According to Influencer Marketing Hub, Facebook is the leading social community online.
With over 2.32 billion monthly active users, it’s the most efficient way to get exposure for your small business and have your message seen by a colossal customer base.
The best thing about creating a Facebook ad is the flexibility the platform has.
You can set your advertisements to appear only to specific groups or segments of people based on information contained in their profile, or you can base it on gender, location, or personal preferences.
For example, if you sell a product for single mothers, you could set your advertisements only to be shown to those who have indicated that they are single mothers in their profiles.
You could narrow down your custom audience more by adjusting the settings so that your ad appears only to single mothers who have demonstrated interest in similar products.
You could also base targeting on a user’s profile, groups they’ve joined, or pages that they’ve liked.
Let’s get started!
Create Targeted Advertisements
To get the most return on your advertising investment, you can use Facebook’s targeting options to create compelling, responsive, and profitable advertisements based on your target audience.
As we said earlier, you have the option to customize your ads only to be shown to specific segments of people based on location, age, gender, interests, hobbies, or other criteria.
Before creating your ads, you’ll need to conduct some market research to define your ideal potential customer accurately.
Next, you’ll want to use that information to develop ads to target specific segments of your target market.
Facebook uses a quality control system that ensures that ads running throughout their community stay within their guidelines and don’t:
- disrupt member activity
- negatively affect the user experience
- offend users
Use Facebook’s quality control system to craft compelling advertisements that stand out in the marketplace and capture the attention of your potential buyers.
Make sure that your ads are consistent with Facebook’s advertising policies.
Keep in mind that Facebook’s advertising is based on display, not search.
Your ads will be triggered automatically to appear in a user’s news feed based on your settings, not when a user conducts an on-site search.
Additionally, users can opt to rate advertisements, further helping retain quality throughout the Facebook community.
Improve your Click Through Rate
Your ad’s click-through rate (CTR) also plays an integral role in saving you money, boosting exposure, and reaching out to your desired market.
Be sure to keep up with your click-through rate and correct and problems with your advertisements or make adjustments to improve it.
Should your ad’s CTR drop too low, Facebook could pause or even remove it.
So, you want to pay attention to it and how well your ad is converting.
The average Facebook CTR in the newsfeed is 0.89%, but we like to keep them above 2%.
One of the easiest ways to have a higher CTR is to target your advertisements highly.
You want to ensure that your ad appears only to those within your target demographic and make sure that the ad’s text and images speak directly to your customer base.
It would help if you also split-test different ads within the Facebook community to learn what gives you the best results.
Pay attention to what times of the day your ads appear.Â
You can have your ads run consistently throughout the day or display them at specific times (or even specific dates). Â
Don’t forget to note your target market’s time zone to make sure that your ads are running based on their most active time of day or night.
Stay Within Facebook Guidelines
It’s essential to understand how Facebook advertising channels work, what is permitted, and what is not allowed in the marketplace.
Although Facebook is super flexible with the types of advertisements allowed on their platform, they have zero tolerance for ads that have images or text that is considered offensive.
Set Your Maximum Daily Bid
We’ve learned through years of digital marketing that one of the most critical components of an effective Facebook ad campaign is the maximum daily bid that you can afford (or are willing to pay for your ad spend).
The higher your daily bid, the greater the exposure that your ad will get.
If you are new to advertising with Facebook, it’s OK to start with a lower bid and increase your maximum daily bid as you learn the process, or as you fine-tune your ads for maximum results.
Pay attention to how well your ad is converting to find opportunities to improve click-through rates and overall response.
When creating an advertisement with Facebook, they will provide a suggested maximum bid.
The suggested bid is based on your advertisement’s focus and target market (that you set up in its’ configuration and preferences).
We suggest you start by setting your maximum bid slightly lower than recommended, and then increase it little by little as you improve your conversion rates to get the most bang for your buck.
Cost Per Click Vs. Impression Based Ads
If you’re just getting started with Facebook advertising, we recommend that you choose the cost per click (CPC) method to accurately test your ads, while only paying for responses and not views.
When you create your ad, you can choose to pay either for impressions or by the number of clicks your ad receives.
You can always change the ad’s format in the Facebook ads manager to “impression-based” later on in your campaign should you want to test out alternative options.
Let’s Hear From You!
What specific demographics can you use to target your Facebook ads?
Which type of advertisement are you going to try first, “cost per click,” or “impression-based?”
