Facebook is now, by technology standards, the Grand Old Patriarch of social media. It’s one of the oldest surviving social media platforms, having arisen from the ashes of older efforts like Myspace and gone on to accumulate huge numbers for itself.
In fact, 68% of all adult Americans use Facebook, with many of those being the coveted older demographics traditionally a little hesitant to use technology.
However, while there’s no question that Facebook is currently the king of the hill, does any king rule forever? There have been some rumblings that all is not necessarily glowing with Facebook’s future.
That doesn’t mean people should abandon Facebook for marketing; the numbers on Facebook are simply too huge to ignore.
It does say that people who choose to advertise on Facebook should do so with the understanding of what Facebook is good for, its limitations, and which advertising is most effective on that channel.
First, let’s look at why you should be thinking of Facebook at all. In 2018 alone, between the USA and Canada, Facebook had a total of 242 million monthly active users. And that’s just North America.
The number jumps into the billions when you count the total global user-base. So the logical reason to choose Facebook is, “This is where the people are.”
And you’d be right if you consider that 41% of users are 65 years old or older. That’s a lot of older Americans who can be reached at a cheaper rate than traditional advertising such as television or radio commercials!
It’s also important to remember that people check Facebook multiple times during the day. Like other social media, consumers return to Facebook, again and again, so you’ve got plenty of opportunities to impress them. All it takes is the right approach.
Facebook ads creation plan
1. Formulate a plan
Just like a business plan is your roadmap to reaching your business goals and milestones, you’ll need a marketing plan to help you achieve your marketing goals. You don’t want to just jump into Facebook advertising with a vague purpose of “improving my business.”
You want to figure out what your business condition is, where you want to see the improvement, what methods will give you this improvement, and what market is best to get you the improvement you’re seeking.
In other words, you need a solid “plan of attack” if you want to come out with a win. Just jumping in, hoping for the best, with no clear idea of how to accomplish your goals will waste time and, more importantly, money.
Start with the marketing basics. Understand your product or service, understand the demographic that needs it, and then figure out how your market is shopping for the product or service you offer.
Understand your unique selling point and figure out how best to convey that to your approach. Finally, find the best avenue to approach your audience.
If you see that your audience consists mostly of parents who are shopping for their children, then you know that Facebook may be the perfect venue for our marketing efforts because it’s a guaranteed older demographic.
2. Tell Facebook what you want
Facebook is actually quite friendly when it comes to advertising.
However, you’re only going to get the most from Facebook if you can tell Facebook what your goal is. That is why it’s so important to have a plan going in. You have to make sure your plan is something that Facebook can understand.
For example, you may simply be interested in creating a video that you want to be watched by as many as people as possible. Facebook has parameters in place correctly to handle this goal.
On the other hand, you may want to simply generate more leads. Facebook has specific measures in place for this too. What about encouraging visits to your store? Facebook can do that.
And if you just want to advertise a particular product or promotion and get traffic or clicks on that, Facebook can push those objectives as well. So make sure that you know what you’re trying to achieve with your advertising and how it aligns with the options Facebook has for advertising.
3. Set up your Meta Business Suite (formerly Facebook Business Manager)
Many people who abandon their Facebook advertising efforts do so due to improper account setup or feeling overwhelmed by the vast amount of ad options offered by Facebook.
To begin successfully, make sure to correctly set up your Meta Business Suite account.
Meta Business Suite is the platform within Facebook that holds your Facebook ad account, business pages, and other necessary tools for managing your ads.
To create your Meta Business Suite account, visit business.facebook.com and select “Create an account.” Facebook will ask you for your name, your email address, your Facebook business page, and your business name.
Afterward, you’ll need to create a new advertising account. To do this, select “Ads” from the left menu bar.
Follow the instructions to create an ad account, which serves as the central hub for all your advertising activities on Facebook. If you already have an advertising account, you can add that instead of creating one from scratch.
4. Install the Meta pixel
One of the most common challenges new Facebook advertisers face is determining their ads’ effectiveness. Although you can boost a post or set up a campaign in Ads Manager, you won’t know if an ad led to any website sales without installing the Meta pixel.
The Meta Pixel serves as a bridge between your Facebook ads and website. It’s a tracking code that you must create within your Meta Business Suite account and add to your website before purchasing ads.
The Pixel tracks all actions taken by visitors who arrive at your website from your Facebook ads, allowing you to see whether your ads were successful and which specific audience and creative led to conversions.
Setting up your Meta pixel in Shopify
If you’re using Shopify, it’s easy to set up the Meta pixel on your website. Go to your Meta Business Suite account, copy your 16-digit pixel ID, and paste it into the Meta pixel ID field under “Online Store” in your Shopify store’s preference section.
