Chances are high that your prospective customers are on Facebook. The wildly popular social media platform has more than 2.4 billion monthly active users. And that’s a pre-COVID stat. Imagine the growth on the platform now with people at home and online more than ever.
So the question is… how do you hook your reader with a compelling ad?
Unfortunately, the days of organic reach are long gone. No matter how good your social media posts are, there are just too many barriers to reach prospects with content alone. Now the name of the game is Facebook ads.
Fortunately, Facebook Ads Manager makes it easy to create, test, and purchase ads that will let you find and connect with your customers, increase brand awareness, and drive sales.
So what exactly is Facebook Ads Manager? It’s an all-in-one tool for running ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Networks. It allows you to create ads, manage where and when they will run, and track how well your ads are performing.
At first, Facebook Ads Manager can seem a bit daunting because it has lots of features and the user interface changes often. But with a little knowledge, practice and time, you can get your ads up and running. The first step is to set up a business page on Facebook. Once you set your business page up, Facebook automatically creates an Ads Manager account for you.
Facebook has this cool feature to help you create your first ad. Once you are in your Ads Manager dashboard, click on Switch to Guided Creation in the top right-hand corner. This is a step-by-step guide that takes you through selecting your objective. The most common ad objectives when you’re starting out with Facebook ads are brand awareness, traffic and reach.
Defining your target audience is the next critical step. If your product or service is location-specific, you can use a map feature to pin a location and set a radius up to 50 miles around your pin. (Alternatively, you can target cities, states or countries.) Add specifics like gender, age, language, and more to further refine your targeting. The more narrow and targeted your audience, the better chance you have of meeting your campaign objectives. Facebook helps you do this by allowing you to match to Facebook users’ behaviors such as interests, life events and job title.
Not ready for Facebook Ads Manager? Try this on for size: Should I Boost Posts on Facebook?
The next step is to select your placements and budget. Initially, you may find it useful to select the Automatic Placements tool until you have a chance to dig deeper into analytics. Setting your budget for ads has lots of components, which we will talk about in a later blog.
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to design an ad. While this is simple to do, it does require some important thinking. Images with less than 20% text tend to perform better than those with lots of type. Facebook used to restrict ads to the 20% rule, but they lifted that in the Fall of 2020.
Write engaging copy with very few words. That can be challenging! And don’t forget that you need a clear call to action too.
You are competing with huge amounts of information that Facebook users receive every day. Test, test, test! Small improvements in your ad can make a huge difference.
Wondering How to Put Your Marketing Strategy to Work? Try this 4-step process to set yourself up for success.
You may need to tweak audience, placement, frequency, visuals, copy and other variables based on the numbers you discover in your analytics.
Facebook Ads Manager is a great tool, but it requires smart strategic and creative guidance and serious attention to analytics. We are here to help you with this vital component of your marketing. Get in touch with us, we’d love to help you grow your business.