This guide on how to advertise on Facebook will give you more room to grow and expand your business. In the course of this article, you will get expert tips on how to advertise on Facebook to grow your business.
Facebook is a safe space for your business to grow. There are plenty of tools and updates available for your business to maximize on Facebook. You can grow both organically and non-organically on Facebook. Your business goals would determine the one to prioritize.
According to Facebook, the 10 ways to grow your business includes:
- Start the conversation
- Motivate people
- Make your customers part of the story
- Be a go-to place for great contents
- Make customer service your thing
- Use videos
- Use insights to understand what works
- Promote relevant content with a target audience
- Find new audiences
- Turn fans into customers
In one way or another, running Facebook ads would facilitate the above tips. There is no gainsaying that Facebook ads should be among your digital marketing strategies.
How To Advertise on Facebook: Types of Facebook ads
- Image ads
This could be an image post you boosted from your page or you can create an image solely for the ad. Image ads can appear anywhere on the Facebook ads network depending on where you placed your ad.
While doing image ads, always be creative about your copy and optimize your image to suit your goals for the ad.
- Video ads
Video ads can be on the newsfeed or stories. They can appear as in-stream ads in longer Facebook videos.
You can run a video ad to show a demo of your product or a behind the scene of what you’re about. It mustn’t be filmed, you can create GIF videos or convert images to a slide share video.
- Poll ads
This is the ad in a poll format. You would ask a question and promote for people to answer, you and those who answered can see the results on the go. This is suitable for research and getting customer feedback.
- Carousel ads
This is where you put up to 10 images or videos together to showcase your brand and products. Each image and video can have its link, maybe leading to a ‘shop now button’ to direct visitors to your product landing page.
- Slide show ads
Here, you create short video ads from a collection of still photos, text, or video clips. The good thing is that it loads faster even with a poor internet connection. This is a way of getting creative with your ad.
- Collection ads
Collection ads are targeted only at mobile devices. It allows you to showcase 5 images or videos that customers can click to buy a product or service. It’s a way for people to buy your product without having to leave your Facebook page. This kind of ad is best for advertising to people on the go.
- Stories ads
This can be said to be the best way to advertise to mobile devices. This is because stories ads allow for flexibility while occupying the viewer’s full screen. Also, stories ads utilize the FOMO principle where your audience won’t take time to view your ad knowing fully well that it will disappear in 24 hours. It’s effective for getting quick results.
- Augmented Reality ads
This kind of ad uses features like filters and animations to allow people to interact with your brand.
It’s suitable for brand brands that sell fashion items like lipstick, eyeglass, cosmetics,, etc. because it can serve as a mini demo for your products.
- Messenger ads
You can run “Click to messages’’ ads that can appear on Facebook feeds. This is best for getting instant feedback.
- Dynamic ads
This is more like retargeting. It is when you advertise to those people that have earlier interacted with your brand.
- Leads ads
Lead ads are only available for mobile devices. It is designed to make it easy for people to give you their contact information without a lot of typing.
It’s best for collecting newsletter subscriptions, signing someone up for a trial, or allowing people to ask for more information from you.
How To Advertise on Facebook – Steps to advertise on Facebook
Once you have a Facebook business account, the next thing is to follow the steps below to create your ad
Step 1: Set your objectives.
From your Facebook ads manager, select the campaign tabs and click on create, Facebook will show you the 11 marketing objectives you can choose from based on what you want to achieve with your ads.
These goals include:
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- App install
- Engagement
- Lead Generation
- Messages
- Catalog sales: Show people ads for the products they are most likely want to buy
- Store traffic: Drive traffic to physical stores
- Conversion
- Video views
Step 2. Name your campaign
This is for easy tracking and control.
You can set up an A/B split test to know what works. To set up this test, click on Get Started in the A/B Test section to set the ad as your control. You can choose different versions to run against this ad.
Scroll down a little further to choose whether to turn on budget optimization. This option can be useful if you’re using multiple ad sets, but for now, you can leave it turned off.
Step 3: Set your budget and schedule
After naming your ad and choosing which page to promote, decide how much you want to spend on your campaign. It could be daily or lifetime. Set the start and the end dates.
