Are you new to advertising your business online? Are you experienced in online advertising but know that Facebook is a market you have to get into? If you answered yes to either of these, read this to the end because this post is for you. Facebook marketing is perfect for businesses that want to start small and go big.
- Allows you to cheaply test products and marketing strategies
- Defines your target audience
- Allow smaller businesses to target buyers and reduce cost
- Gives you specific data about your campaigns in real time
The key to Facebook Ads is mastering Audience Insights: The best tool on the internet to understand everything about your target audience. The reason being if you know your customers, you know how much you’re going to earn.
A legendary marketer Gary Halbert once asked a group of young marketers what was the one thing they would want if they were opening a burger restaurant. Great location, the best ingredients, the quickest service, etc. were the answers being spoken. Gary said, “Hungry customers.”
Facebook’s Audience Insights tells you who is hungry for your product. That’s the best part. Do you know what the send best part is? Audience Insights is free.
That’s right you can dig in this extremely valuable research tool for as long as you want before you spend a dime on ads. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about Audience Insights so you can master Facebook Ads, before you even start making your first ad. Then we’ll go into a great strategy for selling and scaling your products.
Audience Insights
Go to the Search Bar in Your Facebook Account and Type Audience Insights
Until I was shown Audience Insights, I didn’t have any idea it existed.
Hit ‘Use Now.’
Who Will See Your Ad?
If you’re have a large following on your Facebook page and have a product in mind just for them then select ‘People Connected to Your Page,’ but the sake of this article we will choose ‘Everyone on Facebook.’
Select the Interests of Your Ideal Customer
Selecting their interests is just another way of saying what is your product all about.
Let’s say you’re starting a business selling wine products on an e-commerce store. You should use audience Insights to understand all the groups, pages, and companies avid and casual wine drinkers use to educate themselves on the products they consume regularly.
Knowing where they hang out is half the battle, because if you know where they are then you can put your product right in front of them at the right time.
This is the main page of Audience Insights. Notice the options you have to narrow your audience.
You can also save this audience, open another saved one, or create another. Saving your audiences will make creating your ads much easier when you want to run different ad sets and split test.
When filling this form out, I always start with a general way of talking about my industry.
For the sake of consistency, let’s use the wine e-commerce business.
I typed in ‘wine’ into the interests tab and nothing else.
Apparently, only 30% of wine drinkers on Facebook are men. So, I think my ads should have a somewhat slighted approach towards women. Just a theory, but I’m pretty sure it will work.
In the first image of the ‘page likes’ tab, it shows the top categories of page likes for people interested in wine on Facebook. The audience size is 25 to 30 million in the United State alone.
HomeAway and The Mint Julep Boutique are some of the most common pages wine drinkers like. If you look at the last one #10, it was surprising to me that the #1 page in the wine category was Patron Tequila.
The next part of the page likes page shows the audience of each page. HomeAway has a 1 million person audience and Keurig #10 has 1 million too.
Narrow Your Audience
The rest of the tabs at the top of Audience Insights are there for you to play with.
There are over 2 billion active monthly users with Facebook. With the rise in online shopping, knowing to leverage Facebook ads is a must for any business. I suspect companies will start to hire in-house Facebook Ad managers someday when the platform is more widely known.
Let’s look at some of the advanced tabs below on the bottom left-hand corner of the main page.
I hope you’re as excited as I am looking at all the ways you can understand your audience. If you really nail that down, your ad effectiveness will be so high your ads will cost you mere pennies.
Unfortunately, no one can tell you how to narrow your audience. That is something you will have to figure out, but start small with your ads and you’ll have a pretty good idea who’s buying.
Now to Facebook Marketing itself.
Creating Your Ad
From Audience Insights, click on the Create Ad button at the top right of the main dashboard to create your first ad.
Use the Create an Ad tool, and create a new ad. From here you can also edit an existing ad.
Choose Your Marketing Objective
Each option allows you different metrics and understanding of the performance of the app.
