The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are an inexpensive way to quickly grow your audience and sell products or services. What is especially awesome is that it is super easy for a small business owner to use Facebook Ads in much the same way as a big business.
I’ve been using Facebook Ads and Google Adwords to support the growth of my small business customers for several years and have developed a number of strategies that we use to maximise budget, improve reach and conversion and generally to get the best results. After all, when you are a small business you need to make every penny work pretty hard, right?
That level of refinement comes with practice and a bit of additional guidance - I am currently putting together a simple-to-follow Facebook Ads course that will be available next month - it will cover everything I know and have learnt over the past few years 👇
However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get started with Facebook ads right now. You could follow my basic steps below in order to get familiar with the Facebook ads manager platform.
What is Facebook’s Business Manager?
First, I want to quickly cover something that can cause real problems for small business owners if they don’t know to watch out for this potential red herring… Facebook Business Manager.
Business Manager is a complex platform where agencies can create ads, manage multiple Facebook Pages and Instagram profiles. It’s used for people like me who manage a lot of ad campaigns on behalf of different clients.
Should you use Facebook Business Manager?
No! If you don't share your ad account with anyone else, please just use the simple Ads Manager because Business Manager is a very complex solution. If you have only one business and one Facebook page and Instagram account to market you do not need Business Manager.
Once you have a Facebook Business Manager you cannot get rid of it - so please avoid it in the first place.
Facebook Advertising Basics
Set Your Intention
Before you begin with Facebook ads it’s good to think about what you want to achieve through them.
I’d suggest that there are really three main intentions that you ought to focus on when thinking about the purpose of your ad:
I recommend that for your first campaign you begin with generating awareness if you are targeting a cold audience. It is incredibly unlikely that someone that has never heard of you will become a customer without additional nurturing, reassurance and additional social proof so let’s not waste your budget on that.
A good first step is to encourage your target audience to read an article that you have written that relates to their problem to offer some value and build your authority on the subject.
So with that intention in mind, the strategy might be:
*It’s ideal if you add a square image ( 1080px x 1080px) to your post instead of using the automatically generated image that will get pulled into your post when you add the link.
So now we have an intention and strategy, there’s three things to do more you get started with ads:
1. Understand Facebook Ads Manager Structure
There is a hierarchy to the Facebook ads set up, which looks like this:
2. Install the Facebook Pixel
Please ensure you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website before you start running ads. It’s not difficult to do but you do need access to the backend of your website. I have an article about How to install the facebook pixel, but I will also cover this and some more clever things we can do with the pixel in my upcoming course.
3. Create an Ads Account
If you haven’t yet set up an ads account then you will need to do that which involves adding your billing address, payment details, currency and timezone.
Then it’s time to get to the fun stuff!
Creating Facebook Ads Step-by-Step
Let’s get to it shall we? Get into Ads Manager and let’s go through the steps together.
Campaign Level:
1. Set Facebook Marketing Objective
This is actually a bit different to your might be influenced by your intention, but is very specific to creating the ad and what you select on Facebook.
Awareness - leave this alone. Even if your intention is to create awareness of your target’s problem or raise awareness of your profile, move onto Consideration as a marketing objective and choose Traffic (see below).
Consideration - if this is your first ad to a cold audience choose Traffic from this section because it means we can add a call to action and a link to send people to for more information.
Conversion - save this one for when you begin to retarget a warm audience. You need a bit more budget for this and it requires a bit of a strategy to build the audience you will retarget.
Going back to our intention and strategy that we set out earlier:
And now we add the Facebook marketing objective to fit this strategy:
Ad Set Level:
2. Define your target audience
Defining your target audience is probably the most important aspect of any campaign. But when you first start out, then you won’t have that much to go on and you will have to make some educated guesses to see if the audience fits or you will have to borrow an audience from someone else - literally targeting people who like another page and whose audience is likely to be similar to who you want to attract (that only works if the page has a big enough audience).
Otherwise you will need to choose the demographics, interests and behaviours that best represent your audience.Using what you know about the people you want to reach – such as age, location and interests.
3. Choose Placement of Ad
Next, choose where you want to run your ad – whether that's on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network or across them all.
For the first time you run a campaign, simply leave this as Automatic placement. When creating a more sophisticated campaign I have recommendations for this, but it will be ok on Automatic.
4. Set Budget
Enter your daily or lifetime budget, and the time period during which you want your ads to run. I recommend choosing 1-2 pounds/euros/dollars a day and setting the end date for 7 days time. This means even if you forget to check on your ad, you will not bankrupt yourself. If it starts to perform well, you can extend the campaign or the budget further.
Ad Creative Level:
5. Make Ad Creative
You can choose from six formats or you can use an existing post to create your ad. Remember that post I suggested you create to promote your article? That’s what we will use here!
Instead of creating a new ad, simply select “Use an Existing Post” and you will be able pull up the post you created on your page… add a call to action and confirm the correct page link and you are done!
The reason why I asked you to create that square image? Because it works on ALL the ad placements so you don’t need to do any additional work.
Not only is that a simple method but it means you leverage organic and paid for engagement onto your page. I have noticed that this trick significantly reduces the cost of campaigns as well as improving results.
6. Publish
Hit the green button and Facebook will check over your ad to approve it. You will be notified when it is approved and live.
7. Measure, Monitor & Manage
When your ad is running, you can track performance in Ads Manager. If it seems to be going well (you are getting the page views) then you can extend the campaign.
That’s it! You’ve done it. You have published your first Facebook Ads campaign using quite a few of tools in the Ads Manager toolkit.
There is of course much more to know and consider but this is a great way to become familiar with the platform before you graduate to conversion campaigns, building custom audiences, retargeting and creating multi-level campaigns. That’s all the good stuff that I am going to cover in my upcoming Facebook Ads course. If you would like to be the first to know when it launches, just let me know here👇