The best way to rapidly grow an online audience and keep your brand top of their mind is through paid advertising. But when you are on a tight marketing budget and you don’t have a lot of room for experimenting you can achieve success with Facebook Ads; however, you need a plan for making the most efficient use of your marketing dollars.
The method is easy. Facebook permits users to focus on audiences through self-serve tools and it offers them analytics reports that track the performance of every ad. The reach and visibility give the same chances for a freelance business that desires to compete with companies with a lot of larger budgets.
Setting Up Your Facebook Advertising Account
Before you start worrying about the ads themselves, you need sign up to the Facebook ads program.
First, set Up Facebook Business Manager to build a profile for your company on Facebook. You can create a Business Manager account from there that allows you to run ads for that website. To start, go to the Business Manager home page and click Create Account. Then log in using the email and password you used to set up your account on the business page.
After that you need to install the Facebook Pixel. Go to your website and add a Facebook pixel that allows Facebook to recognize people who have visited your website. Create custom visitor audiences, and then display them advertisements.
Now you need to create Audiences to target users. You can build and save audiences that are most important to your brand with the audience tool. Go back to Business Manager, and from the Assets column, select the Audiences choice.
Finally, you account is now set up. You can start by advertising an existent or move on to making your own ads.
Getting Started with Facebook Ads
It is necessary to understand the Facebook Ad algorithm since it recognizes ads that provide a good user experience. It will help maximize your budget with the correct settings. There is a practical explanation why the algorithm exists: users would not return to Facebook if advertisers monopolize the news feed, Instagram, the right-hand column, or whatever you’re using to advertise on Facebook. This implies that your advertisements need to have value as Facebook tries to build a positive user experience with meaningful interactions.
If you want to get the best results, it’s important to understand the various Facebook ad styles and targeting options before you dive in. In this guide, from preparing your first ad to designing advanced marketing strategies, we will walk you through everything you need to know.
The types of Facebook ads
Facebook offers a huge amount of ads which is a blessing but can also be a curse as you’re overwhelmed and can’t decide what would work the best for you.
Image ads
A perfect way to get started with Facebook advertisements is with the easy to create image ads. By enhancing an existing post with an image from your Facebook Page, you can create one with just a few clicks.
Image advertising can be simplistic, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be boring.
Video ads
In News Feed and Stories, video advertisements can play, or they can appear in longer Facebook videos as in-stream advertising. In motion, video ads can display your team or your product.
There’s no need for your online ads to use recorded video clips. As in this Ad, you can also make GIF-like graphics or other animations to catch attention or clarify your bid.
Video poll ads
This kind of Ad is mobile-only, it adds interaction beyond the liking and commenting in the form of polls that you audience can answer. Even though it’s still in its dawn phase, the latest data shows that these ads are more effective in increasing brand awareness than the regular video ads.
Carousel Ads
With this type of ad, you may add up to 10 different images or videos to showcase your product or service. This format is extremely helpful in highlighting different aspects or benefits of a single product or even multiple.
Slideshow Ads
Slideshow Ads provide you with a simple way to create a short video from multiple still images, text, or even video clips. You can also add stock images directly from the Ads Manager.
Like videos, slideshow ads have eye-catching motion which makes them superior to still images, but they use five times less bandwidth, so even for people with sluggish internet connections won’t have trouble loading them.
Collection Ads
This type of Facebook advertising, offered only for mobile devices, allow you to showcase five items that customers can click to purchase.
Collection ads combine with Instant Interactions to encourage individuals to purchase your goods without ever leaving Facebook (more on those below). When individuals are on-the-go and may not have a great internet connection, this makes online shopping quick.
Instant Experience ads
Instant Experience ads used to be called Canvas. They’re a full-screen ad format, like this example from American Express, that loads 15 times faster than a mobile website outside of Facebook.
In order for people to have access to even more instant mobile content, you can also connect to additional instant experiences.
Lead ads
Lead ads are only available for mobile devices and they are specifically designed to make it easy for individuals without a lot of typing to send you their contact details. They are perfect for obtaining subscriptions to the newsletter, subscribing to anyone to test your product, or even enabling people to ask you for more details.
Since these advertisements are such a great way to feed your sales funnel, you should check this complete guide to using lead advertisements from Facebook that breaks down all the information you need to know to make the most of this crucial form of campaign for Facebook ads.
Dynamic ads
Dynamic ads enable you to target the clients most likely to be interested in them with your products ads.
For example, if anyone has visited a product page or put a product on your website in their shopping cart, but then abandoned the purchase, in their Facebook feed, dynamic advertisements for the exact product would appear.
This reminds the potential client to complete the order, which can be a very powerful marketing tool for Facebook.
Messenger ads
You get access to the 1.3 billion people who use Messenger per month with Facebook Messenger ads. Simply select Messenger as the ideal placement when designing your ad. You will need to pick feeds from Facebook.
In the Facebook Feed, you can also run “click-to-Messenger” ads. These advertisements include a call-to-action button that opens a conversation page with your Messenger. So that individuals can have a one-on-one conversation with one of your salespeople or customer service representatives.
Stories ads
Scientific studies found that in order to watch videos, 72 percent of millennials won’t rotate their screens. Story advertisements are a vertical full-screen video format that allows you to optimize the real estate of the screen without expecting viewers to change the screen.
Such advertisements have proved highly successful. A Facebook-commissioned Ipsos survey found that because of Stories ads, more than half of individuals said they were making more online purchases.
Stories augmented reality ads
In order to allow people to engage with your brand, augmented reality advertisements use features like filters and animation. Facebook is new to this ad format, but 63 percent of the U.S. Internet users say they have checked out an AR brand experience already.
Playable ads
Another modern ad format that combines interactivity. You create a game environment that allows individuals to engage with your innovative content.
Improving Facebook Ad Targeting With Custom Audiences
Facebook fans’ real effect on your company is not just about the size of your audience; it’s how engaged they are with your content. Previously, the only way you could target your audience with advertising was either as a whole audience or by forming segments with simple demographic and interest targeting.
Since there were no dynamic targeting choices, a large number of people who like your page but don’t actually engage with any of your posts or advertisements will be included in your target audience.
You can now segment and create audiences based on the experiences people have with your Facebook page and adverts with the introduction of page engagement custom audiences. This makes it possible for you to target only the most interested individuals who are hyper-responsive to your ad campaigns.
Testing your Facebook Ads
An efficient way to automatically test Facebook ad variations is the Facebook Dynamic Creative ad tool.
The tool provides the best combinations of artistic assets for your ad. To decide which combinations yield the best results, it runs various combinations of your ad components, such as images , videos, titles, descriptions, and calls to action, across your target audience.
Conclusion
Facebook advertising, despite the steep climb, can be a good marketing tool for the right company. Targeting specific interests is the most important point to note, use eye catching photos, offer users a low-friction conversion, and monitor everything.
You’ll be able to produce a consistent source of conversions from the world’s largest social network after a some time of trial and error and exploring what works for your company.