Here’s an example…
Your wine business wants to bring more traffic to your ecommerce store. Traffic is the obvious answer, because it tracks how many people are sent to another destination, e.g. your website. You can also have them sent to an app or even Facebook Messenger.
To me this sounds like a fantastic way to integrate a program like ManyChat.
For this article, we’ll focus on traditional ad creation.
Look at the first page of the Facebook Ad dashboard.
Traffic
On the left you decide if you want to traffic to go to a website, app, or messenger.
Offer
You can also create an offer by hitting the switch. An offer will create more conversions by offering a discount. They will even get reminders if they opt out.
Audience
Since you were using audience insights before, your audience is already imported into the ad tool. You don’t have to change anything unless you want to.
Having a saved audience will save you loads of time, and allow you to make small tweaks in the ad creator tool if you decide to run multiple ad sets.
As you modify the audience in the ad creator tool, you can see Facebook’s opinion of how broad your audience is. It also tells you the estimated daily results, i.e. your ‘reach.’ They also project how many clicks you’ll get.
These are very important to recognize for you understand your own metrics before, during, and after your ad set.
At the bottom, there is a spot to give Facebook tips on how accurate these estimates are. Leaving them feedback is a great way to improve the platform.
Placements
Most marketers will edit their own placements, but if you really don’t feel comfortable choosing your audience then choose automatic placements.
Device
I hope you’re happy with the detail Facebook Marketing goes into. You can choose which device you want your audience to see your ad.
Mobile shopping and website viewing rises every year. It’s actually overtaken desktop usage, so optimizing everything including your ads for mobile is a must.
Since Facebook and Instagram are one in the same, you can use the Ad Creator Tool to send targeted advertisements to Instagram too.
Budget & Schedule
Lastly, set your budget.
How much you spend is up to you, but starting small is the best way. I’ve known many amazing Facebook Marketing consistently do $5.00 per day ads and make millions, and this is why I started with ‘Audience Insights,’ instead of diving into ads. Knowing your audience allows $5.00 per days ads to be successful. Just think if you knew your audience and had a big budget.
Hit the blue continue button if your ready.
How to Design Your Ad
Identity
First, select your identity. Which Facebook Page or Instagram Account would you like this ad to come originate.
You also have the ability to make a new page or add here to. Select the ‘+’ or the add an account to select the appropriate one for each ad set.
Format
The format you select determines style in which the user will see the video. Video is one of the best ways to build trust with prospects today. Images and written copy are great and still widely accepted, but video is amazing if you can make them transparent.
Select the format that best describes the medium you will use to reach your audience.
There are many opinions on what works the best. Do your research and test, test, test.
Here is an article on why Carousel ads are 10x better than the rest, by Garett Sloane from Digiday. I can definitely see why, because you can ad multiple images and a slide show video if you like.
It’s all based on your target audience.
Creating ads in general is a game of trial and error no matter how well you know your audience. This is why you should use multiple ad sets with every product. Each ad should have a different images, videos, headlines, and text. Experimenting with the voicing and the point of view will give you insight into the specific things your audience likes or dislikes.
Links and Ad Preview
This is where you’ll spend the most time on this page. On the left is where you’ll decide the text you want in your ad, the headline, and the image or video. On the right, is what it will look like. Every change you make on the left affects the right, so you know exactly what your viewers will see before it goes out.
Notice the image specifications; you have to comply with each of rules.
Also, if you’re using video and think your descriptions are not that important, think again. Yes, some of your viewers will only watch the video, but many of them will reach what you have to say. Hiring an experienced ad writer, i.e. copywriter will make your life so much easier.
When you’re satisfied with how you ad looks, go ahead and click the green button at the bottom and ‘Confirm.’
Summary
I hope this article showed you that Facebook ads are something your business should use. There is a lot you will have to learn, like what your specific audience looks like and what kind of ads they prefer. Please take the time to learn about this, because Facebook ads will be around for a long time.
For more information on Facebook Marketing and marketing in general, please continue to look at the Digital Cartel Media Blog. We’ll have a detailed article to help your business reach its potential on every Monday and Thursday.
