Facebook Advertising Guide

Digital marketers have flocked to Facebook’s advertising platform in recent years in search of a quick return on investment using this remarkable tool for reaching very targeted audiences. However, it’s important to understand that there are dozens of false starts and failed campaigns out there for every success story that you may hear about.

That’s because successful Facebook advertising campaigns require a solid understanding of the basics of how users interact with content on this platform in order to be effective. It’s also important to understand how to properly monitor your campaigns to see what’s working so that you can make necessary adjustments.

Thankfully, creating and implementing a smart Facebook marketing campaign isn’t rocket science, as this helpful infographic illustrates. Below, we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of what you need to do to put the tips offered in the infographic to work for you.

Finding Your Target Audience On Facebook

The first step to putting together a smart Facebook advertising campaign is figuring out how to reach the people that need to receive your message the most. That’s generally a snap thanks to Facebook’s sophisticated targeting options, but it might require a little bit of exploring before you find the audience segments that are right for you.

One of the reasons that Facebook’s advertising platform has become so popular is that it allows advertisers to get remarkably sophisticated at zeroing in on specific demographics.

The easiest place to start with Facebook targeting is by exploring basic demographics like location, age, gender, and parental status. Depending on what you are promoting, you might also choose to drill down into educational and professional factors such as job title, professional interests, employer, and educational background. Other popular options for Facebook targeting include life events like engagements and new jobs, as well as interests ranging from hobbies and favorite foods to beliefs and political perspectives.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with the basics of Facebook targeting, you can drill down even deeper by focusing your advertising on users that have performed specific actions. For example, one great way to take advantage of existing audiences is to show your ads to your competitors’ fans. You can also focus target your ads on people who have demonstrated that they participate in certain types of activities regularly, such as traveling.

Creating Effective Facebook Ads

While targeting is important to ensuring the right people are exposed to your advertising campaign, the most important step is making sure that your actual ads resonate with your audience. The easiest way to create an effective Facebook ad is to break the typical advertisement down into its three major components and focus on getting each part right.

The first thing that your audience will notice when they see your ad is the actual visual image you are using. Some basic best practices to consider when you are creating your ad image include using an expressive human face and avoiding clutter in the picture so that it stands out. It’s also smart to incorporate some text in the image, but be sure that less than 20% of the image contains text in order to meet Facebook’s guidelines.

The text of your post will appear right above the image of almost every Facebook ad. Remember to keep your tone light and conversational in this area. Try to draw your audience when by focusing on the benefits your promotion is offering or speaking of a pain that your audience may be experiencing. Going for shock value with a surprising statistic or teaser can be a great way to encourage people to click through in many cases.

Be sure to take advantage of Facebook’s ability to test multiple versions of your ads, especially when you are first starting off. By testing some different images, post text, and other options like calls to action and headlines, you’ll be able to discover what messages resonate with your audience the most. Many advertisers fall into this trap of Facebook advertising by treating it as a one-off affair.

Choosing the Right Ad Formats and Objectives for Your Campaign

The next step is to use Facebook’s advertising platform to select an ad format for your campaign and choose the advertising objective that makes the most sense for your goals.

The three primary Facebook ad formats are single image ads, carousel ads, and video ads. Image ads are by far the most common and a great place to start if you are new to advertising on Facebook. Carousel ads allow you to experiment with using multiple images in a single ad, which can be a great way to display different products or tell a visual story. Video ads can be tremendously effective on Facebook so long as they are under 90 seconds and simple enough to be understood while muted.

You are limited to selecting a single objective for each of your advertising campaigns. Facebook provides advertisers with more than a dozen objectives to choose from, ranging from increasing brand awareness to promoting specific types of offers like events and apps. To keep things simple though, most marketers stick to either sending traffic to their website or increasing conversions on their website as the objective of an average campaign.

Upleveling Your Campaigns with Facebook Advertising Tools

Once you have gotten your first Facebook ad campaigns set up, it’s time to monitor how your ads perform. Three of the most powerful Facebook advertising tools are the Knowledge Graph, Audience Insights, and the Power Editor.

The Knowledge Graph provides you with powerful insights into what types of interests and pages your audience engages with the most. Audience Insights lets you get under the hood with your targeting options to learn more about the demographics of your ideal audiences. Note: Power Editor has been combined with Ads Manager now.

Wrapping It Up

By now, you should have a solid understanding of how Facebook advertising campaigns work and the basics of how to set up your campaign for success. Hopefully, this type of social media marketing strategy also now looks like something approachable that you can put to work for yourself. If so, best of luck, and have fun getting the attention you deserve through Facebook’s popular and effective advertising platform.

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This is a guest post by Ted Chong. Ted runs Ice Cube Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Singapore that helps local small businesses acquire leads from channels such as Facebook and Google.