Facebook Ads: The Best Ad Buying Guide For Businesses and Brands

Facebook Advertising includes a vast amount of formats available across the various Facebook platforms and facebook affiliated publishers, such as Instagram. Ads can be as simple as well as very complex, as they required for your campaign KPI (Key Performance Indicators). No matter the strategy, the possibilities are endless for companies. Businesses have the ease of use to reach billions of users on Facebook around the world, every day.

Table of Contents

  1. Creating a Company Facebook Page
  2. Advertising on Facebook
  3. Using Facebook Messenger
  4. Facebook Insights & Analytics
  5. Facebook Video Advertising
  6. How to Setup Your Ad Account on Facebook
  7. Where to Begin with Facebook Ads
  8. Local Advertising
  9. Facebook Ad Funnels
  10. Facebook Custom Audiences
  11. Setting up your Ad Spend
  12. Facebook Budget Optimization Tool
  13. Automated Rules
  14. How to Test Facebook Ads
  15. Creating Messenger Ads
  16. How to Use Facebook Video Ads
  17. Optimizing your Facebook Ads

The Ad Buying process is rather simple on the Facebook advertising platform. Facebook allows advertisers to GEO target (geography) audiences through their advertising tools (self service) and providing insights and analytical reports that track various performance metrics for each ad campaign and ad set. The reach is large and visibility is important to businesses that want to compete with their competitors and other’s ad budgets and advertising expenses.

Through Facebook’s Business Manager platform, businesses are able to macro and micro manage their efforts within facebooks self serve business marketing and advertising portal.

To completely dominate Facebook advertising campaigns will require an abundance of time and perseverance along with an in depth understanding of how the platform works with all of it’s capabilities. We will provide a detailed outline of How to Use Facebook Advertising for Businesses.

Social media and content sharing
Facebook Advertising How To Guide for Businesses

The Ultimate Guide on Creating Facebook Pages for Companies

Facebook is not only the world’s largest social media platform, but it is also an incredibly powerful B2B or B2C marketing tool, if you know what you’re doing.

As we approach 2020, businesses have never been able to reach their customer base so easily across the social landscape, and to such a granular dynamic degree, too. With the right Business Plan, you’re advertising efforts may be the best Return on Investment available at the tips of your fingers.

Brandets can help guide the way through the complex world of Facebook Ads.

It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner to Facebook for business or whether want to enhance to your Social Media marketing strategies. The purpose of teaching others about Social Ad Operations is to enlighten clients of all experience levels, from newbie through to very advanced. Optimize your Facebook pages, profiles, groups, analytics, and most importantly, ads to take your business to a new levels of Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

How Facebook Algorithms Work

The Facebook algorithm determines the placement of a business’s organic page, where their posts and ads appear in front of users and audience segments. The facebook algo is ever changing, so digital nomads and internet marketers have to constantly stay ahead of the game to keep on top.

Facebook Algorithms, Network, and Relevancy

The Facebook algo usually prioritizes posts with social signals such as likes, comments, and shares. If the Facebook algo notices a lot of engagement within a short time period, it determines such a post to be Viral and may prioritize it over other native posts. When user social content is similarly liked by known acquaintances or friends, the Facebook algos will determine that content more appropriate to recommend to others in a similar audience segment/group. User generated Content can also apply to Facebook Pages for Businesses or other entities.

What you want to stay away from is promoting/sharing/creating posts that contain Spam; such as click baiting, like baiting, re-sharing (repetitively), Contextual only posts, and content that is generally viewed as sponsored or promotional when not noted as such.

Facebook Social Engagements & Interactions

Every year it is known that Facebook will constantly make significant changes to its news feed and ad algorithms. In the latest update, more content from known acquaintances such as friends and family, started appearing more often in users news feeds. The goal of this update was for fewer promoted posts from businesses.

In place of sponsored content, businesses will have to prioritize content that focuses on the users and less about their business.

The Facebook Ad Algorithms – Audience Segments

In many different ways, the Facebook ad algorithms differ to a large degree than the Facebook news feed algorithm. While we know the news algorithm is focused around the users and designed to show the best ads to create a positive experience for the users. This means changes to how advertisers can compete to access certain user segments or audience groups.

Unlike google, this means that businesses can’t always access users by paying the highest bid. Instead, ad relevancy and quality plays a large role in addition to bidding strategies to access and scale your ads across relevant users.

Optimizing your Facebook ad trends involves testing and perfecting several factors.

  • Relevancy: Matching your message to your market.
  • Results: want to see from each individual ad.
  • Objective: for your overall ad campaign.
fb-profile
How To Publish Your Facebook Page

Publish Your Business Page On Facebook

Most important to using Facebook to your advantage is to understand it’s features, benefits, and pitfalls. When deciding what your business goals are and how facebook will benefit you, you can create the best Social Strategy when creating a Business Page. Initially, you should ensure your Facebook Page is in good standing with no restrictions and/or violations that may prevent you from using all of the features.

facebook page quality
facebook page quality

Business Page Information

Best Practices

  • Know your privacy settings
  • Avoid posting personal content publicly of yourself or others. Always preview or “view as” your page to see what others may see publicly.
  • Understand how your personal account connects to business pages and groups and how to navigate between the various pages you control.
  • Design your cover photo and profile picture to represent yourself as you desire.
  • Add all Business Details to your profile and information (about tab).
  • Allow others to see inside your business and gain inside views to what it’s like for your employees or customers.

