We’re knees deep in the season of holidays sales, deals, and promotions. It’s easy for your customers to become overwhelmed with the overload of emails and mailers coming to their door. If you’re looking to standout, aside from having great content and products to promote, you should consider running Facebook Ads this holiday season. Never done it before? Here’s a step by step guide to creating your first advertisement.
1. Determine the type of ad you want to create
Facebook breaks their ads down into three main categories:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
You need to have a clear understanding of your objective with this advertisement before you get started. Having a solidified goal in place will ensure you set up your ad correctly, and receive the best results when the campaign is over. The campaign you create can be new, or you can use a past or existing campaign to run your new ad with.
2. Create your audience
Once you have your campaign objectives in place, you need to create your audience. The audience is THE most important part of your campaign. Targeting the wrong person for your ads is a sure way to lose money and have a poor ad performance.
It is important to not be too specific, or too vague. If you do not have a clear understanding of your target audience, think back to your campaign objectives. What is the end goal of your campaign and what would intrigue the ideal customer to engage with your ad? Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Where do they live?
- Where do they shop?
- What is their annual income?
- Are they married?
- Do they have children?
- What are their hobbies?
- Do they have disposable income?
- How old are they?
- What are their political views?
Understanding your target audience is crucial to your business and the advertisement you are producing. If you’re unsure, I would recommend taking a step back and performing some market research to get to know your ideal customer.
3. Determine your budget and schedule
If you’re doing ads on Facebook for the first time, I recommend setting a budget of a dollar amount you aren’t afraid to lose or are willing to invest into this campaign. You can set up a daily budget or a lifetime budget. The more money you are willing to spend, the more people you will reach. However, I do recommend if it is your first campaign, you should set a lifetime budget or an end date to be safe.
4. Create your ad
When it comes to creating your ad, you can also decide if you want to start from scratch, or use an existing post. If you decide to use an existing post, please keep in mind that once the ad goes live, you cannot make edits to that post again. Even after the campaign has ended, changes cannot be made. I would recommend creating a new ad that is unique to the campaign you are working on to avoid any issues.
5. Review your ad
Before you confirm, carefully review your campaign set up. Double check the audience you’ve selected, be sure the budget you set matches with your marketing plan, and confirm the “end date” of the campaign aligns with the product or service you are launching. You should also be sure things are spelled correctly and are grammatically correct.
6. Review performance
Once the campaign has ended, your work is far from done! You should review the performance of your ad to see if your original objectives were met. If they were, the next time you create an ad you may want to increase your budget.
If your goal was not met, you should take a deep dive into your results to determine what went wrong and create a plan to improve for next time.
Do you plan on running ads during the holidays? They’re not as expensive as you think. You can set a daily budget of $5 or $500+! I encourage you all to set aside a budget for ads in 2019 if you haven’t already. If you want to learn more about Facebook ads for your business, schedule a 30 minute business consultation today!