Over the years, Facebook has evolved from being a social media network to an essential business tool. However, it’s not enough to simply post content on your Facebook page and hope that new customers and followers will come. With ever-changing algorithms and an over-saturated market, using Facebook advertising is necessary in order for businesses to reach the right people. Luckily, Facebook makes it easy to find the right audience and convert them into loyal customers or followers with their extensive advertising platform. 

Here are a several key steps on how to run to a Facebook advertising campaign. 

Determine your Facebook advertising goal

To get the most out of your Facebook advertising campaign, it’s essential to lay the groundwork and have an end goal in mind. Before you get started, ask yourself what you want to achieve with this campaign. You may be looking to increase website traffic, generate new leads, or make more sales. You may even want to increase overall brand awareness. No matter what your current marketing goal is, make sure it’s clear before you begin creating the ad campaign. 

Choose a campaign objective 

Facebook makes it easy to tailor your ad campaign by providing specific marketing objectives to choose from. Once you have a goal in mind, you can narrow it down to the objective that makes the most sense for the current campaign. 

The three objective categories that Facebook offers are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. From there, you have the option to choose a more specific objective depending on your end goal, like local awareness, engagement, or store visits. 

If you want to get more subscribers to your email list, for example, then the best objective for your Facebook advertising campaigns would be lead generation, which is under the Consideration category. From there, you could create an ad that features an email signup landing page. 

Determine your target audience

Now comes the fun part. One of the most in-depth features of Facebook’s advertising campaign platform is the audience targeting. The ads manager allows you to get pretty specific when customizing the exact audience you want your campaign to reach. This part is crucial to the success of the campaign. It’s much more effective to reach a smaller and more targeted group of people rather than trying to engage with every Facebook user. If your campaign reaches the right people, you increase your chances of your goal being met. So, the more specific you can get, the better. 

You should already have an idea of who your target audience is, so use that knowledge as a base for the campaign. Start by determining demographics like age, gender, and location. From there, you can begin choosing interests and behaviors from thousands of options. You can even narrow it down to people who have previously interacted with your business, and if so, how active they are on Facebook. It may take a little experimenting at first, but each campaign you run will be slightly different. After a few campaigns, you should have a better idea of how to best target your audience. 

Create the content

The last step in creating a Facebook ad campaign is the content. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating ad content for your campaign. The type of content you create depends on your objective. Some of the options include a single image, carousel, or a single video. If you’re using graphics or images, make sure they’re not only relevant to the brand, but that they’re eye-catching enough to stop someone from scrolling past it. Additionally, make sure you don’t add too much text to your ad image as Facebook doesn’t allow text to take up more than 20% of the total image area.

It’s also crucial to make sure your ad is optimized for mobile as 96% of Facebook users access the app on a mobile device. To ensure that your ad is optimized for mobile, be sure that the image, copy and format follow Facebook’s dimension guidelines. 

It can also be beneficial to split test your ads (also known as A/B test) by switching up the copy and image after the first run. Experimenting with different CTA’s and graphics can provide more insight into what works for your audience and what doesn’t.

About Dave Manzer: Dave is founder and managing principal at Swyft, a PR and digital marketing agency with offices in Austin, Houston, and Denver. Swyft specializes in helping tech companies with a variety of services including marketing automation, content marketing, public relations and thought leadership, website design, SEO, and much more.