If you want to use Facebook ads for your small business, this article will help you on how to efficiently use them for your marketing goals and promotion of your product in a cost-effective manner. You can follow this guide to use Facebook ads as your digital marketing channel.
However, it is important for you to also apply these principles as you learn them.
For this, you will need a Facebook business page.
That way, you can use Facebook Ads Manager and create a new ad campaign.
Here are the steps:
Step 1: Set your goals
Go to the Facebook Ads Manager and click on ‘campaign’. Then click on ‘create’ to create a new campaign.
When you do any marketing campaign, it is important to set what you desire or expect from the campaign. Marketing goals can be set in different terms. Let’s see what they are.
- Brand awareness
- Number of impressions
- App installs
- Pageviews
- Video views
- Catalog sales
- Engagement
- Conversion or actual sales
- Leads
- Message of interest
It is important that you design your ad campaign according to your marketing goals. For example, you can choose pay-per-click if all you want is sales.
If you want brand awareness, then you should pay as per the impressions. So you can choose metrics such as page views and number of impressions, or video views.
You should not select any goal that is not consistent with the metrics or the type of campaign. If all you want is the promotion of your Facebook page, do not provide a link for people to visit your website and count page views.
Step 2: Name your campaign
Providing a name that explains easily the purpose of the campaign is the best.
You might take this lightly in your first ad, but as you keep creating ad campaigns, these campaigns will pile up on the list of campaigns and it will become confusing to identify which one was which.
To name a campaign, just enter any name you see fit in the text box.
There are also other tools such as an option for A/B split testing, budget optimization and more. If you do not know what A/B split testing is, you will learn later in this guide.
These tools are optional for your first campaign but you may want to use them as you learn more.
Once, you verify and state your preferences for different tools, as per your marketing goals, you can click ‘set up ad’ to proceed further.
Step 3: Complete your account details
In this step, you need to enter some important details about your Facebook business account like your country, your target area, time zone, currency, and so on.
Please, fill these details carefully as you cannot change these. If you want to change the details later, you will create a new business account.
If you have already completed all the details in your ad account, you do not need this step. You can skip to the next step ie. targetting the audience.
Step 4: Target audience
Selecting the appropriate target audience is a crucial step. You should think about which segment of the audience would give the best response or would be most interested in your product.
Before selecting your target audience you should carefully analyze your product and answer some questions like
- According to you, what would be the profile of an ideal user of your product?
- The profile will contain details about age, gender, area or region, specific likes and dislikes, their job, their education, etc.
- Do you think the audience you select has the purchasing power to buy your product?
Now keeping these questions in mind, select a target audience and enter the corresponding targeting features.
You should then find out the best way to communicate with the target audience.
In your target audience, including the type of users who have already shown interest in your product.
There are two areas where you can specify your audience in Facebook ads
Detailed targeting
You can include or exclude users based on three factors:
- Behavior
- Demographics
- Interests
Connections
Here you can target or deselect some people who are already connected to your Facebook page. This way you choose whether to show your ad or not to the people who have liked your page.
You can be specific in these areas. You will get better at Facebook ads with practice. So it is preferable to try and experiment with features in the beginning.
This way you can reach the full potential of Facebook ads soon and increase your return of investment on ad campaigns.
Step 5: Ad placement
In this step, you choose where to show your ads. There is an option to choose ‘automatic placement’ for beginners which is simple.
With automatic placement, Facebook will decide by itself where should your ad go for maximum impact. These places can include various Facebook feeds, Instagram, messenger or audience networks.
If you decide to manually select ad placement, you can choose these options:
- Placement based on device type: mobile, PC, or both
- Operating system: iOS, android
- Platform: Facebook app, messenger, Instagram or audience network with many sub-categories
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Step 6: Budgeting and scheduling
In this step, you can decide how much money do you want to spend and how long or for how much duration do you want to show your ads.
The correct knowledge of budgeting can only be learned over time. You can start from small budgets and short campaigns and learn as you go.
You can specify daily as well as campaign lifetime budget.
Another option is you can start the campaign as soon as you finish entering the specifications or you can schedule the campaign in the future, to run on specific days or time.
As you learn more with practice, you can learn and use the advanced budgeting options. You will learn to optimize your campaigns and be more efficient with your money.
Advertising is a long-term process and it is better to keep the ads going on rather than run short 3 or 4-day campaigns once in a while. But this is something that you need to decide.
Running a long campaign also gives Facebook to learn about your campaign, kind of people interested, demographics and so on. This way the ads are shown to people who have a higher chance of engaging with your product.
In general, long campaigns are good for products or services since they are available throughout the year. Short campaigns are more suited to events that are one-time only or products that are a limited edition.
This will help you get more out of the same amount of money.
Step 7: Create the ad
Before creating the ad, make sure it is:
- Visually appealing
- Informative
- Communicates your message perfectly
- Provides all the necessary details of the product
- Provides contact information
- Has a call-to-action
- The best way to satisfy your marketing goals
You can use the preview tool to check how the ad would appear to the users. This tool can be found at the bottom of the page.
When you are ready to go and start your campaign, click the confirm button.
