Facebook Marketing: How to make ads to grow your business

With the rise in popularity of social media over the years, it is no secret that businesses are flocking to the sites to market to potential customers.

One of the biggest platforms to date is Facebook.

So, why not take advantage of that?

Facebook marketing is almost as old as the site itself, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Luckily, Facebook has a variety of ad options to give you the best experience for your marketing campaigns.

How to Set up Facebook Ads

To start, you need a business account set up on Facebook. Once you do this, you can go to Facebook Ads Manager to begin a campaign.

From there, you figure out your goals. Do you want to increase brand awareness, reach, traffic, app installations, etc?

Then, you choose your targeted audience and ad placements. You can run your ads on all Facebook-owned platforms, including Instagram and Facebook Messenger. After that’s decided, you can determine if you want it to be on the Facebook feed or Stories.

Next, you set up your budget and schedule. Finally, you can create your ad.

Types of Facebook Ads:

Facebook has various different ad types to choose from. Each offers a different approach and benefits.

Image Ads

For first-time marketers, image ads are a good place to start. It’s simply promoting a Facebook post with an image in it. When used right, this can be a great attention-getter.

Video Ads

Videos can be uploaded to Facebook Stories or News Feed to advertise your product. But, you don’t always have to stick to traditional videos. Animations work as well, and they may get your brand across better.

Alternatively, you can have an ad attached to longer in-stream videos.

Video Poll Ads

These mobile-only ads are a new feature that marketers are finding very effective. Video polls allow users to interact with your ad for better engagement.

Carousel Ads

Carousel ads are a fantastic way to show potential customers a variety of products or reasons why they should consider your business. You can use up to 10 photos or videos, and you can play around with the format to make an ad that stands out.

Slideshow Ads

With slideshow ads, you can put together photos and text to make a video montage. This can be done using your own images or Ads Messenger stock photos. Either way, make sure your images are clear and high quality.

Collection Ads

Want to advertise your product directly to Facebook users? Collection ads let you do just that. You can show a collection of products for customers to view and go directly to your site.

Instant Experience Ads

Formerly called Canvas ads, these take over the viewer’s screen to display your ad. The best part about these is the quick loading speed is 15 times faster than a website.

Lead Ads

Lead ads are another mobile-only feature that allows users to fill out forms. This can have different uses from signing up for newsletters to submitting questions.

Dynamic Ads

If you want to remarket your product to customers, dynamic ads can do that. They target users who have previously shown interest in your business.

Messenger Ads

Messenger ads let you market to customers on the Messenger app. Along with this, you can place ads on the Facebook feed that connect users directly to your Messenger account.

Stories Ads

Story ads are vertical video ads you can run on stories. Marketers have had loads of success with this feature, as a majority of customers surveyed by Ipsos claimed they were more willing to buy a product due to a story ad.

Story Augmented Reality Ads

Augmented reality ads are the feature in stories that allow users to interact with filters and animations. With social media platforms, like Snapchat, popularizing AR, users seem to enjoy the experience, and many have said they’ve used a branded AR ad before.

Playable Ads

If you have an app, playable ads can let users demo your game. Playable ads are an inviting way to get users to connect to your platform.

How To Use Them

1. Do what works. If you have content you’ve used in the past and know is effective, turn it into an ad. A popular blog post can become a video, or you can promote your most liked Facebook post in an image ad.

2. Sell directly to customers. Let the product speak for itself. Clever ad campaigns are good, but ultimately, it’s the product that needs to shine. Quality photos and low prices can make a collection ad campaign successful.

3. Create store traffic. Get customers to come to an event in the real world. You can advertise an event or a sale in your store. Choosing the engagement, traffic, and conversion objectives when setting up your ad campaign will help you target ads for events and ticket sales.

Tips to Optimize Your Experience

The biggest rule in social media marketing to follow is making sure you have high-quality photos and videos to use. If you aren’t confident in your own production abilities, there are several royalty free stock photos and videos at your disposal.

When you first start a campaign, it’s best to target your ads to a specific group and then expand. This way, you can see how your data changes when you market to certain demographics.

With that, you can get further insight by personalizing ads to different groups. For instance, you can use certain ads for remarketing to past customers and some to target potential customers.

Speaking of remarketing, a good tool to use for this is Facebook Pixel. This is a code you can install to monitor your conversion rates. Even if you're not interested in this now, investing in it can let you use the data in the future when you want to expand your campaign.

Facebook Ads Manager is another great resource to track your data.

But all this data does you no good if you don’t look at it. Analyze it. When you change your approach, how is it affected?

If you’re running multiple ad types (which you should), look at which ones work and which don’t. The ones that are more successful are where your money should go.

Facebook is a fantastic platform to reach the millions of people that use it every day. Through Facebook marketing, you can expand your reach and grow your business.

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