To advertise on Facebook, you need to have a Facebook business page. If you don't have a business page, create one first. Once you have your business page set up, you can head straight to the Facebook Ads Manager to create your Facebook ad campaign.

 

Here I briefly highlight the steps in setting up an ad campaign. You will need to do more research to familiarize yourself better:

 

Step 1. Choose the objective you want to achieve

Log into Facebook Ads Manager, select the Campaigns tab, and click Create to start a new Facebook ad campaign.

 

Facebook offers 11 marketing objectives. You select one based on the objectives you want your advertisement to achieve. Here is how they are aligned to the goals of businesses:

 

1· Brand awareness - Introduce your brand to a new audience.

 

2· Reach - Expose your ad to as many people in your audience as possible.

 

3· Traffic - Drive traffic to a specific web page, App, or Facebook Messenger conversation.

 

4· Engagement - Reach a broad audience to increase the number of your post engagements or Page follows. You can also increase attendance at an event or try to encourage people to claim a particular offer you may have.

 

5· App installment - Seek to get individuals to install an app.

 

6· Views of Videos - Get as many persons to view your videos.

 

7· Generation of Leads - This is getting new prospects into your sales funnels

 

8· Messages - This entails encouraging people to contact you or your business using Facebook Messenger.

 

9· Conversions - This entails getting people to take a specific action on your website. This can be subscribing to your list or buying a particular product.

 

10· Catalog sales - Connect your Facebook ads to your product catalogue to show people ads for the products they most likely want.

 

11· Store traffic - Drive nearby customers to brick-and-mortar stores.

Again, you will choose a campaign objective based on your goals for the particular ad.

 

 

Step 2. Name your campaign

Here you will give your Facebook ad campaign a name and declare whether your ad fits into any special categories like housing, credit, employment or politics.

 

 

Step 3. Set your budget and schedule your ad

Here you will decide how much money you want to spend on your ad campaign. You can choose a daily budget or a lifetime budget. You then set the start and end dates whether you schedule the ad in the future or decide to make it go live immediately.

 

Step 4. Target your audience

Here is where you build the target audience for your ads.

Option No. 1 is to add a custom audience of people who have previously interacted with your business on or off Facebook. Here I'll focus on the targeting options.

 

You will start by selecting your target location, age, gender and language. Note that you can specifically choose to include or exclude cities over a specific size under location.

 

As you make your selections, look at the audience size indicator on the right side of the screen. That will give you a sense of your potential ad reach.

 

You'll also see an estimated number of Page likes. Keep in mind that these are estimates; they are not guarantees.

 

Effective targeting is a critical element of seeking to maximize your return on investment (ROI). Using Facebook Ads Manager, you can easily fine-tune your audience. You can use two fields to make your audience very specific; Detailed Targeting and Connections.

 

Detailed targeting can be used to include or exclude people based on demographics, interests, and behaviours. This field allows you to get very specific.

Connections allow you to target or exclude individuals who have previously connected with your Facebook page. For example, if you seek to reach a new audience, you can elect to exclude people who like your Page. And, If you want to promote to existing fans, you can select People who like your Page. You also have the option to target friends of persons who have previously interacted with your brand.

 

Step 5. Select your Facebook ad placements

In this section, you will choose where you would like your ad to appear. If you are relatively new to Facebook advertising, the easiest choice is to select Automatic Placements. This option will automatically place your ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network, where they will likely get the best results.

 

If you are more experienced, you can place your Facebook ads in specific locations of your choice. Your options will vary based on the campaign objective you have chosen, but most likely will include the following:

·Device type: Mobile, desktop, or both.

 

·Platform: Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger

 

·Placements: Feeds, Stories, in-stream (for videos), search, messages, in-article, and apps and sites that are external to the Facebook network.

 

·Specific mobile devices and operating systems: 

 IOS, Android, feature phones or all devices.

 

 

Step 6. Set brand safety 

 

In this section, you can exclude any inappropriate content from appearing with your ad.

 

 

Step 7. Create your ad

 

You will first need to choose your ad format. You will then enter the text and media components for the ad. The formats available to you will differ based on the campaign objective you would have selected in Step-1.

 

Be creative here. You can click Turn into Video to create a short animation if you are working with an image. Or, click Create Slideshow to build a Slideshow ad with the built-in Video Creation Kit.

 

Be sure to use the preview tool at the right of the Page to ensure your ad looks suitable for all potential placements. Once you are happy everything looks good, click the green Publish button to launch your ad.

 

 

As I mentioned, this is just a brief introduction to Facebook advertising. You need to do more research and educate yourself further on Facebook advertising.

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