Facebook Business Page Details

Facebook has business profile that are separate from personal profiles; however, they are accessed through personal accounts via user permissions and roles (Admin, Moderator, etc). Having a Facebook Business page provides many additional benefits of features you wouldn’t normally be able to access through a user account.

Benefits

  • Gain access to Facebook ads or Business Manager.
  • Separation of identity between user accounts and business pages.
  • Access Facebook Insights and analytics on audiences/users

Weaknesses

  • Managing a business page or multiple at a time can be time-consuming.
  • You must abide by Facebook’s ad policy if you want ads to be approved.

Advice

  • Avoid posting any sponsored or promotional content.
  • Only create or share content that’s relevant to your business or users.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Group

Facebook groups are similar to pages but more geared towards communities for other users to engage and interact with others in a central place. You can either create your own group just like a business page or you can join one of the millions of Facebook groups already created, and likely hundreds or thousands in your niche.

Benefits of FB Groups

  • Groups are a good way to find new clients or relevant customers and gain feedback.
  • It’s viable to form relationships within a group and use to your advantage outside of the group.
  • Facebook groups are rather niche and therefore segmented audiences that are highly defined.

Cons of FB Groups

  • If you are not the owner or administrator of a group, you can get removed and kicked out at any time.
  • Keeping up with FB Groups is time consuming due to the abundant amount of user posts and discussions within the group(s).

Best Practices For Facebook Groups

  • Be supportive of users, members, and fellow administrators.
  • Avoid thinking or acting as a business and act more like a fellow consumer or user.
  • Don’t overload yourself with too many groups to stay ontop of.
  • Read the rules and group policies so you can abide by them.
  • Don’t spam others to join groups that you don’t know or are likely not relevant or interested in
  • Don’t create groups if you don’t have a plan or idea in mind to attract members… a dead group won’t help anyone.

If your brand is particularly tied to you as a person, it might be worthwhile to create a public figure page.

This is especially valuable if you want to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Public figure pages work much the same as business pages, with one exception – a business page shows what you sell, a public figure page shows who you are.

Creating, Optimizing, and Protecting Your Facebook Business Page

Add a Business or Brand

Set your facebook page up for success when creating a Business Page. Facebook knows who the administrator is, as all pages are connected to individual user accounts. Make sure you follow all policies to avoid any violations. Be sure to follow best practices to give yourself an advantage over competitors also utilizing facebook pages (which is likely all of them).

Add a Profile Image

Add a FB Profile Photo

Your profile photo can be anything you desire, such as a logo for your Business. Other considerations are services you provide or products that you sell, if your an E-Commerce Company.

Profile photos should be 180 x 180 pixels in size.

Adding a Cover Image

Add a Cover Photo

The size of a Facebook cover image should be roughly 828 x 315 pixels. When considering mobile devices, you should stay at the least around 560 x 315 pixels.

Just like the profile photo, cover images can easily be uploaded or changed by clicking the corner of the photo location and selecting “Change Cover”.

Call-to-Action on Facebook

Your goal for your facebook page should be to convert users towards what you offer through your Business; whether that is products, services, or offerings by adding variables to get in touch such as messaging, calling, or redirecting users to your website.

Add a Facebook Call to Action Button
  1. Create a call-to-action button to make it simple for users to interact
  2. Click on “Add a Button” under the cover photo of your Business Page.
  3. Choose the type of action button that best suits the purpose.
  4. At the very least, you should direct users to “Learn more” or to “Get in Touch”.

About Us Description

Facebook Business Page Description

The About description area tells people what your page, products, services and/or company is about. The more information you provide, the better users can understand if it is of their interest to follow or like.

Facebook About Section

Business Handle

You want to create a custom Business Handle or Permalink to match your Brand and allow users to find you easily.

Facebook Page Handle

Optimizing Your Facebook Page Preview

Facebook Page Preview

Page previews occur when someone hovers over your Facebook page or a search that has brought up your Business Page as a selection. This helps potential customers gain insight to your business page without enterring when they see it in search results, or an ad you promoted, or through shared content from others..

Making sure your Page Preview is optimized will help convert users to enter your Business Page and potentially follow/like/engage for future updates.

5 Suggestions to Optimize Facebook Page Previews:

  1. Make sure information/details/about us content is updated. Include a website link, phone number, and summarize your business.
  2. Add a call to action and contact details.
  3. Showcase your positive feedback and reviews from prior users or customers.
  4. Ensure your content is curated to your liking that will keep not only current users that follow engaged, but also attracts other similar or lookalike audience users.
  5. Analyze your Facebook insights to optimize towards scaling users and growing your fan base.

Facebook Location Pages

Facebook Locations

If you have physical business locations, Facebook will allow you to create multiple location pages for each of your business locations. These pages are connected to your main brand page, allowing users to find the locations nearest to them. Here’s how to setup business locations

  1. Log into Facebook’s Business Manager
  2. Add Business Locations.
  3. Select your location page from the dropdown.
  4. If your main page has an address listed, remove it to add individual locations.
  5. Select/Click “add locations”… and type in the physical address.
  6. Make sure each location page to include a phone number, hours of operation, and website address.
  7. Write an introduction/summary for each location.
  8. Modify posts so that when you post regarding a specific Business Location, it tag’s that Business Location and compiles within the location page instead of solely on the main Business Page.
  9. Curate specific localized content with your Business so that promotional ads are relevant to hyper local, geo targeted users.

Walk Through Guide to Facebook Advertising

Through Facebook ads, businesses of all sizes can reach audiences locally or globally. Whether you are new or experienced to social advertising, you can create a Facebook ad campaign for upstream marketing to generate calls, leads, drive referral website traffic, generate revenue from sales, or simply just increase brand recognition by promoting your brand.

