Are you planning to adopt a Facebook advertising campaign for your small business?

Before you get started, there are certain things you need to consider. The first thing is setting the objectives and goals of advertising on Facebook. Are you looking to generate more traffic to your website, increase brand exposure, get more leads, or simply get more fans to like your business page?

Today, Facebook boasts more than 400 million users and this number is growing each day. Facebook ads platform is worth exploring; the tool allows you to place your ads in the right sidebar of the Facebook pages and profiles. Once you have chosen your goal, you can then begin developing a successful social media marketing strategy. Like many other things, setting up and running a successful Facebook ads campaign is not an easy task.

Here are a few steps and tips to consider as you create your Facebook advertising campaign:

Destination

This is the first step – choosing the destination for your ads. The destination is the landing page visited by the people after clicking on your ad. It can be a specific post, your website, your company page, event, or application. The application destination is only relevant if you have created a custom application for your business on Facebook.

Promotion

Next, you simply choose what you want to promote. You can promote your company page, a specific post, a new ad about your company, or stories about friends liking your page. If your goal is to generate new likes and traffic to your page, then choose to promote your page or a specific post on the page. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website or get new leads then choosing a landing page on your website will be the best way to achieve these results.

 

What People Will See

This is the third step in your setup process – choosing what type of ad your audience will see. Following are the options for your ad creative based on what you decide to promote:

A new ad about your page, stories about friends liking your page, a post on your page, external URL, etc.

If you decide to make your own ad, you need to have the following materials: headline, text, and image. In order to create the most successful ad, I suggest creating a few variations of the ad to test out your messaging and images to develop.

Choosing An Audience

Choosing the target audience for your ad campaign is extremely important to determining the success of your campaign. If you develop an audience that is too broad, we’ve found that your ads are rarely shown. It is usually best to set up very targeted ad groups to achieve the best results, the more specific the audience, the better you can tailor your advertising message.

 

Campaign and Budget

After your ad and audience are finalized the last steps are to name the campaign, set the budget, and schedule the campaign. We suggest choosing the Cost Per Click (CPC) option for pricing, so you only get charged when people click on the ads.

Pro Tips

To copy an existing ad simply click on the name of the ad and click on “create a similar ad” at the bottom of the ad preview.

Set up weekly performance monitoring to see which ads are doing the best. Use this information to pause weak ads, or to develop better ads.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with new ad variations or your target audience.

If you are running ads to promote your page or posts, then check out the Insights tab on your company page to see just how many new likes or activities are from your sponsored ads.