There are many companies which need to contact their customers in a more direct way, whether the users are potential future customers or already loyal to the brand/business. Posts which are published on Facebook reach an ever-decreasing range of people due to the changing algorithms which are running on this social network. We thus miss a large number of opportunities to connect with the right target audience.

As a result, this reduction and the consequent reduction in engagement and interaction with Facebook users, translates into greater difficulty in successfully meeting previously established goals. It will cost more, for example, to increase brand awareness and your online reputation as well as increasing the total number of sessions (quality traffic) coming from the social media channel.

So, to get around this problem and for many other reasons, companies decide to invest in what is known as Facebook advertising, that is to say the advertising platform which is provided by Facebook itself. You can use this system to promote your own Facebook page or any of your posts, as well as a website, an event or an application.
But how can should you go about creating a successful Facebook Ads campaign?

What is the main objective of your Facebook Ads campaign? | Advertising on Facebook

1. Once you are on your Facebook profile, go to the drop down menu on the right hand side of the top bar and choose the option “Create Ads”.
2. Once inside the Ads Manager, select the main marketing objective for your campaign.

To advertise successfully on Facebook, you first need to know exactly what goal you want to achieve through this process. The three possible marketing objectives which Facebook suggests are the following:

Awareness:

• Brand awareness: increase your brand’s awareness and reach everybody who is likely to be interested in it.
• Local awareness: promote your brand amongst those who are closest to your business.
• Reach: show your Facebook ads to the highest number of people possible.

Consideration:

• Traffic: attract the most people to your web site or application.
• Engagement: get more interactions through your posts. Facebook ‘Like’, responses to events and requests for offers.
• App installs: get more people to install your application.
• Video views: get more people watching your video content.
• Lead generation: get more data on potential clients (for example, email addresses of people interested in your brand/business).

Conversion:

• Conversions: generates valuable activity on your website or application.
• Product catalogue sales: create advertisements on Facebook which automatically show products from your catalogue according to the target audience.
• Store visits: get more people visiting your physical store.

This is just the beginning of how to use Facebook advertising and learning how to do it the right way, and more importantly, learning how to generate positive results and a satisfactory return on investment.
However, keep reading our next post in which we will give you more information about segmentation in a Facebook Ads campaign.

La entrada Advertising on Facebook: How to Get Started – Facebook Ads Guide I aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

In order to better explain the fundamental aspects of creating optimal Facebook campaigns, we will use the marketing objective ‘brand recognition’ as an example.

A campaign can contain multiple sets of ads. It is therefore advisable that you edit the name of yours at this point to as to differentiate it from other Facebook campaigns that were previously created, or from future Facebook campaigns that you might create and activate with this account.

After clicking on the ‘continue’ button, you will go to the next step: ad set. Here, you will be able to segment your Facebook campaigns in relation to three key factors: your audience, your location and, finally, your budget and the dates for both the activation and completion of the campaign.

The keys to properly targeting your Facebook campaigns

Carrying out an effective segmentation will be the key to whether or not your Facebook campaigns have the expected level of success and if they achieve the marketing goal that you’ve just entered in your ad management panel. This point is, therefore, very important in the creation and configuration of your Facebook campaigns, and it is also here that you should invest the most effort in ensuring that this segmentation at its most optimal.

Target, search, and connect with your ideal user!

Segmentation in your Facebook campaigns | Audience

• Firstly, Facebook Ads offers you the option to choose from any of your previously created audiences in other Facebook campaigns, or on the contrary, to create a new audience that is much more compatible with the main goal you are looking to achieve.
• You’ll be able to indicate where your target audience resides. Add as many places as you see fit, or for example you can also mark a specific location and how many kilometres from that place that you want Facebook Ads to locate your target audience.
• You will also be able to indicate the age range of your audience, as well as if you only want your Facebook campaigns to be directed at women, men or to both sexes at the same time.
• Last but not least, you will also be able to find the interests of your audience. This is a basic point when it comes to any segmentation, because that’s what really gives Facebook advertising its power. You can insert as many interests as you want, either manually, with the ‘suggestions’ option or using the suggestions that the Facebook Ads system itself provides you with, by using the ‘explore’ option. Using this second option, you can select from a myriad of suggestions related to demographic data, interests, behaviours and other categories of interest.

We recommend that, before saving this category of public in your Ad Manager and continuing with the next step of the Facebook campaign, you go to the ‘Connections’ section and select the following option: Facebook pages > exclude people who like your page. It is understood that your fans and loyal followers tend to be more aware of all the posts that you continuously publish on your Facebook page or that they can see them on their timeline. What should be of greatest interest to you is being able to grab the attention of those that still don’t know about you, that don’t know of the existence of your brand or business and who, therefore, also wouldn’t know of your presence in a social network. So you need to broaden your horizons and open up to new users and future fans of your Facebook page. And who knows? Maybe you’ll find some prospective customers and future buyers!

