Advertising on Facebook: a walkthrough

What is Facebook advertising and how does it work?

Facebook advertising is an extremely powerful tool that can help you reach new customers and grow your business. Running advertising campaigns on Facebook is a great way to target specific audiences and can be used for a variety of purposes, such as boosting your posts and pages, promoting your products, driving traffic to your website and of course boosting sales and revenue if done successfully.

Is advertising on Facebook worth it?

If you aren’t seeing a return on your advertising or results from your campaigns, it can definitely be frustrating and make you feel like pulling the pin. However, if done successfully, it’s definitely worth it. After all, it’s really about getting your service or product in front of the right people at the right time – and that takes time! Making sure you have a well-rounded, long-term view to your approach will help mitigate any downturns in performance overall.

How much does it cost to advertise a post on Facebook?

This depends on the size and scale of your campaigns. If you’re in the early stages of testing or even just starting out, you can set daily budgets or lifetime budgets to suit your business needs. At a minimum, you should spend at least $5 a day.

Can you advertise on Facebook for free?

Absolutely! Technically, this is called organic advertising or posting. Many brands will do this in tandem with a paid media strategy.

How to create a successful Facebook ad campaign

There are a few things to consider when creating a Facebook ad campaign. We summarised the process in 3 key steps.

Step 1: Install the Facebook pixel

The first step is to make sure you’ve correctly installed the Facebook pixel. Installing the pixel properly allows you to efficiently capture the data most important to your business. Aside from the basic tracking functionality, you can also set up custom conversion events to suit the targeting needs of paid campaigns.

Step 2: Structure your campaigns

Once the pixel is firing properly, you can start to think about how to structure your campaigns. We recommend taking a full funnel approach to your advertising efforts and thinking about your unique customer journey. What is the piece of creative you initially want prospects to see and how will you make sure your ad stands out? Those are often some of the most crucial considerations when you’re capturing traffic and interest in consumers during that first touch point.

Step 3: Test your ads

As you break down your marketing funnel from awareness to interest and to consideration, you can get super granular on testing different messaging, creatives and audiences to understand which ad types, formats and campaigns are getting you the strongest results.

The key is not to ask too much of the system too quickly. As a rule of thumb, Facebook’s conversion algorithm needs at least 50 conversions to allow it to successfully build on its data pool to find your ideal customer at a particular stage in the marketing funnel.

Audiences and segmentation

Another key feature of Facebook ads is the ability to build unique audience profiles based on user activity. You can target your page followers and existing database or expand your reach by building look-a-like audiences.

At the awareness level you can go broad by incorporating demographics and interests into your campaigns, and as you move lower down the funnel, you can optimise your campaigns toward other key events (website visitors, social media engagers, add to carts and newsletter sign ups).

Be sure to make your ads unique to the audience that you’re targeting and speak to different interests in your copy to make whatever it is you’re offering more compelling.

How does Facebook advertising compare with other marketing platforms?

What we love about Facebook is that it differs from traditional advertising or offline advertising through data. Data can be powerful and help you draw insights about your advertising efforts but also your users to recycle back into your advertising program. Other digital platforms such as Google Adwords or LinkedIn marketing have similar approaches. Traditional marketing efforts can be impactful but difficult to measure and pinpoint strengths or weaknesses of your campaign.

It’s super important to understand how these platforms can work for your unique business by being strategic about when, how and why you choose to use them. 

Speak to us for a custom paid media or Facebook advertising plan for your business.