Facebook, being the biggest social media platform, has now become the leader in social media advertising. Facebook ads are inexpensive, effective, and help execute optimum utilization of resources with their brilliant target audience filters. In today’s market, all small and large businesses should ensure the use of Facebook ads to advertise their products and services to fulfill their marketing goals. So let me quickly tell you how to create Facebook ads to effectively reach your target audience in 2021.
Table of Contents
Here Are 7 Simples Steps To Create Ads on Facebook
Though these steps seem pretty simple, there’s a lot more to them than most of us know of, So let’s learn all about these steps in detail to get the best results.
Step 1. Selecting your Goals
This step is where you learn how to advertise on Facebook to achieve your marketing goals. Once you select the Ad you want to run on your Facebook business profile, you can need to choose the motive behind your Facebook Ad Campaign. What are the goals that you want to achieve by running this campaign and advertisement? Facebook offers choices between these end objectives and lets you choose between various Facebook Ad Types based on these goals. This is the first step when you create Facebook ads for your business, even when you are planning the campaign. Therefore, the goal you can choose from are as follows:
Brand Awareness: To build general brand awareness about your brand in the minds of the audience.
Reach: To reach more and more people within your target audience.
Traffic: To increase the number of people visiting your page or website.
Engagement: To get more likes, comments, and follows from your target audience.
Lead Generation: To get more details about your potential customers through Facebook ads.
Messages: To get more and more messages from your target audience.
Once you are done selecting the goals of your Facebook Ad Campaign you move on to the next step.
Step 2. Selecting your audience
According to Facebook, your target audience can be divided into 3 groups namely Core Audience, Custom Audience, and Lookalike audience. This step is essential for understanding how to run Facebook ads for the right target audience.
Core Audience
The core audience of a business is set based on demographics, interests, and behavior. There are 4 basic metrics on the basis of which you can categorize your core audience. These metrics are as follows:
Location
Naturally, you wouldn’t want to target the people you physically can’t deliver to. This is why you need to choose the locations where your business operates.
Demographics
Here you would categorize your audience based on their age, gender, education, job title, et cetera. This would efficiently help Facebook narrow down your target audience and ensure your ads reach the most optimum audience.
Interests
The things and ideas your audience is interested in are a great way to categorize and reach them. For example, if you are a health brand you would choose the people interested in healthcare, fitness, et cetera.
Behavior
These Facebook ads are based on consumer behavior towards certain products and services. If a person has previously bought a product similar to yours, then you can choose to target your ads to them in order to influence them to shift to your brand.
Custom Audience
Under this, you can target the people who you already know or who have previously visited your pages and website. This process to similar to retargeting. Here you can upload the details of the people who have visited your site, the people who have been involved in business with you, and also your current customers.
Lookalike Audience
Lookalike audience refers to the people who are similar to your existing customers. Let me tell you how to set up Facebook ads to reach them. All you have to do is upload the details of a set of audience that is already interested in your brand. Based on that data Facebook will target people with similar interests to attract quality leads that have a high conversions rate.
So now that you clearly understand how to create Facebook ads to reach your target audience, let’s move on to Ad placements.
Step 3. Facebook Ad Placements
There are several places on Facebook where your ads can be shown, depending upon the type of Facebook ad, and motive of the ad and its creatives you need to select its placement. Different types of Facebook ads can be placed at various arenas on Facebook, Instagram, and the Facebook Audience Network. However, within these three platforms, there are several ad placements you can opt for based on your advertisement. These placements are divided into feed placements, story placements, video placements, and the audience network app placements. Let’s find out how to create Facebook ads and place them efficiently to get the best results.
Feeds
Facebook News Feed: Your ads will appear on your target audience’s Facebook News Feed, this is most suitable to target consumers
Facebook Marketplace: Here your ads will appear on the Facebook Marketplace. Though regular consumers are found on this section of Facebook, it is advisable for B2B advertisements.
Facebook Right Column: These ads will only be visible to the desktop users of Facebook.
Instagram Feed: These ads appear in the Instagram feed of the selected target audience, Instagram ads are usually advised to target the young generation of the society.
Instagram Explore: These ads appear in the explore section of Instagram, and are targeted based on the audience’s interests and previously interacted content with the help of Instagram’s algorithm.
Stories
Facebook Stories: These ads are advisable when you are trying to target a larger demographic the ranges from all types of audiences.
Instagram Stories: According to a study, 90% of the active users on Instagram are under the age of 35 years, which is why these ads are suitable for targeting the age groups between 13 years to 35 years.
Video Feeds
Facebook Watch: Your ads will appear in between the organic videos to target the audience with creative visuals, this is generally used for video ads.
IGTV Videos: These ads appear when a user clicks on the preview button from their feed to watch an IGTV Video. These ads are vertical videos that usually last up to 15 seconds.
Instagram Reels: Your Facebook ad campaign should involve video ads that you can publish in between Instagram reels. These ads play a great role in catching the attention of the audience pacing through Instagram reels.