How to Create a Facebook Advertisement

  1. Set up a Facebook advertising account via the Facebook Business Manager.
  2. Figure out who you’re targeting with your ads (demographic, geographic, interest, custom audience, etc)
  3. Choose the right ad content medium– Image, Video or solely Contextual.
  4. Determine Ad Targeting
  5. Set an Ad Budget, Flight Dates, Pacing, and Buying Model (CPM, CPC).
  6. Choose Ad placements (within Facebook Newsfeed, Instagram, or 3rd Party Publishers connected to Facebook).
  7. Setup multiple ad campaigns for Split Tests and A/B Testing.
  8. Optimize your ad sets to Most Relevant, Best Engagement, and Best Cost.

Use Facebook Messenger to Engage Your Audience

Facebook Messenger

To better interact with your customers or audience, you can setup Messenger Bots to interact, collect and quality check leads, and automate funnels to better drive conversions. Additionally, you can now Serve ads within Facebook Messenger to reach users using the Facebook Messenger Application on Mobile Devices. By using Facebook Messenger to it’s max potential alongside your Facebook Business page, you can not only serve users through a medium for marketing but also stay engaged and provide quality customer service.

Facebook Messenger Chatbot

Without any programming knowledge, you can create a messenger chatbot with tools such as Botsify, Chatfuel or OnSequel. These tools are simplistic in mind for the average user or business owner.

Not only are chatbots useful for customer service and engagement, but you can also use it to push notify users that follow your Business Page for updates. Using Chatbots to your advantage can keep you ahead of competitors and on top of your customers.

Facebook Messenger on your Website

You can also add Facebook Messenger Chat boxes to your website to keep superior customer service and keep interactions connected to your facebook business page. This allows top notch customer engagement and a level of professionalism many other Businesses fail to do. Staying ahead of the trend can drive more customers, more viewers, and more sales!

How to Setup Ads in Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger ads are configured from within the same ad center as the rest of Facebook Advertising Campaign ecosystem and can be created all the same. Allowing ads to appear within a users messenger system can increase the chance that customers not only see your ad, but interact with it and stay engaged with your business services, content or offer. Ads can also be created to initiate a chat automatically within the messenger system driving quality leads like no other, and can also engage the user to click to call your business immediately!

Facebook Insights and Analytics

Facebook Insights – Demographic

Facebook Insights and Facebook Analytics provide businesses the ability to analyze and optimize their marketing efforts and performance. Using Facebook Insights can give you keen information on who your audience is and whether your advertisements are keeping users engaged and providing a return on investment to your advertising goal.

Facebook Insights

Understanding how your audience engages with your advertising methods provides perfect Insight to your Facebook Advertising Goals. Although analytics can be a bit difficult to navigate and understand, obtaining the data to then use to your advantage is rather easy. Go to “Insights” and select “Overview” then “Export Data”

Export Facebook Data

This data will provide Insights to Followers, Likes (as well as lost Likes), Stats on Views or Videos, Engagement (Link Clicks, Profile Views, Profile Opened), as well as sources to Likes and referrals.

You can also find specific data for download on individual post statistics from within your facebook page if you enjoy monitoring your posts and engagements on those posts.

Facebook Analytics

The best way to explore Facebook Analytics is to simply dive into the data through your Business Page Dashboard.

Facebook Analytics Dashboard

With deep insights to your audience and business page on facebook, you can compile active users, discover the best sales funnels to drive more conversions and purchases and stay engaged with your customers. Facebook is constantly extending it’s reporting and analytics capabilities because the value it provides if you can read and understand the data to use to your advantage. Using this data can help optimize towards segmenting custom audiences and making your ads more relevant to the users you are trying to reach. Almost all activities can be monitored and provide insights to market cross-device and get in front of your audience, and interact with them.

Facebook Analytics and Insights allow you to figure out your Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) when configured properly to ensure your advertising campaigns are successful and not wasting money. This valuable analytics tool within Facebook can help identify the campaigns working properly and ad campaigns that may not be setup to the best potential. This can be applied well beyond Ads and further drive information on who your target audience is and who is interested in your Business Services or offers.

Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel Retargeting Custom Audiences

The Facebook pixel is a code installed on your website or application that allows you to track user activity and ad performance or engagement such as conversions or leads. It can be obtained thru Business Ad Manager and implemented into your website/app to help track users that visit your site/app across the Facebook platforms. This will also allow you to find and retarget users thru custom audience segments on Facebook that have visited your website and/or Mobile App. We call this cross-channel Social retargeting. Use Insights from Facebook along with other web/app analytics tools such as Google Analytics to obtain as much workable data as possible on your users to optimize your ad campaigns, and sales funnels. These analytics reports can also be disseminated across your company to keep all level employees up to date on your business marketing efforts.

Facebook Video Advertising

One of the best ways to connect with users on the Facebook platform is through Video Advertising. Video allows highly engaged statistics with users as almost all videos in the Newsfeed are AutoPlay upon scrolling. You can also use Facebook Live Video to stream to users and interact with your customers in real time!

Some recommended tips on marketing with Video on Facebook:

  • The best Ratio is Widescreen 1920 x 1080 pixels.
  • Add relevant tags to your video, Optimize the Thumbnail, and Context for those before they watch.
  • Look to Dayparting the video to times you know users are most engaged by discovering this data in Facebook Insights.
  • Comment first and Pin a comment so users can read your comment before others.
  • Design the Video around the users and tell a story most will want to hear to stay engaged, like, comment, and share to others they know!
  • Boost the Video and pay to promote to audiences outside of your direct network.

