Quick Step-by-Step Guide to Facebook Ads For Small Businesses

Facebook ads – one great option to market your brand.

As a small business, advertising and marketing are two crucial factors that will determine your business growth in terms of awareness and sales.

One of the biggest opportunities is through social media, specifically Facebook videos.

Why Facebook Ads?

Here are few key reasons to consider Facebook advertising:

• Facebook’s enormity stretches 1.59 billion monthly active users
• 95% of social media marketers stated Facebook gave the best return on investment out of all other social media platforms
• You can target audience by location, gender, interests and much more
• Facebook ads cost less than other online marketing channels, with a minimum spend of $1 per day

Facebook’s cost effectiveness coupled with it’s customer targeting makes it an excellent resource.

Although Facebook advertising is pretty straightforward and easy to use, there are certain things you should know before getting started.

Related: 9 ways to advertise on Snapchat

Step-by-Step Guide to Facebook Advertising

Determining your marketing goal, defining and identifying your audience, setting a budget range and designing your ad are the simple steps it takes to getting started.

Step 1: Selecting your marketing objective

From your home page, select “Create Ads” from the drop-down menu in the top right hand corner.
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What you’ll do next is to enter your “Campaign Name” and select your “marketing objective“. Your marketing objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads. Marketing objectives of three types:

1. Awareness: This helps you generate interests in your product or service.
2. Consideration: This gets people thinking about your business and look for more info.
3. Conversions: This encourages people interested in your business to purchase your product or service.

Tip: You can hover over each option for more information, by clicking on the little “i” that appears to the right. You can also edit your campaign name after choosing an objective.

Once you’ve made your selection, you can create your ad account by selecting your account country, the currency you operate in and you time zone.

Now you can move on to the next step.

Step 2: Defining your audience

Finding the right audience is critical for a successful campaign.

It is beneficial to be as specific as possible, aiming for an audience between 50,000 to 100,000 people when targeting.

Note: Avoid using generic interests such as nature and food. It’s better to choose brands, books, sites and even other Facebook pages when they are available.

Location

You can select entire countries, state/region, city, zip code, address or congressional district.

You can narrow down by choosing age range, gender and languages.

Also, you can target audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors and more under “Detailed Targeting”

Finally, use “Connections” to reach people who have a specific kind of connection to your page, app or event.

Once you’ve made your selections, press Save Audience and you’ll be prompted to give your audience a name.

Step 3: Setting up your budget and schedule

You need to define how much you’ll spend either daily or over a life time.

DAILY BUDGET: Work out the average you’ll spend every day. Some days you’ll spend more, other days less. Keep it simple with an average daily budget.

LIFETIME BUDGET: Work out the maximum you plan to spend in total on the advert set. Facebook will automatically spread the amount you spend across the live period.

You can schedule to run your advert continuously, or within a start and end date.

Step 4: Designing your advert

Choose the format you want from the options below, depending if you have multiple images or vieows you’d like to use

Under the page and links section, you’ll need to add your Facebook page. Check this article to learn how to create a Facebook page for your small business

When choosing an image, the recommended size is 1200 x 628 pixels. You can either upload your own, or add one from the free stock images that Facebook offers.

4 Key components of your Facebook ad

Your Facebook ad campaign must posses these 4 components:

Image: They will have a big impact on how people respond to your ad

Headline: Your headline must be catchy and tell people what the ad is about. Keep it to 24 characters

Text: Tell a bit more about your URL and What you’re promoting. Keep it to 90 characters.

Call to Action: Include a call to action button to tell people what you’d like them to do.

You’ll be prompted to enter the information on the page. You can preview how the ad will look on a desktop, mobile, feature phone and Instagram feed.

*Don’t forget to add your website URL as this will help people know the source of the ad on their Instagram or Facebook news feed.

At the button of the page, you’ll be prompted to “Place Order“. Click the button and enter payment details.

Step 5: Understanding Facebook Ad Reports

Once your advert is up you can analyze it’s performance. If you understand Facebook insights and how it works, you’ll know how well your ad performs. You can find the ad reports under “Facebook Ad Reports”

Columns shows things such as performance, engagement and clicks.

Breakdown shows result by age, location, video view type or day etc.

Once you know the basics, Facebook Ads aren’t that scary. Give it a try and see the benefits for your business.

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