How to Advertise on Facebook

Reaching new customers in your target marketing requires a lot of forethought and effort. Activities such as local booths, events and other forms of advertising only go so far. Social media offers an opportunity to send your message to a narrow audience. You might wonder how to advertise on Facebook for maximum impact. 

How to advertise on Facebook is easier than on some social media platforms. At the same time, creating ads on the social site can be complex. You must know how to use the platform to create ads. The process changes occasionally, giving even experienced users a slight learning curve. 

Guide for How to Advertise on Facebook

Facebook has around 2.96 billion monthly active users on the social network. United States based users got on the site more than any other social media platform, spending an average of 33 minutes a day on Facebook. 

Once you have an idea of the type of ad you’d like to create, follow these steps for how to advertise on Facebook and start attracting new leads.

1. Know Your Objective

Before you create an ad, you must know what the end-goal is. What do you want your target audience to do? You have a number of options, such as viewing a video, following your business page on Facebook, clicking on a link or commenting in the thread. 

It’s okay to simply have a goal of increasing your brand awareness. You also might want to move a particular product you’re overstocked on or any  number of other objectives. When figuring out how to advertise on Facebook, they make objectives easy because they offer a few ready-made categories for your selection. 

Facebook also offers six objectives in their system. Options include: 

• Brand Awareness 
• Traffic 
• Engagement 
• Leads 
• App Promotion 
• Sales

You probably noticed the blue thought bubbles in the screenshot above. These guide you along the way. When you share your objective with Amazon Meta, it guides you toward creating an ad with those goals in mind. 

2. Find Your People

Recent studies show around 50% of people wake up and immediately check their social media profiles for comments and new posts from friends and family. When you first started your company, you likely told family and friends and grew from there.

Social media works in a similar way. You’ll first reach out to those you know and then expand your network over time by making wider and wider connections with friends of friends and eventually strangers.

Figuring out how to advertise on Facebook requires thinking through who your target audience is. You likely have some demographic information from your current customer database. Select the perfect elements to build your audiences. You can narrow results by geolocation, gender, age and interests. 

3. Navigate Meta

Facebook recently launched a new system called Meta where you can manage ads, your business page and community groups. Even the most experienced person who knows how to advertise on Facebook finds the system a bit clunky and confusing. Fortunately, Facebook offers some guidance and clicking around will help you find what you need.

Start on your home page. It’s easiest to work from a desktop computer to set up ads. You can do so on  your smartphone, but the process is much more complicated. Look on the left sidebar when on your homepage. You’ll see the option to go to Ad Center or Ads Manager. Ads Center has a variety of info you might find helpful, but to create a new ad, it’s best to click on “Ads Manager.”

4. Create an Ad

You will see a screen like the one listed above. You have the option to create a campaign with multiple ads or just create an ad. If you want to conduct some split testing to see what performs best, a campaign is a nice setup that allows you to track different ads within the same effort. 

However, if you’re in a hurry or just want to get something up and start testing metrics, you can just click on “Create” and then tab over to “Ad.”

5. Fill in Fields

How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook? The amount is based on what you set. When you choose “Create,” you’ll be given some fields to fill in.

• Campaign Name–Name the campaign something you can remember easily, like December Holiday Sales. 
• Special–If your ad is related to finances, employment, housing, social issues or politics, you must indicate it to meet various country requirements. 
• Type–Choose the buying type and review your campaign objective to ensure it’s correct. 
• A/B Test–If you want to see how the audience responds to different options, toggle this feature on. 
• Set Budget: Set a daily budget or lifetime budget for the campaign. 
• Bid Strategy: Facebook will auto select this for you, but you can edit to whatever you want. Highest volume is a good choice if you’re looking for traffic. 
• Ad Scheduling: Set up the times your ads will run. If you know your target audience engages most on certain days, you may want to limit the ad to those days and times. 

Knowing how to advertise on Facebook requires some testing and trying out different methods, images and wording. Pay attention to the results and analyze which things work best with your target audience. 

6. Add Images and Text

Click Next until you come to the page where you add your images or videos and text. Facebook may suggest some ideas for you based on the analytics of the page you’re promoting. You can certainly change things up, but at least study what the bot suggests. 

When everything looks the way you’d like, click publish. Facebook reviews your ad and it goes live. You should pay careful attention to results. You can change the ad, pause it or swap out things to get better results as the campaign progresses. 

Boost Your Posts

If you mainly want to expand your brand awareness, you can boost your posts from your business page. Just go to the post you want to draw attention to and click on where it says 

“Boost Post.” You can choose which audience to reach, amount you want to spend and see some data on how many people you potentially reach with the effort. 

Whether you dig into the details of a campaign or just boost some posts to get them in front of users, learning how to advertise on Facebook is a skill every marketer and business owner should develop.