Integrating Facebook Videos and Live Videos along with the Messenger Chat or Chatbots can provide automated funnels to drive conversions and user engagement. With very little knowledge and tools, you can create professional videos and video marketing without using 3rd party Creative Agencies. Be sure to check the video and audio before posting or going live to make sure it’s a quality video that users will like.

Setup Your Facebook Advertising Account

In order to setup your Facebook Advertising account, you simply need to follow a few initial steps to begin.

Start with Facebook Business Manager.

Ideally, you will have first created a Business Page on Facebook that you will associate with your Advertising account. When you create a Business Manager account, you will be able to manage multiple Facebook Pages at a time without leaving the Business Manager Studio. Additionally, you can manage multiple advertising accounts through the Business Manager on Facebook. To start go to the Facebook Business Manager and select “Create Account” – and login using the credentials (Email and Pass) you have for your Business Page account.

Install the Facebook Pixel.

We discussed earlier what a Facebook Pixel does and where to create one within the Business Manager. You will need to implement/install this Pixel on your website which will allow Facebook to track users who have visited your website or mobile app (usually within the last 90 days) and identify those users when they are on the Facebook Platforms. When those users are identified on Facebook platforms, you can target these “Custom Audiences” in your ad account for campaigns to retarget users that have visited your website. This allows you to segment your Advertising Funnel and optimize towards users that have already shown some interest in your Business. Additionally with time, you can create “lookalike audiences” that are similar to your Custom Audiences obtained from the Facebook Pixel installed on your web/app properties.

Create Custom Audiences

The Custom Audience tool helps you create and save audiences that are most relevant to your brand to make it easier to not only organize, but also optimize your ad campaigns as you dive deeper into the social advertising world. Go back into Business Manager and select the “Audiences” option from the assets column.

Once you have enough data collected from pixels (or via uploading email and phone contacts) for a Custom Audience Group, you can Save said Audience Groups, or create Lookalike Audiences to scale your reach to similar and relevant users.

Custom Audiences on Facebook

Use Facebook Posts as Facebook Ads.

Boosting posts and paying to promote your Facebook Posts as Ads is not always the wisest way to start advertising. However, if your post is already creating positive engagement from your existing audience, it makes sense to use that post to promote to Audiences outside of your page to scale your users.

What you need to decide is what you are looking to achieve from your Advertisement. Do you want more Website Traffic (Clicks), more Facebook Likes/Followers, more Video Views, more Leads, or more Sales.

Facebook Ads Manager is the main tool for creating, analyzing, and optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns. To create an ad, you need to select “Create Ads” from the drop down menu within your Business Page and start creating the ad copy to be used for your ad, along with targeting criteria and campaign details. After done, you will submit your ad for review to ensure it passes Facebook Ad Policies and Guidelines.

Creating a Facebook Ad

In order to make your ad most efficient, you should follow some basic guidelines to ensure you execute your strategy with positive results.

Planning:

Facebook has a “Plan” Section that contains tools that will be helpful to learn about not only your audiences, but also provide ideas for your ad copy and ad campaigns. You can also use Facebook Audience Insights and Analytics Tools to help segment your target audiences.

Use Facebook Ad Library to view other businesses advertising campaigns, both historic and fresh campaigns. You can check out their ad copy, images, videos, and flight dates to use to your advantage when creating your own Ad Campaigns. Seeing what works for competitors or other Businesses is a great way to identify how to create your own ad copy.

Facebook Ad Library Review

Create and Manage Ad Campaigns:

In this section, you will find all the tools you need to not only create your Ads, but also manage the Campaigns throughout the flight dates of the advertising campaign.

Measure and Report:

Once you start obtaining some fresh and historic data from your advertising campaigns, you can begin to Measure reports and optimize your ad sets. When analyzing how your ads are performing and the audience you are reaching, use the tools available in this section. These tools may consist of setting up Events or Conversions to track whether your audience is engaging the way you’d like or whether the ads are meeting your goals.

Ad Assets:

In the ad assets section, you can find all copy for your existing ad sets. This may include contextual copy, creative copy, images, video, and all other assets used to build out your ad campaigns. Also available is your targeting settings, custom audiences obtained via Facebook Pixels or internal data, or even segmented interests that may have been used in your existing ad set targeting scenarios.

Ad Settings:

Make sure your account information is always up to date in ad settings so that your ads are never paused or halted due to information not present such as payment details or personal information required to run an advertising campaign on Facebook.

Facebook Pixels in Event Manager

In order to run the most targeted campaigns, you need to create a Facebook Pixel within the tool set and install on your webpage or application before running any ads, so that enough data is accumulated to create a custom audience you can use for identifying and retargeting those users on Facebook. Each ad account is limited to one default Facebook Pixel per Business Page. The code consists of a tracking identifiers to track not only traffic but also events such as engagement on your website to optimize those interactions later in your AdOps Strategies. If you are not familiar with programming, you may need help from a developer to implement these pixels and codes client-side on your website or mobile application.

Where to Begin With Facebook Ads

Knowing how to provide the best user experience is very important when creating the perfect ad. Twitch uses livestream’s to their streaming website to cross-channel promote Gamer’s currently streaming and keep users engaged until they click through to the Twitch Website.

