How to grow your brand with your first Facebook ad

Have you ever run an ad for your business on Facebook? If not, today is the day where I show you step by step how to get started.

My goal for this article is to help you create your first Facebook ad. Following this guide will not make you an expert in Facebook marketing, but it will give you the foundations to build on if you decide to use Facebook to grow your brand.

Facebook marketing is one of the most powerful marketing channels available to businesses and advertising agencies. Facebook currently has 2.3 billion monthly active users around the world. The platform gives you the ability to target users based on their location, demographics, and interests which allows you to reach new audiences and untapped markets.

REQUIREMENTS FOR RUNNING FACEBOOK ADS

Before you start running your first Facebook campaign, you will need the following:

1. A website
2. A Facebook page
3. A Facebook Business Manager account (Here is a guide to creating a Facebook Business Manager account if you don’t have one yet)
4. Photos of your products or service (if you don’t have any - go to Unsplash and get some suitable stock photos)

Once you have all of the above in place, you are ready to start setting up ads.

Our journey starts in the Ads Manager of your (newly created) Facebook Business Manager account. Start by clicking on the green “Create Ad” button on the dashboard.

Picking your Campaign

HOW TO TELL FACEBOOK WHAT YOUR GOALS ARE

The first screen you will come across when starting your campaign is the “marketing objective” screen. You can choose between running brand awareness, consideration or conversion campaigns.

In this example, we are going to choose a consideration campaign and specifically set “Traffic” as our campaign objective. This will tell Facebook that your top priority is to get as many people to your website as cheap as possible.

Choosing other campaign objectives will tell Facebook to prioritise different outcomes such as the amount of people who are reached or the amount of sales that are made on the website. Because you are brand new to running Facebook ads, we just want to start getting people to explore your website.

Create different ad sets

DEFINE WHO YOU WANT FACEBOOK TO TARGET AND HOW MUCH YOU WANT TO SPEND ON THE FACEBOOK CAMPAIGN

Once you have picked your objective, you move on to the second stage of setting up your ad, creating an ad set.

An ad set basically addresses the following questions:

1. Where do you want your ads to be displayed? Specifically by location.
2. What demographics do you want to target? Age and Gender.
3. What interest do you want to target?

I highly recommend identifying the types of customers that you have and trying three different interest settings. There is a bit of trial and error involved in this step, so try mixing up interests or age ranges. Some ad sets will work well, others won’t. The goal of setting up multiple ad sets in the same campaign is to figure out what audiences works best for you online. It may not be what you expect!

To set up your first audience, choose around 5-10 different types of interests you believe are likely for your customer audience.

When selecting placements (where Facebook displays your ads on their website and online), I recommend leaving automatic placements. However, if it is important to your brand to not be in certain ad slots on the internet, then click on “edit placement” and deselect the placements that you don’t want to use.

After selecting your placements, select your budget. I recommend starting off with $10 per day per ad set. You will have the ability to turn off the ad campaign whenever you want. If you are worried that you will forget to turn the ads off, then switch to lifetime budget and add a fixed amount that you want to spend.

Lastly, change the “Optimisation for Ad Delivery” to Landing Page Views.

Click continue and move on to the final stage of setting up your first Facebook ad...

Create different ad creatives for each ad sets

Choose the “Single Image” layout and add three different images to your ad.

The final stage is where you can show off your brand and creativity. Simply add three images to a “Single Image” ad creative template. This will create three separate ads for you.

In the Website URL field, you determine where you want to send people once they click your ads.

My recommendations for setting up and effective ad creative are:

1. Use high-quality images with people in them.
2. Don’t use text in your images (they will most likely be declined by Facebook).
3. Be specific in your messaging to the audiences you set in the previous stage.
4. Select the call to action that is most appropriate.

Last step.

All that is left to do now is to hit the confirm button. Facebook takes a few minutes to review your ads, but your job is done for now. You will be able to see a nice overview of all the ads you just created in your ads manager overview. (You might still need to add your credit card at this stage).

What now?

Hopefully, now your first Facebook ad is live and very soon you should see an influx of people visiting your site.

If you want to expand on this process and learn more about strategies, like Facebook retargeting or targeting different types of audiences, reach out to me on Unicorn Factory. I am currently running one-on-one workshops helping businesses learn the basic of running effective Facebook campaigns.

If you don’t have the time to set up Facebook campaigns yourself, but see the value in it, then I recommend reaching out to freelancers specialised in Facebook marketing.

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