A Quick and Easy Five-Step Guide to Creating Your First Facebook Ad Campaign

Advertising on social media is an extremely effective way of reaching your desired audience as it meets consumers where they are and allows for advanced audience targeting. As one of the most popular and widest-reaching social media platforms, Facebook offers nearly 2.8­billion monthly active users, making it the ideal start for small businesses looking to advertise in the digital space. Use the step-by-step guide below create and launch Facebook advertising campaigns that can help grow your business.

1. Creating a Facebook Ads Manager Account

To create advertising campaigns on Facebook, you must first activate an Ads Manager account. Ads Manager is an all-in-one tool for creating ads, managing when and where they’ll run and tracking how well campaigns are performing. Luckily, Facebook makes it easy for businesses by automatically creating an Ads Manager account when you set up a business Facebook page. This can be assessed at Business. Facebook.com/AdsManager.

2. Determining the Objective and Buying Type

Facebook offers a variety of objective options for ad campaigns ranging from Traffic to Brand Awareness to Engagement. The best objective for a campaign will be based on the desired results or company goals. If you would like to drive users to your company website to get more information, select a Traffic campaign. If the goal is to build overall user knowledge of your company and services, Brand Awareness would be the best fit.

Video content also performs extremely well on Facebook, so if you have video content ready to share with a larger audience, select the Video Views objective. Additionally, the Engagement objective can help share organic content with a larger audience that is most likely to engage with and comment on your posts.

When choosing an ad objective, you will also see a menu for Buying Type. You can choose from two options: Auction or Reach and Frequency. It is recommended to choose Auction as your buying type as this will allow the Facebook advertising platform to select the best ads based on which are most likely to be successful.

3. Setting a Budget

When it is time to set campaign budgets, there are two choices: daily budgets and lifetime budgets. With a daily budget, you can set the average amount the campaign should spend each day in order to consistently generate the same results daily. A lifetime budget allows you to set a final amount you are willing to spend through the entire flight of the campaign. If you want or need to set a hard cap on the ad spend, this is the best option.

Facebook offers Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO), which allows you to set one overarching campaign budget that continuously distributes to the ad sets with the best opportunity to succeed. This allows the Facebook ad platform to deliver the best results at the lowest cost. If you’re flexible with how the budget can be spent, this is the best option. However, if you would like an ad set within a campaign to utilize a certain amount of the budget, you can also set a minimum spend budget for that specific ad set.

4. Selecting Your Audience

Facebook’s audience targeting allows you to show ads to the people you care about by offering specific audience refining options. Facebook’s "detailed targeting" allows you to choose the audience based on their demographics, interests and behaviors. You can also exclude attributes to avoid targeting certain audience members with ad content. For example, you can target users who live within a 20-mile radius outside of Fairfax, Virginia, are between the ages of 25 and 60, who are homeowners and are interested in pest control and home improvement.

When choosing the audience, it is best to look at your current or prospective customers to identify attributes you would like to target through the ad campaign. You have a lot of options and flexibility here, so play around with the different audience selections and see what works best.

5. Ad Copy and Creative

Drafting the text and capturing images is a fun task for creative team members. While the message and images included will be specific to your business, there are a few best practices to keep in mind.

·     Keep text short: Facebook users scroll and scan quickly, so it is important to ensure the message comes across as simply and concisely as possible.

·     Include a call to action: Facebook offers a variety of call-to-action (CTA) buttons to feature on your ads. A good CTA draws attention and encourages users to engage with the ad. Based on what you want people to do when they see the ad, experiment with phrases such as "Learn More" or "Sign Up."

·    Use minimal text on images: If you are planning to use a text overlay on images, Facebook recommends using less than 20% text as these usually perform better.

·    Use vertical videos: Most users access Facebook on their phone so be sure all content has either a vertical or square aspect ratio to cover their full screen.

·    Add movement to your content: Including short-form video content in your ads can capture the audience’s attention and stand out in the Facebook newsfeed.

Then, that’s it! You can launch the campaign and see how things take off. Once it is up and running, it is critical to keep tabs on the campaign performance. Facebook’s Ads Manager provides users with real time analytics of how the campaign is performing, allowing for adjustments as needed throughout the duration of the campaign. Below is a list of general Facebook advertising performance benchmarks that can help determine whether your ad is performing based on its goals.

·       Click Through Rate (CTR): 0.75%-2%

o   When optimizing for website traffic, ensure your CTR is as high as possible—remaining above the platform benchmark of 0.75%-2%

·       Cost Per Click (CPC): $1-$2

o   When optimizing for website traffic, ensure your CPC is as low as possible—remaining below the platform benchmark of $1-$2

·       Cost Per One Thousand Impressions (CPM): $7-$9

o   When optimizing for awareness, ensure your CPM is as low as possible—remaining below the platform benchmark of $7-$9

Digital advertising may appear as a daunting task, however, Facebook is a platform that is continually evolving to provide small businesses with the tools they need to reach their ideal customers through simple and streamlined advertising processes. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, also offers a variety of educational resources for business owners at Facebook.com/Business. Digital advertising can take your business to the next level and ensure continued and sustainable growth.

"As one of the most popular and widest-reaching social media platforms, Facebook offers nearly 2.8 billion monthly active users, making it the ideal start for small businesses looking to advertise in the digital space."