Twitch Livestream Facebook Ads

By creating extremely quality ad copy and relevant targeting scenarios, you can reduce your ad expenses and cost while optimizing the media budget of your ad campaigns. The Facebook Algorithms allow those to take advantage of knowing the best practices to benefit by achieving reduced costs and larger reach to more users vs other advertisers that do not follow Best Practices. Many times, you may have to hire a Media Buyer or AdOps Expert to create and run these campaigns for you. You want ad campaigns to create great user experiences and positive, meaningful interactions with users to ensure that they not only relate to your ad but are interested in learning more about your Business while not affecting the reputation of Facebook.

Ad Transparency and Insights

Ad transparency is not only important on Facebook (hence the Ad Library being available for all users publically), but it is now more common on all social platforms, such as Twitter. The ability for any user to identify what ads are showing on their Facebook account or Twitter account is not only important for users in this day of privacy, but it is very useful for businesses. We believe you can use this information to your advantage within your Business Page Advertising Accounts in several ways:

Active Facebook Ads

Research competitor campaigns, landing pages, and target audiences

By gaining insight on your competitors ad campaigns, you can use that information to your own advantage when creating your own ad campaigns. Checkout their ad copy in the Facebook Ads Library, review the landing pages on competitors ad sets, figure out how they are attracting users, generating leads, creating awareness, or driving sales.

Get Inspiration and Test New Ad Features

Every so often, Facebook, Twitter, and all social platforms update and release new features to their advertising tools. Review Big Brands to see how they are incorporating new features (such as Messenger Ads) and see if it is a viable way for you to gain a competitive edge and create positive experiences with audiences you are trying to attract through your ads.

Engage with Customers and Audiences within your Ads

You want to build a solid Facebook Advertising Strategy, and all that begins with your audience and potential customers and how to reach them effectively. You need to plan and choose so you are not flighting ad campaigns blindly with no idea what you are doing, running up large advertising costs with no real results. Users can and will engage with your ads the same way they engage with all posts within the Facebook platforms. Users are now more aware than ever to shady practices and will make it known if they disagree with your advertising techniques or models. Be sure to plan your sales funnels effectively, so that you can use the Facebook ad campaigns to your advantage both on the Facebook Platform and off of it (on your landing page).

Here are a few questions that are important to consider before creating your first ad campaign on Facebook:

  • What’s your objective? (Traffic, Sales, Views)
  • Do you have pre-existing consistent website traffic? (to filter from new traffic brought in from advertising)
  • Do you have an email list? (to create Custom Audiences to retarget)
  • Can you create unique engaging content? (to create compelling ad copy)

You can use this basic information to create initial strategies on your advertising campaigns. Here are a few examples on how to start:

Create Free Content

Creating free content is a great way to initiate a long term advertising strategy. Users don’t like ads, but they do enjoy curated content around subjects they enjoy. By creating curated content and marketing such content, it will seem less intrusive, less like an ad, and create a positive experience fore users to interact with. Using Videos, or Viral Marketing techniques can help warm up cold audiences to your Business.

Retarget Website Users

If you install the Facebook pixel on your website or mobile application, you can target users who have visited your site within the last 90 days across all Facebook Platforms.

Engage Your Contact List

Knowing who your customers or audience members are is one step above cold advertising, as you have a curated list of users that have already shown interest in your Business, industry, or niche. You can use an email list or phone numbers to create “Custom Audiences” to then use to target in advertising campaigns.

Promote via Influencers

Find relevant influencers with a large audience to promote your Business through a paid promotional post. This is similar to advertising campaigns; however, it is outside the Facebook ad platform. You can create a direct agreement with influencers via messenger or email and reach their audience directly by having them promote to their audience on your behalf.

Local (HyperLocal) Advertising

Facebook Marketplace is a good start to reach local audiences with your product and services if you are in a defined geography or DMA.

Users in the Facebook Marketplace are more often than not, looking locally for services or products that fit their need. Additionally, you can use Geo-targeting features for Hyper Local Targeting on Local Businesses to reach Audiences in specific regions of the Country/State/City.

Create a campaign objective

Local Advertising offers several objectives, be sure to label your campaigns to understand your own advertising objective. These strategies can be for Brand Awareness/Reach, Views, Leads, Sales, or Curation.

Select Ad Placement

Figure out where on Facebook you want your ads to appear (newsfeed, marketplace, instagram, etc).

Create Video Ads or Image Carasouls

Using the Ad Creation section, you can upload images or video to create highly interactive ads for your Business Services or Products. Videos are usually best to attract new users, and Facebook Marketplace is a good placement to find Local users.

Review and Optimize your Results

Breakdown your ad campaign activity by filtering by “placements” or “demographic” and review how your ads are performing compared to your ad strategy and goals.

How to Create Facebook Ad Funnels

By creating a ad funnel on Facebook, you can begin to optimize your conversions and reduce your ad costs and budget, while scaling your target audience and increasing sales. If you think about email marketing, you always start with a cold email, then work up through the door of the gatekeeper with warm follow ups. These canned messages can be used in theory with Messenger Bots, but also can be applied to advertising campaigns. Each Ad sequence needs to be planned and incorporated to the overall strategy.

Creating a Hook Advertisement

A Hook advertisement usually offers a value to users at limited to no cost, such as a free trial, coupon, gift, content, or knowledge. By providing value to your audience, they’ll trust your advertisement message and engage with your future offers and ads.

Advertising with a Hook

Nurturing Advertisements

After you hook in an audience segment, you’ll need to start nurturing those users that have opted into the hook advertisement. Warming up a cold audience is useful and more valuable when they convert into new leads, as they won’t immediately go cold like many other ad campaigns that don’t have an advertising funnel.

