In part one of the basics of social media advertising I walked you through creating a business profile page and promoting it. Now you are ready to create Facebook Ad campaigns and begin boosting important posts promoting your business.
Facebook ad campaigns can be very targeted and are a great way to reach a specific audience and generate quality leads and customers. Over the years Facebook has tweaked their advertising strategies and policies and have improved the ability for businesses to more closely target a specific group of people. You can create ads that are defined by demographics as well as specific interests, job titles, etc. This allows you to create campaigns that will reach the people most likely to take some sort of action on your ad that is of value to you. Many people are still reluctant to use social media as a way to advertise, they don't see the value in social media marketing or believe it to be limited to branding and customer engagement. But that is completely inaccurate and if you are not using social media to market your business you are missing out on the opportunity to reach hundreds of millions of users, with access to their locations, interests, behaviors, and countless other targeting capabilities. Not to mention the fact that it is one of the most affordable advertising platforms available....a marketers dream and a win win, affordable and targeted!
In this post I will walk you through the basics of using Facebook ads to generate quality leads and use that information to analyze your customer's behaviors and create "lookalike audiences" to even further grow your target market.
Let's create an ad campaign
On your business page go to the AD Center which is located on the top of your Facebook page. This is where you will be able to see all ads and promotions as well as the analytics on how each ad performed. Click on Promote and you will be brought to a page where you can decide the goal of your campaign.
You can create multiple ads using different goals to achieve different results. When I first built my Facebook page I created an ad with the goal of promoting the page to grow my audience and draw attention to the page, I also created an ad with the goal of sending people to my website. For this post I will be walking you through the ad campaign with the goal set "to get more leads". The steps for setting up the ad are very similar for each goal.
After you choose your campaign goal you will be directed to start editing your ad. If you chose generate more leads you will first be directed to customize a form that people can fill out so that you can contact them about their interest in your business.
Select or upload an image or use one of Facebook's free stock photos if you don't have a picture that you feel is suitable for your specific business. Side note, if you are not familiar with unsplash.com you should check it out, its a free website with hundreds of pictures that you can download for free without any concern about copyright.
So choose whichever photo or photos you think will draw attention and interest in your ad. You can create your ad with a single photo, a slideshow of up to 10 photos or even a video ad. Now create a headline that draws attention to your ad and lets people know what your ad is about, keep your headline short but make sure it's informative. You then can add additional text below the headline that describes in more detail what you are promoting.
You can also create a call to action by adding a button that allows people to engage with your ad. I selected "learn more" but I also might choose "call now" or "get a quote". What you choose all depends on what your goal is with the ad.
Choose your audience
This is the most important and valuable step in creating your ad, spend some time thinking about who it is exactly that you'd like to target. You can get very detailed with your target audience and can choose everything from location, male/female, age, interests, behaviors, jobs, etc. Facebook will guide you with some suggestions, but you can also type in just about anything you think would target someone that would be interested in your business. Facebook shows a meter that will tell you if your ad is too specific or too broad and it will also tell you your potential reach based on the targets you choose.
Budget
Your budget effects your total reach too, you can choose the total amount you'd like to spend by selecting your daily budget and the length of your campaign. However, it is recommended that you run the ad continuously because there are certain times when you may use less or more of your daily budget based on days that are better for your ad to run. If you choose this and still have an overall budget in mind (and who doesn't), make sure you keep track of how much is being spent so that you can stop the ad from running if you reach your planned budget. Obviously, the higher your daily budget, the more clicks FB estimates you will receive.
After you've created your ad, chosen your audience and set your budget you are all set to run the ad.
But wait....have you heard about Facebook Pixel? If not you definitely need to learn what that is and how incredibly insightful and useful it is when you are choosing your audience and quantifying the results of your ad.
Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that is placed in the header of your website that helps you measure when someone visits your website from your Facebook ad, and it tracks any actions they take on your website. Obviously, an extremely useful tool in understanding who that potential customer was and what they were interested in on your website. You can use that information to reach them with future Facebook ads or you can create a custom audience or "lookalike audiences" that target people with similar interests and demographics to the people that took action on your ad and site. Pretty cool, huh!
You will need a website for your business and must either be able to update your website's code or have someone that manages your website update it for you.
Here is a link to the basic steps "beginner's guide" to setting up your Pixel. Once you have this set up on your website you will love the information you can generate about the people who are interested in your ads and what actions they take when they reach your website....so do not skip this step!!
You've now spent time creating a beautiful Facebook business page and are on your way to growing your business with ads. You also need to be posting relevant and interesting information to your audience regularly. You can boost posts that you think are really important or that you'd like to make sure reach a targeted audience, boosting posts works in the same way as the ads you've now learned to create. You can choose your audience and budget.
If you need help with growing your business or have any questions about advertising with Facebook or any of the other social media sites, I'd love to help.
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