Facebook is another social media platform that businesses have leveraged to boost their brand. Nowadays, for your business to be considered truly authentic, you should have a Facebook business page at least.
Facebook is a very vast platform and it opens you to over 3 billion people worldwide at once. Because of how vast it is, you would need to strategically use the platform to your advantage and there are different ways you can do that, one of which is using a Facebook advert.
In another article, we have extensively discussed how best to use Facebook for marketing. In this article, we will be discussing how you can run a Facebook advert that will generate more prospects and customers.
How do I run a Facebook advert?
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Get started with Facebook Ads Manager:
The Facebook Ads Manager is a complex dashboard that gives you an overview of your advert results and performance over a period. You’ll need a business Facebook page before you can sign up for the ads manager. Facebook does not allow ads to be run through personal profiles.
Set up your Ads Manager as the control centre for your Facebook ads by scrolling to the Facebook Ads Manager page and confirming your information on the account set up page. Also, set up your payment method and save your changes.
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Begin creating ads with the Ads Manager:
After logging into the ads manager, you would see a performance dashboard that should show you the performance of all the ads you have run so far. If it is your first time signing up on the ads manager, this dashboard would be empty.
You can begin creating your ads by clicking on the large green ‘create’ button on the top right corner of the page.
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Select an objective:
In creating the ads, Facebook will prompt you to choose an objective; that is, the reason why you are creating the ad. This is so that Facebook can subsequently provide you with the best options and templates for the ad based on the objective you have selected.
Some of the objectives include brand awareness, reach, engagement, lead generation, conversions, video views and store traffic.
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Select your audience:
This is where you configure your target audience. Some businesses, especially ones new to using Facebook ads, usually like to experiment with their target audience here just to see what type of audience works well for them.
However, what would guide you in defining your audience is your objective for creating the ad. If you’re looking to boost brand awareness, then you should be more generic in your target audience, but if you’re looking to boost your website traffic, it would be more helpful to focus on a more streamlined audience.
Facebook includes many options to define your audience through location, age, gender, interests, and upcoming life events. A helpful tip if you’re looking to make conversions would be to target the audience having upcoming life events (such as birthdays or weddings), explaining how your product will be beneficial to them for that event.
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Have a budget:
The Ads Manager allows you to set up the budget for your ad depending on how long you want it to run. If you simply want your ad to run continuously daily, then the best option for you would be to run a daily budget. Otherwise, for a specific and longer period, you might want to choose a lifetime budget.
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Finish your ad:
This is where you make the finishing touches on how you want your ad to look. Your ad could either be a Links ad or a Carousel ad. In a Links ad, you have only one image displayed on the ad, but in a Carousel ad, you can add up to 3 - 5 scrolling images to the ad for no extra cost.
It is important that after launching your ad, you should regularly check its performance and assess its performance using some performance metrics. For example, you can check its performance through its level of engagement (your page likes, post likes, and post engagement).
Conclusion
For a Facebook advert to sell, you would need to target the right audience while creating the ad. Your ads will surely fall flat and ineffective when you target them to the wrong people.
Run your Facebook adverts side by side with SMS marketing to further boost their impact on your audience. You can follow up with your Facebook adverts by sending SMS text messages to your audience and ensuring that they engage with your posts. Begin SMS marketing now!