook will strongly recommend that you adhere to the following criteria:

• Ad Text: 125 characters
• Ad Headline: 25 characters
• Image ratio: 1.91:1
• Image resolution (including CTA): 1080 x 1080 pixels

Once you upload your image and add the text for the ad it is extremely important to look at the previews of the Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, and Desktop Right Column on the right hand side before you click on publish.

How will your business make the most of LinkedIn?

The most important advice you need to remember when setting up a Facebook ad is to take your time and make your ad text and images as attention grabbing as possible. Once you understand who you are trying to reach and what they are looking for, Facebook ads gets a lot easier. Always monitor your ads every day and don’t be afraid to stop ads and try again if they are not working. The best thing about Facebook Ads is that you will only spend your ad budget on effective ads if you keep a close eye on how your ads are performing.

Contact our Digital Marketing Manager Jonathan Flynn if you would like any further tips and training on Facebook for your business. We would be happy to meet over Zoom and help you get the very most from Facebook Ads.