How to advertise your business on Facebook Ads without dying trying

Today almost all companies, freelancers, and businesses are required to advertise on the Internet. Long gone is the time when with a few posters, some flyers, and a more or less decent website, customers were generated.

The options that exist to carry out such advertising are many. From the classic banner on a web page or the advertisement in a digital medium to search engine advertising and Google Adwords display network.

However, there is one that is still not used as much and that can make a difference for your company: Facebook Ads.

Why advertise on Facebook Ads? How to do it? What type of advertising to choose? If you want an answer to all these questions, keep reading and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from my experience using Facebook Ads daily.

Why advertise on Facebook Ads?

With so many advertising options, why do I recommend using Facebook Ads? For many reasons:

1. Price: there is no comparison between what it costs to get a lead on Facebook Ads and what it costs to do it on Adwords, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or any other platform. If you know how to do it, Facebook is the king of price.
2. Scope: most people around the globe have Facebook and they get into it daily. Does it seem like a little reach?
3. Versatility: you can advertise a mobile application, a discount in a restaurant, or an online consultancy. There are specific options for each type of advertising and that makes life easier for the company.
4. Data: Facebook can hyper-segment the target audience thanks to the amount of data that Mark Zuckerberg’s company collects daily: age, location, interests, customs, and even choose whether you want to advertise to couples with or without children. A gigantic world to explore.
5. Brand generation: appearing on Facebook gives a good image of your company and generates branding. Whereas before people only trusted what appeared on TV, today they are beginning to trust what they see advertised on Facebook as well.

How to make a Facebook Ads campaign step by step

Let’s get on the “playing field”, we are going to create our first Facebook Ads campaign. And we are not going to do it in any way, but by choosing the best options to achieve an affordable price and reach the target audience of our company.

Create a Facebook page

If you don’t already have a Page, you’ll need one to advertise on. It is convenient that, before advertising, your page has a certain number of “Likes”.

Because? Because you will give a better image to Facebook and to the users themselves, who trust a page with 15,000 “Likes” more than one with 100.

Enter Facebook Ads

You can access it through your profile (menu on the left) or by searching for Facebook Ads in the Facebook search engine.

Choose the type of promotion

There are 10 options for advertising on Facebook. What does each mean? Which should you choose? Let’s see:

• Promote your publications: they have the objective of promoting something that you have published on your page (photo, text, link, video, …). They are very good for advertising if you know how to do it.
• Promote your page: campaign to get “Likes” for your page. I would never recommend it, since it is usually expensive and with the other campaigns you can also get it “by rebound”.
• Attract people to your website: to redirect traffic to your web page or landing page. I don’t usually use it because the next one is much more useful.
• Increase conversions on your website: this is the promotion par excellence. It is used to attract people to buy a product, download a document or carry out some type of action on your website. Thanks to the Facebook conversion pixel you will be able to measure how many people do that action and you will know if the campaign is working or not.
• Increase your app installs – Perfect for driving app downloads on iOS or Android. If you have a mobile app, choose it.
• Increase interaction in your application: very similar to the previous one, but to make people who have already downloaded it use it more.
• Reach people who are close to your business: I would not recommend it, since this can be done in any of the others. In addition, it does not allow you to segment by interests, only by location. It could only be useful if you live in a very large city and want to advertise in a specific area.
• Increase your event attendees: If you’ve created a Facebook event for some reason and want to make it more visible, choose this option.
• Get people to request your offer: for those who have an offer in their Facebook shop and want to promote it on the social network.
• Increase video views: perfect for announcing anything through a video, which auto-plays on users’ boards.

Ok, and of these 10 options, which one is the most recommended? Depends. Even so, unless you have an app or a store or event on Facebook, I always recommend promoting your posts and increasing conversions from your website.

I recommend the first because it is the cheapest in the long term and the second because it is used to measure the true effect of advertising. In addition, the conversion option today allows you to make multiple ads like the ones made by Hawkers (one of the companies that have used Facebook Ads the best):

Therefore, in general, we will use the promotion of publications or the option to increase conversions on the website.

Segment the target audience

Once you have selected the ad, you will have all the customization options available to choose them to your liking.

If you chose to boost your posts, you’ll need to select one of the ones you’ve already published. In that case, before doing so, I recommend generating interaction on that publication (“Likes” and shares). That way, the cost per click will be cheaper later.

In case you chose to increase conversions, you will only have to choose the URL to which you want to redirect the target audience and create a conversion pixel. To do so, choose what a conversion means to you (download, add to cart, …), name it, and add the code that Facebook gives you on the correct page (cart, the page where the purchase is confirmed, thank you page, …).