Facebook Audience Network
Under this, your Facebook ads will appear on the apps on the Facebook Audience Network. The Facebook Audience Network is a service provided by Facebook under which you can place your Facebook ads on mobile apps and in videos that people can watch in return for a reward in the app.
Step 4. Set your budget
This step in the process of setting up your Facebook ad campaign is pretty simple because you already know what your budget is. All you have to do is set the number of people you want to reach, the engagements, and how long you want to run the Facebook ad for. You can either set a campaign budget for your Facebook Ad Campaign or set individual budgets for every ad. The campaign budget is preferable while running Facebook ad campaigns because it reduces the number of individual budgets you will have to manage and helps you get the best results for the least expenses.
Step 5. Set up your Facebook Ad Format
The next step while creating Facebook ads would be to choose the format in which you want to publish your ads. Facebook presents you with 7 formats to choose from while posting your ads. These formats can be used in different ways based on your business type and the Facebook advertising strategy you are adhering to. Let me tell you in detail about the FB Advertising Formats. This is one of the most important steps when you create Facebook ads.
7 Facebook Ad Formats
Photo
Photo ads are simple and are made to appeal to the audience by using compelling creatives and texts encouraging them to find out more about your brand.
Video
Video ads are a great way to convey your message with motion pictures. These ads can be of different lengths based on the message your want to convey.
Story Format
Story ads can be photo or short video ads that are shown to the users in between Instagram and Facebook stories and are considered to be one of the most appealing ads among the younger generation.
Messenger Ads
Messenger ads allow the users to get into a conversation with your business. You build a good rapport with possible customers through interactive features and personalized ads.
Carousel Ads
Carousel Ads on Facebook are perfect for brands that are involved in eCommerce. These ads have a wide range of products that they want to advertise. With carousel ads, a brand can advertise 10 images and videos in one Facebook advertisement, each with a separate link to the product or service.
Collection
These are yet another type of Facebook ads that are suitable for businesses selling products online. With these ads, you get to show a collection of your products to the consumers.
Playables
These ads are interactive ads, generally used for advertising gaming applications. Businesses that are seeking to provide their potential customers with a try before you buy experience.
Step 6. Run ads on Facebook
Well, here’s the final showdown. Every time you place your order to run your ads on Facebook, the platform runs something they like to call an “Ad Auction”. Ad auctions help Facebook decide who to show what ads. An ad auction takes place every time Facebook has to decide between 2-3 separate ads to show to a single person fitting into the target audience of all the advertisers.
There are several businesses that run ads on Facebook for their target audience. However, if Facebook started showing the same person 3 different ads about the same product offered by different companies, there won’t be any space left to show the newsfeed. Billions of Facebook ad auctions take place every day over the different Facebook ad spaces. So I am sure you are now wondering what are these auctions based on? And how does Facebook decide which ads to show to whom? Yeah, let me tell you.
How do Facebook Ad Auctions work?
The ad auctions on Facebook decide the winners based on the total value of three major factors that contribute to the making of the Facebook Ad. The three factors are as follows:
Bid
So, one of the factors that contribute to deciding who gets the ad space is the amount the advertisers are willing to pay for it. You can easily manage your bid section by using one of the three bidding strategies namely: Spend-based, goal-based, and manual. Under the spend-based bidding strategy, you focus on trying to get the most benefits out of the entire budget you have for the Facebook Ad Campaign. And on the other hand, when you are going for the goal-based approach, you focus on achieving previously set goals for expenditure and the value you want to gain out of the ad campaign. The Manual bidding strategy should be executed by experts. One needs to have a detailed knowledge of how the auctions work and how to strategically get the best results for the best prices based on the situation.
Ad Engagements
The probability of the desired outcome that is to be achieved decides the winner of the ad auction. Well, Facebook wonders, “Hmm, If I do give this ad space to this advertiser, would it help him achieve the goals he wants to achieve through this ad?”. And if the answer is yes, then that’s another point for you in the ad auction.
The Ad Quality
Well, now FB with their brilliant goodwill, doesn’t want to show the customers blurry, pixelated, and just bad quality ads. The quality of the ads and how the audience has interacted with the ads previously is a contributing factor that helps one stand out in the Facebook ad auction.
Now based on all these factors your ad is published on various platforms and ad spaces all over Facebook and its subsidiary apps. Once you are done with this step your ads are live and then you can move on to the final step in the process of running Facebook ads.
Step 7. Measure and Optimize your ads
With the help of the Facebook Ads Manager, you can easily monitor the performance of your ads, their reach, impressions, and the demographics they are reaching. Consequently, the analysis tools provided by Facebook give you an overview of all the performance metrics of your Facebook ad. You can then save the metrics that you want to monitor and have personalized reports every time you log into the ads manager. You can further compare the performance of all your Facebook ads to find out the ones that are working the best on different platforms and devices. This would help you understand the behavior of your target audience and create the most effective and appealing ads. It also tells you what kinds of ads do not work and how you can make them better.
Well, finally now that you know literally everything you need to about how to create Facebook ads. It’s time to run the most effective Facebook ad campaigns and get the best results. For more information on Facebook advertising, check this out.
