7 Reasons Why You Should Be Advertising on Facebook & How to Create Effective Ads

Whether you’re a start-up business or an established SME, you SHOULD have a sound digital marketing strategy and be advertising on Facebook. If you still haven’t created your digital marketing strategy or need some convincing as to why one is important, make sure to check out our previous blog What is a Digital Marketing Strategy and 10 Reason Why You Need One. 

Nestled within your digital marketing strategy is social media which is a valuable channel for showcasing your brand to the masses in an affordable, creative way. Social media marketing also offers businesses another useful tool that capture the attention of your target audience and garner strong leads – advertising. Social media advertising, in particular advertising on Facebook, can be developed easily, creatively and effectively resulting in more followers, page likes, increased traffic and, importantly, sales. To put it simply, if you want your brand to get noticed, a Facebook Ad campaign is the go-to channel with around 72% of ads reaching monthly active users. 

Many business owners and marketing managers see the setting up of a Meta Business Suite account (previously known as Facebook Business) as a daunting, arduous task. Fear not! We have written this blog to give you an understanding of how you can do this and the ways in which to create effective ads that will enhance your exposure and increase traffic to your eCommerce business. 

7 Reasons Why You Should Be Advertising on Facebook

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty of Facebook advertising, we think it’s important you first understand why you should be advertising on Facebook and how it can benefit your business.

1. Cheaper Than Other Forms of Advertising

There are no fixed, strict costs for advertising on the Meta network which means you can set your budget accordingly. Unlike other mediums – billboards, print ads, TV and Radio – advertising on Facebook is super affordable with the added benefit of being paused and restarted whenever suits you and your cashflow. 

2. Agile

Other advertising mediums can be rigid in their design, creativity and delivery whereas Meta ads give users the opportunity to freely change their campaign and targeting options as often as they like. This is important as it allows you to adjust quickly based on the real-time data that you are seeing from your campaign. 

3. A Return on Investment That You Can Measure

Facebook ads are one of the better performing advertising strategies that can offer an impressive return on investment (ROI) if set up and monitored correctly. Unlike other ad mediums where the only reliable statistic is how many cars drove past your billboard ad or how many people were tuned in during your radio ad, Facebook ads provide various data variables that give thorough insights into a campaign’s performance. 

4. Specific Targeting

Thanks to Facebook’s wealth of user information, buyer personas can be easily created and segmented into targetable groups and custom audiences such as lookalike audiences. Aspects such as age, gender, location, interests, and work titles are useful metrics that allow ad campaigns to target consumers directly, through remarketing and thereby increasing impressions, click-through rates to your landing page and overall traffic. 

5. Ease Of Use

Meta Business Suite, where Facebook ads are created and managed, is an easy-to-use platform that has been designed to offer functionality for everyday business people. This allows for newcomers to get their ad online quickly and accurately without the delays and lead times that is common with other advertising mediums. The best part, you also have access to a useful support and help centre that can assist with complications or ideas to better your ads performance. 

6. Retargeting

Once your campaign goes live, Facebook will study and monitor each interaction that people have with your ad. By remembering these interactions, Facebook can specifically target these same individuals who showed interest in the ad but may not have proceeded towards making a purchase or accepting a trial offer. Retargeting is so powerful that it has the ability to bring back 1 in 4 consumers to complete a purchase and 10x higher click-through rate (CTR) than that of a regular display ad. 

7. Intuitive Analytics

One of Meta Business Suites strongest features is the analytics and data that it captures from campaigns. As mentioned before, other advertising mediums either fail to capture valuable insights or manage only a small amount of detail. A Facebook ad campaign on the other hand captures a huge number of metrics – from costs per click, engagement and click-through rates to conversion rates, impressions, and consumer demographics. The data that is acquired provides valuable insight into how users are interacting with your ads, what is working, and where improvements exist that you can make moving forward. 

Getting Started with Your Own Facebook Ad

What Is Meta Business Suite?

