If you utilize social media for you business marketing Facebook can provide an important role in providing a far reach without breaking the bank. In the following article we will show you how to integrate Facebook into your marketing strategy.

What is Facebook advertising?

Using Facebook advertising opens the door for the promotion of custom ads or content. This allows your business to target a precise audience, with a variance of cost dependant on the reach and engagement the ad receives.

Facebook ads typically are located on the right column of one’s Facebook or in a news feed.

The algorithm FB uses allows you the opportunity to leab about existing customers or potential ones allowing you to better create your ads for the highest efficiency.

Best Facebook Advertising Practices

Establish objectives Before you decide on a budget it’s important to decide on the goal your ads want to achieve. Its important to clearly think of what goal your trying to obtain wether it be conversions, video view, or raising awareness. Each action made by your argeted audience on Facebook costs.

Target Audience Facebook holds billions of data points to properly make its user experience the best for each individual. To make your ad get to the person it should, reaching your end goal, whatever that may be, entails proper articulation of exactly who you are trying to reach. Make sure to clearly give this some thought.

Rotate your ads regularly

‘Ad fatigue’ is when viewers see your ad in over-abundance. This creates a lack of interest which equates to les interaction. Unfortunately FB penalizes you for this. If your ‘click rate’ starts to drop raises the price of your cost per click (CPC). This makes likes, commens, and click-throughs more expensive on your ad.

7 Steps to use for FB advertising

1. Create a Facebook business page

The Category of the Page is an important step in creating your Facebook business page. Be exact in choosing the most appropriate category that bests describes the identify of your business. This allows people to find your page more easily. The category will appear on the page and is one of the first things a user will see about your page.

Go tocom/pages/create
Then choose a Page category
Click Get Started and follow the on-screen instructions

2. Create obtainable goals for your Facebook ads

Use S.M.A.R.T. goals—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Using S.M.A.R.T. goals for your Facebook Ads will help you achieve a better return on your ads investment.

3. Intentions for your campaign

Once you’ve made your Facebook Page and have goals for your ads, you can now go into the Facebook Ads manager and choose an objective for your ad.

If your goal is to acquire registrants for an upcoming event, the Facebook Ad objective you would choose is to “Raise attendance at your event.” Or if you want to show people to your blog, then you would choose the objective, “Send people to your website.”

Learn more about specific campaign options go to Youtube and watch Hootsuite’s video titles “Facebook Campaign Options” to get an in depth look on this topic.

4. Choosing your audience/ ad spend

Modify your target audience

Imperative in setting up your Facebook ad for success is customizing your taget audience.

You can target ads based on location, age, gender, language, interests, and behavior.

This goes even further in customization to create custom audiences to reach people who already know your business. You can also remove them from your ad’s target audience so you can reach new people on Facebook. These custom audiences can be created through a customer list, website traffic, or app activity.

Utilizing these customization tools will enhace your ads making sure they reach the audience you want. This ensures money being spent in the best way to target prices audience groups. A video going more into this can be found on Youtube provided by Hoosuite. Simply search “Advanced Audience Research and Targeting for Facebook” to retrieve this video.

Choosing your budget

Once you’ve chosen your target audience, you can then choose the spending amount correlating with this for your ad. The ad budget you set is the maximum amount you want to spend. If you choose to have a daily budget, the amount you enter will be the maximum amount you’ll spend each day. If you do a lifetime budget, the amount you enter is the maximum you’ll spend during the lifetime of your ad.

Choosing your objective

To begin you must bid for an objective: clicks or views. This will decide how your ad will be served and the expense. If you optimize for the page like objective your spending will go towards that and advertising to people who will be prone to liking your page. This data all correlates with the targets’ internet activity. When you’ve chosen your ad objective you can then chose the scheduling of your advertisement. If you chose the lifetime budget option, you have the choice of selecting exact times and hours of each day of the week you would like your advertisement to be viewable. Therefore its wise to chose times when your target audience is most prone to view your ad. Its best to think of times your users will be active like for example after 5pm considering many jobs are 9-5pm. Also correlate this with times zones wether they be domestic or international to get the most out of your ad.

5. Your ads aesthetic

Now comes the more fun part. Creating the actual look of the advertisement for Facebook. Then thoughtfully pic your images, body text, and headline for the ad. Also choose the actual placement of the ad. You can use up to Five images while the headline text is limited to 25 characters.

Because your headline is limited this puts some pressure on the description section of your ad which is a little less limited with an allowance of 80 characters. While this is a little more leeway this still isn’t all that much so its best to get a clean crisp and clear statement out there.

Lastly, you need to choose the placement of your Facebook Ad. Choose whether you want it on people’s desktop News Feed, mobile News Feed, right column, or audience network.

6. Place your order

Once you’reall set up for your advertisement to be reviewed, click on the green button that says Place Order, located on the bottom right-hand corner. Once you’ve done this you will receive an email from Facebook once your ad has been reviewed and approved and ready to go up.

7. Create a Facebook ads report

Now that your ad is up on Facebook, its best practice to keep a track on it. This means monitoring its success and also its failures to meet the goals you’ve established. You an do this by going to Facebook’s “getting started site”.

Go toAds Manager and click Reports in the navigation. You’ll automatically see data from the default report called General Metrics over the last 30 days for your active campaigns.