Testimonial Ads

Be sure to use Real testimonials or case studies in your ads to show new users or clients that your existing and past clients have taken great value out of your Business offers. Educating a new audience about your business is easier when it comes from another User and not the business itself. However, be sure to not walk over the line with fake testimonials, as users can smell deceitful campaigns when they see them and associate negative feelings with your ads and business.

Q&A Advertisements

Setting up Conversions

When your audience is warmed up, you will soon have very warm leads ready to convert to your offers. These users have been fed valuable content and information that shows you as the expert in your niche and industry. When it’s time to make them an offer, the best case is if they are approaching you, rather than you trying to sink the final hook. In most cases, Users have a problem that your business wants to solve. You put yourself out there in front of new audiences to show your solution, and now they have learned more through Nurturing and Retargeting, that they are ready to take advantage of your Business Offers.

With an actionable plan and Sales Funnel, you can target users at all stages of your audience funnel and begin optimizing each stage to benefit you and the users as much as possible.

Building a brand and spreading brand awareness is no easy task, it takes expertise, money, and will power. Not all audiences will interact according to your original plan, and sometimes you will need to pivot strategies, just like business need to pivot services to stay ahead of competition. If you are lucky, you may find an AdOps expert or hire an Agency like Brandets to take care of your Social Advertising and run your campaigns for you for a reasonable price.

Always use Custom Audiences if you have them.

Facebook Custom Audience

Everyone focuses on the reach or size of their potential audience, but the most important aspect most business miss is how to keep your audience engaged with the content you promote. You can target your advertisements via creating segments with demographic, geographic, and even interest based targeting; however, you can also implement custom audiences from uploading data or implementing Facebook pixels.

By implementing your Custom Audiences, you can begin to filter them down based on further segments you decide to optimize upon. You want to build audiences that engage with your Business Page and Facebook Ads, but furthermore, you want to Build Audiences that convert according to your Advertisement Strategy. Keeping your audience on Facebook doesn’t usually mean adding value to your business financially and you will eventually need to spur user interest enough to take them either off page to your Business Website or App, or locally in person.

With the new Facebook Leads features, you are able to capture leads within the Facebook Platform, allowing businesses more value from users that don’t actually leave Facebook when engaging with your ads.

Selecting a Source for Custom Audiences

By analyzing and tracking activity on your landing page, app, website or products, Businesses can retarget audiences based on their activity. Custom Audiences allow highly targeted and relevant ad campaigns, which Facebook deems as High Quality and relevance for it’s users, delivering to a larger reach at a cheaper cost.

There are a few examples of who you can retarget from implementing a Facebook Pixel/Event:

Website Visits

A good option for small businesses with few conversion points can be retargeting based on visits to a specific website or webpage.

Product Views or Cart Adds but No Purchase

You can add a URL condition to where users that visit your website and view select products or services and even add to their cart to checkout, but don’t complete a purchase can be retargeted later to complete abandoned purchases.

Users that didn’t Opt-in but viewed Landing Pages

Retarget users that landed on your landing page but never Opted in or subscribed. You can try to advertise to these users again with a better probability that reaching out to a cold audience.

About Us or Contact Page Views

Users that navigate to your about us or contact page are audiences that seek more information about your business. Audiences that seek further information are worth retargeting to see if you can warm them up to a new offer or service.

Previous Customers

By using your pre-existing database of customers, you can create a custom audience to retarget prior customers who have already ordered your products or services. This is the best market to capitalize on with your advertising budget because you have sold to them in the past and know they are your target audience.

Users engaged in your Content

When users are positively engaged with your content, you know you have hit the right target market. You want users to enjoy the content you create and be relevant for them. Segmenting these users is easy with Facebook Pixels because you can segment the content accordingly with your products, services, and then correlating ad campaigns.

How to Set Facebook Ad Spend

Controlling your Advertising Budget

To forecast and monitor your advertising spend, you need to have a budget in mind. Setting up a budget aligns with your Ad Campaign Spend. In order to monitor your ad spend wisely, you need to set certain goals, and review analytics properly to optimize accordingly for the best Return on Investment and Return on Ad Spend. Using tools like Facebook Pixels, Audience Insights, and Facebook Events, you can monitor these analytics to ensure your ad spend is being spent wisely to your goals.

Create a Revenue Goal if Selling Products/Services

In order to make sure you get positive ROI or ROAS from your advertising campaigns, you need to forecast and plan accordingly. You want your sales revenue to exceed your advertising costs with a healthy gross margin to make it all worthwhile. Small Businesses with low advertising budgets especially need to act wisely when setting up advertising campaigns.

Use Conversions in your Facebook Business Manager

Setting up Conversions in the Business Ad Manager will allow you to receive the data you need to monitor ROAS and ROI and stay profitable as you scale to new audiences and larger reach, along with a larger advertising spend/budget.

Split Test your Ad Campaigns

By segmenting your ad campaigns, targeting scenarios, and custom audiences, you can determine different variables and how they affect underlying cost or revenue associated to your ad campaign sets. This will also allow you to cut out bad performing campaigns and optimize good campaigns to the best of your ability.

Review Analytics and Constantly Optimize

The more Historic and Fresh data you obtain, the better you can review results and optimize towards better goals. Staying ontop of analytics and insights will allow you to stay on top of campaigns before they can go against your goals.

Setting Facebook Ad Costs

Facebook Ad Budget Optimization Tool

Facebook has a Budget Optimization setting that automatically optimizes and analyzes your budget to make real time changes to your ad campaign and spending budget. It’s best to keep a close eye on your campaigns and optimize your ad sets personally rather than trust Facebooks Budget algorithm; however, when your campaigns are running successfully, this tool can be extremely useful to reaching a larger audience within your target audience at a reasonable advertising cost, in real time.