And we come to the important part of Facebook Ads: audience segmentation. You can choose the location, age, gender, language, interests, behaviors, and connections.

Here you mustn’t think “the more the better”. What you have to do is reach the target audience as many times as possible, the better. If your ad appears to a lot of people, but almost no one has the intention of buying, you will be wasting money.

For this reason, try to segment your audience as much as possible. If your business has been running for a while, it will be easy for you to know the ranges of age, location, or gender. In location, in case you want to do local advertising, choose your city and a radius of 20-40 kilometers.

In the interest section, you can find everything from generic interests such as “sunglasses” to others as specific as brands such as “Hawkers” or “Ray Ban”.

Here I would recommend thinking carefully about what interests suit you since it is always better to select small segments. For example, if you have an online eyewear store and sell products like Hawkers, why not advertise to your audience if Facebook allows it?

In that case, you could choose several eyewear brands and advertise to an audience that you know is active on Facebook and likes your style of sunglasses. It’s not bad, right?

Once you have touched all this data, look at the bottom right in the “Estimated daily reach” section. Adjust 2-3 years above and 2-3 years below the ages you have included and see if it goes up or down. On many occasions, by adding 1 more year on each side you can get up to 500-600 more impressions for the same price.

Choose how much to spend

The budget for Facebook advertising can be chosen by the total (what you will spend in total) or by a daily budget. I recommend choosing the budget by days and not putting a deadline on the ads, since according to some studies this reduces the reach of the publications.

When choosing the “optimize for” field, if you chose to promote a publication, select “Interaction with the publication” and if you chose the ad for conversions, select “Conversions on the website”.

Now Facebook also allows you to schedule ads and choose the hours at which you want them to be displayed. If you know what hours your clients can be on Facebook, create an appropriate schedule, although this does not have much influence from what I have verified.

Create the ad

If you used the promotion of publications, everything that I am going to recommend you should do when creating the publication, since now you will not be able to retouch it.

In conversion tracking, you can choose between a single video or image or multiple ads. If you have a store, I would choose the second one yes or yes, since it would be like having a small stand constantly selling your catalog on the Facebook board. If you only sell one product, choose the one with a single image.

The choice of image (or video if you prefer) is key. 80% (or more) of the success of your ad will depend on it since Facebook lives by and for images.

First of all, you should know that the image cannot have too much text. The text can only occupy 20% of the image or it will be blocked. You can check if your image meets this rule here.

Afterward, you can write a small title and text. You can only use 25 characters in the first and 90 in the second, so choose each word carefully. Get straight to the point and put the important information with an eye-catching title.

You can also include 200 characters in the link description (it appears under the ad link), although this is often much less readable. In any case, it does not hurt to include it and take advantage of those 200 characters to continue improving the ad.

If you chose the conversion tracking ad, don’t go short and make only one ad. Take advantage of the fact that Facebook allows you to upload up to 6 different images and do tests. It will be as if you have 6 different ads browsing Facebook.

Now all that remains is to choose a suitable button for your ad. Depending on the product or service, it will be better to choose one or the other, although it is usual to select “More information”.

Once you do all of this, or you did when you posted your post to the Page, you’ll have your ad ready to start advertising.

Choose where you want the ad to appear

Before closing the ad, you still have to choose the places where it will appear. They can be on Facebook for computers, Facebook for mobile, in the right column of Facebook, or on the public network.

My recommendation? Choose only the news section on the computer and mobile. Except for very isolated cases, advertising in the right column does not usually work well.

And now yes, the ad is ready for you to click on “Place order”.

Analyze and improve your ads

Once you’ve published your ad(s), analyze its results in the Facebook Power Editor. You will be able to see how many people have clicked, how much each conversion is costing you, or the reach you are having.

In case you chose to make 6 different ads discard those that have a worse CTR or that have converted less. The usual thing is that in the end you keep 1 or 2 and discard the rest.

One last piece of advice

Facebook is all about testing and testing. For that reason, I recommend anyone starting with Facebook Ads to do a lot of campaigns with very small budgets.

With these initial tests, you will be able to know which campaigns and audiences work best, to later be able to increase their budget and stop the rest.

With all these tips and this little guide, you are ready to start advertising on Facebook Ads. You will be able to make a difference and take advantage of all the advantages that this social network has for SMEs.

At first, it may be hard for you, as everything sounds Chinese to you or it may seem like you are wasting money, but I assure you that in the long term, you will end up “hooked” on this platform.

If you have any questions or want to expand any of the points, comment and I will be happy to answer you to give you a hand.