Facebook will now quickly verify and approve your ad and it will be ready to be shown to the public. You will receive an e-mail regarding this.
This completes the steps required for you to start an ad campaign with Facebook ads for small businesses. With this guide on how to use Facebook ads, small businesses, entrepreneurs or freelancers can handle their own social media marketing
WHY FACEBOOK ADS?
Now let us learn about various terms related to social media marketing with respect to Facebook ads and why Facebook ads are one of the best marketing channels.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform. It was started in 2004 inside the Harvard university building by roommates Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
By the start of 2020, Facebook has over 2.5 billion users. The most populous country in the world has 1.4 billion people. This makes Facebook a platform where you can reach more people than if you release your ad in China.
The vast number of users makes Facebook an ideal platform for marketers. Everybody is on Facebook!!
With Facebook ads, you can promote your small business to a more suitable audience that is really interested in your product.
This way you can reduce wastage of marketing budget on people who are not really interested in your product which happens a lot in ads on TV or newspapers. This is a big advantage of digital marketing.
Facebook gives small businesses and entrepreneurs a chance to compete in the market where they can not afford to give ads on mass media like TV which requires crores of rupees.
With Facebook ads, small businesses can save money and still reach a wide audience.
With its targeting options that use user behaviors like their age, demographics, interests, page likes and more, to decide whether the user would be interested in your product.
If Facebook thinks the user would not be interested and showing an ad to that user would be a waste of marketing money, it does not show the ad to that user.
This way, a great marketing campaign can be set up to reach hundreds of users only in a few thousand rupees.
Let us learn about various technical terms related to Facebook ads and social media marketing.
Reach/ Impressions
Reach is just the number of people to whom the ad is being potentially shown. In digital marketing, reach is similar to impressions, which is the total number of people exposed to your ad.
CTR
When an ad is shown to a user, sometimes it is clicked upon by the user. The total number of clicks per 1000 number of impressions is called CTR or click-through rate.
CPM
CPM or cost per thousand impressions is the cost charged to you for showing the ads a thousand times.
PPC
PPC or pay-per-click is an advertising model where the business pays the ad platform an amount every time someone clicks on the ad.
This is great as there is no money spent unless the user actually clicks on the link and reaches the website or the landing page.
A/B testing
Let us assume that there are two ads that you designed but you have to choose between one of them. With A/B split testing, you can show a small number of users different samples of ads and based on their response, you can decide which ad generates more engagement so you can use that ad for larger campaigns.
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Tips to get better at Facebook ads
No two ad campaigns can be the same. This is because no two products are the same.
This is why any guide to teach Facebook advertising for your product can only teach you the basics.
your best bet to learn about Facebook Ads is by investing in a digital marketing course like the Digital Marketing Master Course from IIM SKILLS. Here you can learn in detail about social media marketing including Facebook ads, as well as SEO, SEM, Content writing and much more.
In order to perfect your campaign, you will have to do the practice. Facebook provides all tools inside the campaign manager so you can learn a lot while creating campaigns.
There are a few things you can do to learn Facebook ads for small businesses faster.
The first way would be to change and play around with some of its features. You can change the target audience, for example.
Targeting a new audience can tell you a lot about your product as well. It can help you discover new markets or new applications for your products.
You can narrow down or broaden your audience based on their preferences and likes. You can change the age and demographics.
For example, if you are selling study lamps, you can target parents of the audience you are currently targeting and tell them the benefits for their child.
You can also use different kinds of images and different messages to see which one gives you the best results. You can use A/B split testing before launching any ad campaign. This will also help you get the maximum out of your marketing budget.
Always use high-quality images. Facebook and especially Instagram, are highly visual-oriented platforms and amateur photographers may not click the best photos. Hire a good photographer.
You can experiment with video ads too. Most small businesses find video ads to lead to more engagement. Videos are interactive and easily catch attention.
You can increase your ad budget for one day to see what impact it has on your product sales.
Monitor your ad performance from time to time. If you want to learn Facebook marketing for small businesses, it is important to tweak and learn.
Facebook ads for small business is all about testing. No one can tell a perfect bid strategy, the perfect message to deliver, and the perfect target audience, and so on.
It is only through testing that you can find which market leads to the best conversion rates and the highest sales for your product.
For more such articles about digital marketing for small business, visit the digital marketing blog.
Frequently Asked Questions- FAQs
Q1. Do Facebook advertisements really benefit the small businesses?
Yes. Facebook is a social media user worldwide. Hence it is the most popular and powerful marketing tool for small businesses. The targeted customers are very well-fetched on Facebook, increasing the conversion rate for small businesses.
Q2. How much does it cost on Facebook ads?
Facebook advertisements are comparatively cheaper than LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube. Apart from this, season and the competition in the market also has its important role that decides the rates for advertising on Facebook.
Q3. Can Facebook be used for free advertisements?
Yes, of course. One can use Facebook at a very economical rate or even free to promote their businesses. Since Facebook is the most popular social media platform and also it is widely used by the competitors you should promote your business on Facebook else, you may lose your potential customers to your competitors.