Scheduling your ad is the best to give room for more flexibility.
Step 4: Target your audience
There are 3 types of audiences you can target on Facebook;
- Custom audience: these are people who have interacted with your brand before either by liking your page, commenting, or sharing. These are the kind of people that would most likely buy from you.
- Saved audience: here you target specific people based on their interests, behaviors, income levels, location, etc.
- Lookalike audience: these are people that have not previously engaged with your brand but they look like your custom audience. It could be people connected to your custom audience either by following them or engaging with their posts. There is every possibility that these people would be interested in your brand.
You can start with a custom audience and expand to other options subsequently.
Selecting your audience involves choosing their location, age, gender, and language.
You can always check the audience size indicator from the data on your Facebook ads manager so you will get a rough estimate of your potential ad reach.
Step 5: Choose your Facebook ad placement
You could choose your ad to be automatic and leave it to Facebook to place your ad where it is most suitable or you may go specific to
- Device type; where you choose between mobile; desktop or both
- Platform; you can choose either Facebook, Instagram, audience network, or messenger.
- Placement; it could be in feeds, stories, in-stream as(for videos), search, messenger,in-article and sites external to Facebook
- Specific mobile devices and operating systems; android, ios, feature phones, or all devices.
Step 6: Choose your brand safety and cost controls
Here, you can choose to avoid your ads showing sensitive content.
Then set your ad bidding strategy and bidding types. You can add an optional bid control.
Step 7. Create your ad
After choosing your ad format, enter the text and media component you’re using for your ad.
This is where you get creative. Write the kind of ads your audience would be willing to read and respond to. You don’t want to spend money on an ad that would not convert.
How to advertise on Facebook- Facebook ads specs
Facebook has listed the different specifications they would accept for the different kinds of ads available on their platform. Failure to comply with these specs would result in your ad being flagged down or presented in poor quality.
Image ads
- Headline: 40 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
- Body text: 125 characters
- Campaign objectives: All except video view
Video ads
- Headline:40 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
- Body text:125 characters
- Campaign objectives: all except catalog sales
Facebook Stories ads
- Text: No set character count. Aim to leave 250 pixels text-free at the top and bottom of the ad.
- Campaign objectives: All except engagement and store visits
Carousel ads
- Headline: 40 characters
- Link description: 20 characters
- Body text: 125 characters
- Campaign objectives: All except engagement and video views
Slideshow ads
- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
- Body text: 125 characters
- Campaign objectives:
Collection ads
- Headline: 40 characters
- Link description: n/a
- Body text: 125 characters
- Campaign objectives: Traffic, conversions, catalog sales, store traffic
Instant Experience ads
- Text: Blocks of text up to 500 words each
- Button text: 30 characters
- Campaign objectives: All except lead generation
Messenger Inbox ads
- Headline: 40 characters
- Link description: n/a
- Body text: 125 characters
- Campaign objectives: Traffic, app installs, conversions, catalog sales, messages
How to advertise on Facebook: Facebook ads cost
How much it costs on facebook depend on a range of things; your budget, the placement you chose, your bid, and other factors like:
- Time: The month, day, and even the hour you set your ad
- Bidding Timing strategy: The cost of the bid strategy you chose
- Ad placement: placing your ad in a competitive space will cost you more
- Ad relevance: This is determined by your ad score. When you have a low score in your ad’s engagement ranking, quality ranking, or conversion ranking, you would cost higher.
- Target audience: Higher competition audiences cost you more.
Also read: How much does a Facebook ad cost
How to advertise on Facebook: best tips for Facebook ads
- Be creative with your copy
- Use a suitable bid strategy
- Set out a budget
- Leverage remarketing
- Consider your goal
- Measure
- Keep iterating
- Don’t rely on just Facebook, consider other platforms
Final Thoughts On How To Advertise on Facebook
Running an effective Facebook ad for your business is something you master with time. Starting you might not get the results you want but when you keep learning and adjusting, the effect would start being evident.
Don’t forget to follow the Facebook ads guideline to get the best from your ads.
Following the above tips and guidelines, you are empowered to run your Facebook ads on your own, but if you need expert help, you could hire the best digital marketing agency to do it for you.