Within a few hours of adding the pixel ID, you should start seeing your website activity under “Pixels” in your Meta Business Suite account. Stats like purchases, add to carts, and visitors will be recorded there.
5. Build Facebook audiences
Advertising to the right audience is crucial for success on Facebook. With billions of users globally, utilizing Facebook’s Audiences feature in Meta Business Suite is crucial to identifying individuals likely to be interested in your brand or product.
You can use Audiences to create lists of people to target. While many features exist within the audiences section to help you define these lists, we have put them into two categories to make things easier to understand: retargeting and prospecting.
Retargeting: Engaging potential buyers
People who have been to your website, added items to their cart, or followed you on Instagram are more likely to buy from you—they may just need a little encouragement.
If you’ve noticed ads from a brand you recently looked at appearing on your feed, that’s called retargeting. It’s a powerful way to advertise on Facebook.
You can use the custom audiences feature in the Audiences section of Meta Business Suite to create Facebook retargeting campaigns. Custom audiences lets you use the information gathered by your Meta pixel and business pages to target specific users.
When creating a custom audience, you can choose from several sources, including:
1. Customer List
Upload a list of email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information collected from customers or leads to the customer list source. Facebook matches this information with its own users, allowing you to target them directly with ads.
2. Website
Reach website visitors by creating a retargeting list using website traffic.
You can create lists based on pages visited on your website or the actions taken. Common lists that perform well including those who visited in the past 30 days or added something to their cart in the past seven days.
3. Catalog
This custom audience lets you target people who have interacted with items in your catalog.
Prospecting: Finding new customers
Reaching new customers through Facebook advertising can be an effective way to grow your business. This is known as “prospecting” and targets people who have not yet interacted with your business online.
But prospecting can be challenging for small to medium-sized businesses, as there are billions of users on Facebook to consider. To make the process easier, Facebook provides two helpful tools for businesses to find potential new customers.
1. Lookalike audiences
Facebook can help you find new customers by using your existing customer data. The lookalike audience tool takes information from your custom audience and creates a new group of Facebook users that are similar to your current customers.
You can make lookalike audiences using any of your custom audiences, with sizes ranging from 1% to 10% of a chosen country’s population.
A 1% lookalike audience comprises people who closely resemble your source custom audience and are ideal targets for your initial prospecting campaigns.
As you broaden your targeting and increase your advertising budget, you can move on to 3%, 5%, and eventually 10% lookalike audiences. This will give you a larger reach while focusing on users with similar profiles to your customers.
2. Interests, behaviors, and demographics
If you don’t have a customer list or website visitors to create lookalike audiences, you can use Facebook’s saved audiences option to target prospects using interests, behaviors, and demographic data.
Here’s a list of each category, with examples of sub-groups within each one:
- Interests, which relate to pages and content users have engaged with (e.g., scuba diving, K-pop, exercise).
- Behaviors, which are actions recorded by Facebook (e.g., moving to a new city, celebrating a birthday, having a baby)
- Demographics, which includes user profile information (e.g., engineers, college graduates, new moms).
Test different audience options from interests, behaviors, and demographics to determine which ones work best for you. Start with a narrow audience and experiment with additional layers as you find ones that convert well. This way, you can broaden your prospecting campaigns.
6. Create a Facebook ads campaign
To start your first ad campaign in Meta Business Suite, head to the Ads section, and hit the Create Ad button. Then, select a goal from the following options:
- Automated ads: Facebook will test six different versions to find the best performing one.
- Boost website visitors: To increase website traffic.
- Boost a post: To promote an organic post.
- Get more messages: For click to Messenger ads.
- Promote your page: For simple ads promoting your Facebook Business Page.
- Get more leads: To collect contact information from Facebook users.
Choose a goal that aligns with your business objectives. Keep in mind, Facebook charges you based on impressions, or the number of people who see your ad.
Be sure to choose the correct objective to optimize your ad and reach your desired outcome. If you want website purchases but choose Traffic as your objective, you won’t necessarily reach your goal.
7. Use your metrics
Finally, when everything is said and done, dig deep into data. The real beauty of digital marketing is that you get a veritable goldmine of metrics that can be hugely useful to current and future campaigns.
You know exactly how many people got your ad, how many people clicked on it, and how many went to your website. You know whether you got visitors to your site from Facebook or Instagram.
With these metrics, you can see what’s working and what’s not. If certain ad methods aren’t performing well, change them or trim them out. If others are working better than you expected, allocate more budget and resources to them.
Thanks to the vast collection of user data that you’re getting, you have far better information to make strategic decisions than someone who can only guess at how many people saw a poster in a subway and whether it engaged them or not.
Facebook has a huge reach, and can generate a lot of good leads, but only if you know how to get the most from it.