When you run advertising campaigns, your target audiences will vary in size. Ideally, you want to allocate budget appropriately and respectively to the size of the audience you are trying to reach. In certain scenarios where you have optimized to the most targeted users possible, you may want to pay more to try and convert them and cutting out many other stages of the sales funnels.

Having many positive social signals such as a promoted post or grassroots post go viral and receive a lot of comments, likes, and shares can also reduce advertising costs, as you are not spending anything from users sharing within their audience networks. These organic growth opportunities are the best solution to aim for achieving large reach at little to no cost; however, you may need to put a lot of planning into content curation and content marketing.

Some tips to achieve organic viral and free advertising:

Use what works to engage your audience

An audience that reacts and engages with your content is a good way to know what is working. Having many likes, comments and shares show that the content is valuable and that others will also likely be interested in seeing that content under advertising campaigns. Keep track of competitors that have highly engaged ads and review why that is and how you can imitate their methods for your Business.

Focus your Content to Convert Users

Warm your audience up and have a goal in the end to convert them to your product or services. You want your strategy to end with your goal and making sure you track milestones across your funnel will allow you to optimize ad campaigns and ensure budget is being spent appropriately to your ROI goals.

Stay Engaged with your Audience

When you stay engaged with your audience, it’ll continue to push notify the users and also change the Facebook Algorithm for those users. If they are engaging with your content, the Facebook algo may start recommending your content to their audience network through “Suggestions”.

You can build out your ad budget and costs to be charged on a CPC (Cost per Click) or CPM (Cost per Mile [thousand impressions]) basis.

Knowing what is most ideal may come with historic data and determining what is the best cost and most effective for reach and goals in mind. Paying per click can bring highly engaged users at a slightly larger initial cost; while paying per Thousand Impressions may be cheaper and bring a larger reach to larger audiences, but bring fewer interactions due to the ad not being relevant to the audience it is reaching. Where your campaign is at in your Ad funnel may determine what cost method is best for your advertising campaign.

Automated Rules

Facebook’s Automated Rules is a new way to manage your Facebook ad spend and budget automatically with little oversight.

Facebook Automated Budget Rules

You can save time, resources, and even cost by implementing automated rules and relying less on optimization techniques to bring down your ad spend. Facebook uses multiple Key Performance Indicators and metrics to define conditions of automated rules, and you can create a custom automation workflow should you spend the time to set it up. Many Businesses find it well worth the time and effort to invest in Automated Rules.

Set predefined conditions and review KPI’s such as leads, audience reach, likes, or views across all ad elements such as creatives or ad campaigns within your ad account. Facebook Automated Rules will check conditions that you set and refine campaigns to meet that criteria of your predefined actions.

Testing Facebook Ads

Facebook allows Businesses to use a Dynamic Creative ad to automatically shuffle through ad variations dynamically.

Dynamic Creative Ad Tool

If you want Facebook to use it’s technology to determine the best creative assets you are running, then the Dynamic Creative Tool is for you. It’ll review your creative assets such as Images, Videos, and Contextual Content Copy such as Title, Description and Call to Action to determine what ad copy is best for reaching your target audience and produce the best possible results. This can save a lot of time and money from manually split testing and optimizing different ad copy and not overlapping ad spend across the same audience groups.

You want to avoid what is called “Ad Fatigue” – when your audience has seen your ad too many times with too much frequency, therefore, losing it’s effectiveness and becoming annoying to the users. When users start blocking your ads or leaving negative comments, it can create a negative image to other users that are viewing your ad.

Here are some tips to avoid Ad Fatigue:

Don’t over saturate your audience

With advertising, you want to keep high interest and quality ads; whether the users are your target audience or not. It’s easy to over saturate an audience of a few thousand than an audience size of a few million. You want to scale your ad campaigns appropriately with your audience sizes to ensure users view this as quality content and offerings they may be interested in.

Don’t create dull boring Ads

Never saturate your audience with boring ads. Even if the ads aren’t relevant to your users, you can segment those users out eventually if they aren’t showing engagement. But with very boring ads, you won’t obtain engagement from even viable highly targeted and relevant audiences. You want to keep the audience segments engaged and have enough data to constantly optimize towards higher quality ads and cheaper ad costs.

Don’t do a poor job targeting your audience and deliver un-relevant ads

This is a run on from not creating boring ads… you want to stay relevant to your users and potential users. You want them to convert and review your services, products or offers and by providing advertisements that aren’t relevant, you’ll not only lose potentially interested and relevant customers, but also create a negative experience for them on the Facebook platforms.

How to Create Facebook Messenger Ads

Facebook ads can now be displayed inside the Facebook Messenger App allowing for instant contact with users already engaged with each other. This increases the likely hood that people will engage and interact with your Business, if relevant.

Create lookalike and custom audiences from Messenger App leads and subscriptions to later use hyper targeted ad sets. These users will commonly stay highly engaged with your content as they are familiar with your brand and business, making them highly ideal to convert and a low cost.

Lookalike audiences share many traits from the audiences you are attempting to imitate in your targeting… these trends are secrets within the Facebook Algorithms, but can be understood by evaluating interests, trends, and historic data.

Using Facebook Video Ads

Facebook Video Ads

Facebook Video is one of the best methods to advertise your business to users and audience groups. Not only pre-curated videos, but also by streaming on Facebook Live to show users in real time what you have to show, say or offer.