Segmentation in your Facebook campaigns | Locations

At this second step in the targeting of a Facebook campaign, we advise you to select the first option, ‘Automatic locations (recommended)’. What does this mean? Your ad group will automatically be shown in places that are more likely to get better performance, including both Facebook and Instagram.

If you choose the other option, ‘edit locations’, you may reduce the number of people your ads reach and you will therefore be less likely to achieve your main goal with the campaign.

Segmentation in your Facebook campaigns | Budget and Calendar

As the Facebook ads system will tell you, you simply have to “define how much you want to spend and when you want your ads to be displayed.

We recommend that you specify a daily budget, not a general ad set budget, as well as a start and end date for your Facebook campaigns, in order to be able to take better control.

Finally, one more recommendation: take a look to your right. Here, you will find an estimate of the daily scope of the campaign and, therefore, of the possible results to be obtained based on the defined target audience, its duration and the indicated budget.

As we have been stressing throughout this post, targeting is the cornerstone for your Facebook campaigns to really reach a quality target audience, those who might become fans of your Facebook page, click on the ad and go to your website.

Despite knowing in advance that the key to success lies in a correct segmentation of Facebook campaigns, we musn’t forget the last creation and configuration step: the Facebook ads themselves.

La entrada How to use Facebook Ads targeting and succeed aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

The format of your Facebook ads

First of all, you will choose how you want your Facebook ads to appear, i.e. their format. This can take different forms:

• Sequential ads: create Facebook ads which include between 2 and 10 images or videos.
• Just one image: create up to 6 ads for Facebook, which each include an image, without any additional cost.
• Just one video: create a Facebook ad with a video.
• Presentation: create a Facebook ad with a video, with up to 10 images.
• Canvas: create a Facebook ad which combines images and videos to tell a more captivating story.

Multimedia content

It never hurts to remember that images and videos should be as eye-catching and as impressive as possible. Remember that this Facebook ad has to draw the user’s attention away from everything else on their timeline which will be full of all kinds of posts (pictures, gifs, videos…) which have been posted by thousands of individuals and many other companies. There are many Facebook ads which your competition is launching continually which you will have to stand out from if you want to be noticed by the right people.
Some important recommendations:

• 1200×628 pixels is the best size for your images. Another important factor to remember is that the text inside a picture should not take up more than 20% of the total area.
• Videos should be in the following formats only: .MOV or .MP4, with a minimum resolution of 720 pixels and a maximum duration of 60 minutes (2.3 GB).

Your Facebook page and the ad’s text

You have already decided on the format that your Facebook ad will take and all of the content (images, videos or both). Now it is time to, connect it to your Facebook page (here, you also have the option to link it to your Instagram profile if you want this campaign to run simultaneously on Facebook and Instagram Ads). Create a copy which is just as eye-catching as the multimedia content and finally, enter the info which will redirect your traffic from the Facebook ad to your website.
At this point it is time for 5 pieces of essential advice for your Facebook ads to run smoothly:

1. Make your content attractive and very visual

As we have said before, whichever format you choose for your Facebook ads, their content must always meet the following requirements: it must be attractive to look at, attention grabbing and must make users react so that they will click on the Facebook ad and therefore continue to enquire about your products and services.

2. The copy must be concise, direct and effective

The title, body of the text and any other writing on a Facebook ad have a limited number of maximum characters. So, Facebook already forces you to be brief and direct since its limits are very strict. If you do go over the limit of total characters, ads will show with incomplete text; unfinished sentences followed by an ellipsis (…) which means that users cannot read the rest of your content.
Therefore, you will need to use as few words as possible to summarise all of the essential information to engage your audience and to call them to action.

3. Call To Action

Even with the knowledge that Facebook ads are strictly limited in terms of the total number of characters for the various textual elements, it is impossible to create good copy which does not include a call to action, which invites the user to perform a certain action (‘Like’ your Facebook page, fill in a contact info form, book an appointment, attract useful traffic to your web page etc.). Without a call to action, the user will feel disorientated and will not know what to do after they have seen your Facebook ad..

4. Mobile version

Nowadays, mobile devices are an important part of our lives, they are indispensable in our day to day activities both for business and for our social life. We use different devices, phones and tablets to carry out day to day tasks, to communicate, search for information, shop, claim refunds…

Facebook even confirm that 700 million people use the social network on a phone or a tablet. Therefore, when creating and setting up Facebook ads, don’t forget that many people will be seeing them on a mobile device. For this reason, it is vitally important to check that your text is not cut off in the mobile version and that your images are very visual and don’t have much text – that way they will be perfectly legible.

If you take all of these tips into account when designing your Facebook ads, you will have much higher chances of success. All of the statistics which you will find in the Ads Manager will help you to monitor and optimise your Facebook ads. This tool will allow you to make as many modifications as you would like to, meaning that you can improve the profitability of all your Facebook ads and therefore use your advertising budget in a more efficient and strategic way.

La entrada 5 Tips for Designing Successful Ads | Facebook Ads Guide 3 aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.