How to Advertise on Facebook in 4 Steps (+ 3 Best Practices)

If you want to reach new business leads, consider using Facebook. With nearly 3 billion active users, Facebook provides great opportunities for lead generation. Facebook can be used for more than an organic social networking campaign.

There is a paid advertising program available to your business to expand your reach and gain new leads. In this post, we’ll discuss how to advertise on Facebook, plus offer tips for your ad campaign.

How to advertise your business on Facebook

So, you’re ready to start advertising on Facebook, but how do you start? Begin your campaign by reading these four steps:

1. Choose your objective

The first step for how to advertise on FB is choosing your objective. When you run an advertising campaign, it’s essential that you establish why you’re running that campaign. Every advertising campaign should have a focus.

On Facebook, you have numerous options for choosing an ad objective:

• Brand awareness: Building brand awareness is common in advertising campaigns. You want people to get to know your brand so they will follow your social media page or choose your business when they’re ready to make a purchase.
• Reach: If you’re looking to build up your followers and earn new leads, reach is a great goal. You can set a goal to reach a certain number of people.
• Engagement: Many companies will set their goal to increase engagement by a certain percentage. Engagement is a great way to build brand recognition and get leads to choose your business down the line.
• App installs: If you’re running a Facebook ad for your app, you can set app installs as your campaign goal. By doing this, you can track every time someone downloads your app from your ad.
• Video views: If you run a video advertising campaign, you can set an objective to get a certain number of video views.
• Lead generation: Lead generation is a great goal if you’re looking to increase the number of followers on your Facebook page. You can run an ad to encourage people to follow your business.
• Conversions: Most businesses run ads that focus on conversions. These ads typically direct people straight to a product or service to purchase it.

To choose an objective based on your campaign’s goal, you must know what you want to achieve with your Facebook advertising campaign.  

2. Target your audience

Once you know your objective, you’ll decide who you’re trying to target. Your target audience is the group of people that are most interested in your advertising content. You want to reach people that are most likely to engage with your ad.

Facebook is a great place to target people precisely. You can get very specific with the network’s targeting options. Facebook allows you to target people based on their age, gender, location, language, interests, and buying habits.

This precise targeting allows you to reach the most relevant leads interested in your business. It’s a great way to drive better results with your campaign. To set your target audience, you must think of who is most likely to buy your products or use your services.

You can use your current customer base to get an understanding of who takes an interest in your products and services and create a lookalike audience. This will help you determine who to target and how to advertise on Facebook.

3. Choose your ad type

After you establish your target audience, you’ll focus on your ad type. Facebook offers a few advertising formats for your business. Here are the four main formats:

• Photo ads: Photo ads are a commonly used ad type on Facebook. These ads have one photo, typically of your product or service, which showcases your marketing message.
• Video ads: These ads are an extremely popular format for business because people love videos and take time to watch them. Video ads autoplay when people scroll past them, so they immediately engage users and catch their interest. These ads are a great way to show your product or service in action.
• Carousel ads: Carousel ads use up to 10 videos or photos to showcase products or services. This format often highlights different benefits of a product or showcases multiple products under one umbrella topic. For instance, if you were interested in leather jackets, a clothing store might show you multiple styles of leather jackets in hopes that one catches your interest.
• Slideshow ads: These are short video ads formed from a collection of still photos and video clips. They have eye-catching motion like videos, but they use less bandwidth. These are an excellent option for your business if you want to use something easier to run.

These are the four main formats of ads that you’ll encounter when setting up your Facebook ad.  

4. Set your budget

The last crucial step for how to advertise on FB is setting your budget. You want to ensure that you know how much you’re going to spend on your Facebook advertising campaign. Facebook ads operate similarly to pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

You pay when someone engages with your ad. You’ll set a maximum bid amount, which is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can either set a daily or lifetime budget for your campaign.

You set the daily budget each day, and once you hit that daily amount, your campaign stops running until the next day. With a lifetime budget, you have a set amount for the duration of your campaign. Choosing how much you want to spend on your campaign will help you stay on track with your budget while still running an effective campaign.

3 best practices for how to advertise on Facebook

Facebook advertising offers many opportunities for you to reach new leads.

In fact, one Facebook ad has the potential to reach over one billion people. With Facebook statistics like that, launching a successful ad campaign on Facebook can drive incredible results for your business.

Here are the three best practices to ensure you run the best Facebook advertising campaign for your business.

1. Use the Facebook pixel

If someone viewed one of your products previously, there’s a good chance that they’re still in the purchasing decision process. They’re trying to figure out which product is right for them. By using the Facebook pixel, you can retarget these leads and get them to choose your company.

The Facebook pixel is a small piece of code that you place on your website. Using this tool, you can track conversions and remarket to people who previously viewed a product on your site. It provides an excellent opportunity to remarket to customers on Facebook.

Using Facebook pixel for your remarketing strategy is a great way to help your business earn conversions.

2. Test your ads

Testing your ads is crucial to the success of your campaign. The first version of your ad will never be the best version of your ad. It takes testing and optimizing for you to put out the best version of your ad for your audience. When you run your Facebook advertising campaign, conduct A/B testing.

Testing allows you to compare how different elements perform when running your ad. For instance, you can test how different call to action (CTA) buttons affect your ad’s performance. You might do a comparison test between using “learn more” and “buy now” as your CTA buttons.

In your original ad, you may have thought that “buy now” was the best CTA button for that ad. After testing, you may find that “learn more” gets more engagement on your ad than “buy now.” Testing is crucial to ensure that you’re putting out your best content.

3. Track your performance

The key to how to advertise on Facebook successfully is tracking and monitoring your performance. If you want to put out the best ad, you must focus on how it’s performing and how you can improve. You can track numerous metrics related to your campaign’s performance.

You’ll see how many people see your ad, engage with it, click on it, and convert. These metrics are great for understanding how your audience perceives your ad. By tracking your ad’s performance, you’ll be able to improve your ad’s performance and drive better results.

For example, tracking your ad’s performance can help you determine when to advertise on Facebook. If your ads typically perform best on the weekends, for instance, you could allocate more of your budget to running ads then. Measuring your ad performance can also help you determine your ideal ad types, target audiences, and more.

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Start advertising on Facebook today

Facebook advertising is an excellent way to help your business grow.

By running Facebook ads, you’ll reach more valuable leads that are interested in your organization. Now that you know how to advertise on Facebook, you can take the first step toward growing your business with Facebook ads. If you’re ready to start advertising on Facebook, request a free quote online or call us at 888-601-5359 to learn how our Facebook advertising services can help you get started.