Here are some Tips for Facebook Video Ads:

Do your Research on What Users want to View

You want to provide valuable content and Video is one of the best mediums to do so; however, you want to stay relevant and show audiences what they are interested in. Therefore, you must do your research and target accordingly.

Boost highly engaged Video posts

If you have Video Content that your existing audience is already engaging well with; then spend a little money to Boost that Video posts to new audiences and obtain a larger reach.

Drive Views from other Sources

Promote your Facebook Videos via other Mediums, such as on your website, on other social platforms such as twitter, or even on Youtube. Promoting on other Channels and linking back to your Facebook Page will show authenticity to audiences on other platforms.

Create a Funnel and Landing Page

Have a landing page ready to push users from your Video on through your funnel into your landing page.

Promote Free Content or Giveaways

Users are attracted to services or information they don’t have to pay for. Even more so, they love Free Giveaways. If you can offer free products or services as a promotional marketing method, than you may achieve better than usual results from your Video campaigns. Get Winning receivers to post video updates to then follow up showing the authenticity of your giveaways to other users so that they engage the next time around.

Retarget your Video Ads to your Custom Audiences

Track users that watch your video ads, and later retarget them with other ads in hopes of converting them. Sometimes Video isn’t the best method for converting, but is the best method for scaling positive engagement. Capturing these potential leads as a custom audience for later segmenting in ad groups can result in desirable outcomes.

Advertise your videos not only within the Facebook Newsfeed, but also select Instagram platform and Facebook Publishers to obtain a larger reach to grow your audience further.

Optimizing Your Facebook Advertising

Keep focus on 4 key metrics to optimize your Facebook Ads — Ad Cost, Relevancy Score/Ad Quality, Frequency, and CPM/CPC. These metrics will not only help identify opportunities and weaknesses, but will maximize strengths and performance across your entire strategy.

Ad Cost per Result

Ad Cost

By knowing your KPI’s, you can monitor and optimize your ad campaigns to ensure you are obtaining a positive Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). By knowing your Ad Cost per Result (Conversion, View, Sale, etc), you can stay on top of your goals and strategies while you scale budget and optimize ad sets.

Ad Relevance Score

One of the most important metrics to abide by is Ad Quality and Relevance. Ensuring you have a quality ad and highly relevant will not only allow you to access a large reach of audience, but also at a cheaper Cost! A relevance score is on a rating from 1 to 10 and Facebook determines what relevancy score per ad is set by auto and sometimes manual review. This metric is available for review at the creative level of your ad campaigns. Over time, the larger the relevance score and the higher you increase your ad quality, Advertisers will see larger performance in scale ability and decreased costs. If you have a bad Ad Quality Score, you will find your costs going up, and potential reach decreasing as Facebook doesn’t find your ad campaign to be relevant to the users you are targeting and opt to reduce your reach and performance.

Ad Frequency

Ad Frequency Caps

Frequency is an important metric to consider as you don’t want users to get Ad Fatigue. Typically, you don’t want to show an ad more than a few times to the same users within 24 hour duration’s. The more a user see’s your ad when they don’t feel it is relevant, the more negative connotations they will start associating with your brand and business. Keep your frequency at levels of 1 to 4 views per user every 24 hours. The higher the frequency, the more it may impact your relevance score and inflate your ad costs, especially if those users are not converting.

Ad Cost Basis – CPM / CPC

Ad Cost per Mile or Cost per Click

Keep an eye on your cost basis, whether it be CPM or CPC. Depending on your strategy, you may have both ad cost models running with different scenarios. Different Businesses may find each or either of these cost models more beneficial than the other, and it takes a lot of historic data to determine what is best for your ad campaign and objective.

Why Facebook Analytics are so Important

Analytics are quintessential to understanding which ads are performing well, and which one’s are draining your budget. Facebook Analytics is a great tool for analyzing all levels of your advertising campaigns from head to toe. Since Facebook Insights is a free tool, you don’t lose anything but time by identifying trends and data that you can use to your advantage within your advertising and marketing campaigns.

When used with Conversion and Event management both on and off the Facebook Platform, you can really dive deep into how to optimize your Advertising Campaigns as you scale your Ad Budget. Use other analytics platforms such as Google Analytics to measure conversions and compare data from Facebook advertising. Track users across social channels and across your website/app to know the most about how to attract more users and convert them quicker and cheaper. You want to increase your ROI and ROAS regardless of the methods you use for paid advertising, and analytics will help you optimize.

Understand how Facebook Attribution works when people interact with your Facebook ads and how their actions or interactions are recorded for usable data. Each time your ad leads to a marked conversion, Facebook will attribute such so that you can properly analyze and optimize your campaigns. If you are too unfamiliar, it may be beneficial to hire a data scientist, a media buyer, or an ad operations expert to not only setup your ad campaigns, but also monitor trafficking or yield management, or simply advise on your progress to growth hack your advertising to new levels.

When you have campaigns that are performing extremely well, it’s time to invest more and scale to larger audiences without losing points in your relevance score. Monitor analytics as you scale, and adjust budgets and ad costs so that you achieve your goals and meet your forecasts appropriately. Facebook offers reporting functions through the Business Manager and Ad Center to allow you to export data and reveal workable data that can be shared throughout your organization to better understand how your ad campaigns are performing and quickly spot areas for improvement or areas that are performing noticeably well where you should continue to focus growth around.

If you need help with Social Advertising campaigns at any level, please feel free to contact our Social Media Buyers and AdOps gurus today to on board your business and scale your performance to new heights!



source https://brandets.com/advertising/facebook-ads-the-best-ad-buying-guide-for-businesses-and-brands/

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