The Meta Business Suite allows you to manage all your connected accounts across both Facebook, Instagram and messaging tools. There are various elements that are offered within the suite;

• Create Ads – Curate your very own ad campaign that will be published across Facebook and Instagram 
• Create Posts & Stories – Schedule and publish posts from the suite 
• Boost & Promote – Get your posts and pages noticed by more people by boosting and promoting them
• Insights – Analyse the performance of your posts, ads and boosts/promotions whilst gathering a deeper understanding of your audience
• Business At a Glance – The suite allows you your social assets and functions – everything from updates, recent posts, activity, notifications, insights and ads. 

How To Set Up Meta Business Suite

To access Your Business Suite, make sure that you have a Facebook page for your business. If you haven’t set up a Facebook business page, then you will need to create one here.

Navigate to the Meta Business Suite website (desktop) or download and access the Meta Business Suite app on Android or iOS. Should you wish to manage both your Facebook page and Instagram account from the suite, you’ll need to connect them in Meta Business. For instructions to do this, here are the links for desktop and mobile. 

How to Create an Ad on Meta Business Suite

Here we’ll show you how to set up your very own Facebook and/or Instagram ad. 

What’s Your Goal?

Before you embark on your first ad, make sure you understand why you are undertaking this investment. There are more reasons to advertise than purely for “quick sales”. Things like building brand awareness, creating an online presence, generating leads, promoting an app and attracting new clients are all great goals for you to work towards. 

Create Ad

On the homepage of your Meta Business Suite, you should see a menu on the left-hand side with tabs such as Home, Notifications, Inbox and Ads. Click on Ads. This will take you to your business’s ad summary page which, once you have set up a few ads, will show recent ads and their performances. Navigate to the ‘Create Ad’ button. 

Choose Your Objective

Remember that Goal you had set out for yourself before undertaking on this ad journey? This is where you’ll need choose what that goal is so that Facebook ads can tailor your ad appropriately. 

Pick Your Audience

Identifying the type of consumers that you want your ads to reach is the next step in the ad creation journey. This is where you will input variables such as age, location, interest, gender and language.

Where Your Ad Will Be Seen

Placement is deciding where you want your ads to be run – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network, or all of the above. Meta gives you the option to select Automatic Placements which will showcase your ads in places it deems most beneficial to reaching your goals.

Budget

As mentioned earlier, Facebook ads allow you to spend as much or as little as you like. Setting your budget is an important step as this will determine the prevalence of your ads, the more you spend, the more likely you are to gain higher impressions and clicks. Make sure you triple check your scheduling in this section as there is an option to run an ad continuously or to set a start and end date. We recommend you input a definitive amount of time as this prevents your budget being blown if you forget to stop the ad. 

Content Format

Telling your story and capturing the attention of your audience all revolve around your ad format. Here you will decide as to whether your ad will feature a single image, a carousel of images, stories, a slideshow, a collection piece, playable ads or a video. For example, if you are a clothing brand, a carousel would be a well-suited ad format as it allows you to showcase a variety of designs and styles all in the one ad.

Submit & Monitor

Once you have given your ad a final check, you can submit it which will then be review by Facebook before going live. To monitor the performance of your ad, which provides live updates, simply head to your Ads Manager account and select the campaign that you are interested in viewing. The three metrics that are worth tracking and that you should keep an eye on are;

1. Total Conversions – Look out for data centred around traffic to your website, sales generated and lead generation
2. Return on Ad Spend – This metric will determine whether your campaign is effective and worth running. Simply take your revenue generated (that is a direct result of your ad) and divide it by your money spent. A good ROAS for Facebook ads is around 4:1 or $4 revenue for every $1 spent.
3. Cost Per Click (CPC) & Click Through Rate (CTR) – As the name suggests, CPC gives you the cost of clicks to your website from your ad with the CTR being the percentage of people that have clicked through to your website after seeing the ad. A low CTR may mean your ad isn’t appealing to your audience and isn’t inviting them to ‘click’ so make sure to keep an eye on it so that you can pivot accordingly and create a more engaging campaign without wasting money. 

Advertising on Facebook is one essential way to expand your reach in an affordable, yet results-driven way. A strong digital marketing strategy will have many variables but Facebook and social media advertising should always be a strong consideration thanks to its ability to generate quick, valuable awareness that can drive lead creation and ultimately lead to sale conversions. 

For more information, check out our Facebook Ad Management procedure or get in contact with Cemohs best PPC Guy for more information.