With it becoming increasingly difficult to reach your target market on Facebook organically, more and more clients have been asking me for advice about Facebook advertising. Since my experience in this area is very limited, I’m pleased to share this guest post from Taktical Digital.

An effective marketing campaign doesn’t just need to reach a large number of potential customers; it also has to reach the right ones. That’s just one reason Facebook is such a valuable tool for a marketer. The popular social network currently has 2.19 billion active monthly users.

Leveraging it gives you the opportunity to cast a very wide net with a campaign. That’s why Facebook advertising firms are so highly sought out. Specialists have experience with the platform and are well versed in reaching the right audiences. Facebook also provides intuitive tools that make it easy to target specific types of users with advertising content.

If you’re new to Facebook marketing, this introductory guide will help you plan your first campaign. Refer to it when developing your strategy for ideal results.

Getting Started

To advertise on Facebook, you’ll need to create a business account. Once this has been done, you can then create an Ad Account, determining both who has access to it and the method of payment you’ll use. You should also establish a page for your business to help attract long-term followers.

Facebook is particularly useful because of its Custom Audience feature. This tool lets marketers target specific users based on a wide range of potential factors, including geographical location, interests, demographic information, and more. You can also target your existing customers by creating an audience of people who already subscribe to your email newsletter.

Custom Audiences play an essential role in the success of any Facebook marketing campaign. Instead of blindly releasing content and hoping it reaches the right groups, marketers can refine their audiences to boost their odds of reaching visitors genuinely interested in their business.

Choose a Format

Facebook lets marketers create several different types of ads, including videos, photos, and slideshows. The latter is an alternative to video for users with slow connection speeds. Additionally, the platform offers carousels, which feature multiple photos or videos in one ad, collections, which allow users to browse your products efficiently with one ad, and Facebook Messenger ads.

The kinds of advertisements that will be most effective for one brand may not be as impactful for another. You’ll have to experiment with different approaches to determine the strongest performers for your business.

That said, it’s a good idea to use a range of formats when advertising on Facebook. For instance, while simple photo-based ads may be quick to create, surveys indicate that videos ads are the most memorable.

Setting a Budget

Understanding how much money to invest in a Facebook campaign can be tricky. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be, even if this is your first time using this marketing platform. You just need to crunch some numbers.

Start by factoring in your product’s price, how many sales you want an ad or campaign to generate, and what your current conversion rate is.

For instance, maybe you’re selling a product that costs $100, and your goal is to generate 10 sales from an ad. Imagine your conversion rate is at 1% in this scenario. That means you’ll need 1,000 ad clicks to reach your goal.

This principle will help you define your daily budget. When you design your ad on Facebook’s platform, you’ll have the option to optimize it for link clicks. In the field where you select the Bid Amount, choose Automatic.

This means Facebook will automatically adjust your daily budget throughout your ad’s lifetime to help you achieve your goals. By tracking these adjustments, you can find out what type of budget to set in the future.

Once you’ve gone through this process, you can switch to the Manual option when choosing a Bid Amount. Facebook’s Automatic option is ideal when you have limited prior experience and want to understand the minimum amount of money you should spend each day to reach your goals.

Tracking Metrics

With Facebook, marketers can track the performance of their ads through key metrics, including video views, reach, and cost-per-reach. Marketers should take advantage of these features to find out what types of ads work, and what types are less effective. Tracking metrics gives businesses constant opportunities to adjust their campaigns when they aren’t delivering beneficial results.

However, keep in mind that not all metrics are as valuable as others. For example, Facebook considers a video view to be any instance when someone watches your video for more than three seconds. Since videos tend to autoplay on Facebook, that doesn’t mean a user has actually engaged with the content.

Choose which metrics to focus on by honing in on your goal for a particular ad. If you designed an ad to generate more sales of a product, track how many people reached your landing page via the post. You can track how many of those resulted in conversions with the Facebook Pixel.

Again, the specific strategies that work best for you will vary depending on the intricacies of your business. However, this general information will help you more effectively design strong Facebook campaigns when you’re just starting out. The more you experiment, the more you’ll learn what tactics you should rely on most often.