(Read in 10 minutes)

You may find interest in digital marketing, especially using Facebook as a marketing tool. Getting started to do Facebook marketing for your business is a good way to brand or sell your product or service. However, Where to start and how it’s going in the process will be a problem for every business or marketer who wants to involve in this kind of work. Before creating your first Facebook ad, there are 7 things you should know before creating your Facebook ad, and they are things as follows.

1. Getting the Ad in front of the Right Audiences

It’s quite the same to do your marketing strategy, firstly defining your marketing segment, which means finding who your customers are. It’s the same thing to do in creating the ad, so who or which group of people will see your ad and whether they are the right group of people your showcase product ad will appeal to attract their interest and lead to action for purchasing and sharing to other people. 

There are 3 ways to target on Facebook, core targeting, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.

Core Targeting

Preliminary to considering your target audiences is to break a segment of them by the Core Targeting. On Facebook, there are over a billion users in action, and how the platform detects and divides them into a group. Here is the way that Facebook did this. We can define our preference audiences primarily through this way of divisions. So, to select the core targeting audiences divided variously by the demographics, locations, behaviors, interests, and connections. 

By obtaining your core targeting audiences, based on this foundation, you will be able to move or narrow your audiences into another level of the target segment, as the next will discuss.

Custom Audiences

Meanwhile, you have already targeted the core. Here, you can generally re-target and re-market your audiences by redefining the target to people on Facebook you already have a relationship. And those relationships can be able to customize from your existing lists as follows.

• Website custom audiences (if you obtain this list of audiences, it may be applied to use Facebook pixel in your ad)
• Email list custom audiences
• Page engagement custom audiences
• App engagement custom audiences
• Video view custom audiences

To further discuss more likely audiences, discussion can also be developed to the next level of redefining audiences called lookalike audiences.

Lookalike Audiences

Here is another level of the peak to reach the new target audiences as long as we have done with the previous two types of targeting, and now we’re getting started to reach people who are like current customers, website visitors, or Facebook page true fans.

It’s time to use this source of audiences from the custom audiences to find similar people on Facebook. For instance, it’s gradually turning a source of 10,000 scaled up into a targeted audience of 2,000,000, where we do refining the similarity and related criteria of the existing source of audiences to re-target another wider area we can set our ad deliverable to.

In this practice, we apply the process from the preliminary core targeting to re-marketing the custom audiences and eventually to reach our refining of lookalike audiences where is the right targeting of our ad will be delivered.   

2. From Audiences Attention to Their Action

On Facebook, your audiences may come from anywhere with various preferences. They may intend their attention to your brand or product or may not at the time, but don’t worry. Because the Facebook marketing funnel derives from different users’ intentions. And this will move forward from each marketing objective you have set in the funnels by awareness, consideration, and conversions.

In the awareness, it’s best for the brand or personal branding which it can reach people more likely to pay attention to your ads and increase awareness for your personality or brand and be able to show your ad to the max number of people, your target audiences or prospect.

In the funnel of consideration or conversions, for example, the ad boosts traffic to increase visitors to the website sales page, so the sales percentage will increase. Or you may create another ad to provide some special offer such as the free consultation or course to your audiences and encourage them to click to subscribe and lead to sales offer, which we can define as the lead sales for the ad we use for our product or service advertisement. And another way is through post ad or video view and lead the custom audiences to download and install the particular app via their smartphone.

Here is the process go through the audiences, such as the custom audiences you have created, attract their attention and raise their awareness of your brand, then lead them to take action of purchasing your product/service. So, it depends on your marketing objective to set up your ad to fulfill the marketing funnels, including awareness, consideration, and conversions.

3. Design to Match the Ad Format of Facebook

Creating an ad is so easy, but how to make it meet your business or marketing objective and at the same to match the format of Facebook is still a problem for every digital marketer using the Facebook Platform. By the way, Facebook has its own rule to restrict and let the business follows them. And there are various types of Ad Format you may see as follows.

• Video: Show off product features, and draw people in with sound and motion.
• Image: Drive people to destination websites or apps through high-quality visuals
• Collection: Encourage shopping by displaying items from your product catalogue – customised for each individual.
• Carousel: Showcase up to ten images or videos within a single ad, each with its own link.
• Slideshow: Use motion, sound and text to tell your story beautifully on any connection speed. Slideshows created within Ads Manager run as video ads.
• Instant Experience: Instant Experience, formerly called Canvas, provides a full-screen, mobile-optimised experience instantly from your ad.
• Lead generation ads: Lead ads on Facebook and Instagram help you collect info from people who are interested in your business. A lead ad is presented using an image, video, or carousel, followed by a lead form when the user engages with the ad.
• Offers: Offers are discounts you can share with your customers on Facebook. You can design your offer ad to appear as an image, video, or carousel.
• Post engagement: Most Page posts on Facebook can be boosted to deliver more likes, comments, shares, and photo views.
• Event responses: Event response ads can be used to promote awareness of your event and drive responses. You can design your event ad to appear as an image or video.
• Page likes: Page likes ads can be used to drive users to like your Page. You can design your Page likes ad with a video or an image masked to a ratio of 1.91:1.

You may see further details in the link here.

Though there are so many things about the Ad format, we still consider whether to use the Ad in the following ways.

• To boost Traffic with link or Carousel ad format.
• Propose to gain more Video views with the video ad format
• Intent to generate Collect leads, you may consider using the Lead ad form
• To get the Conversions or sales up use the link ad (Facebook Pixel)
• To make more Post engagement that you believe in getting more interaction with the Image(s) of a single post can make more single products sell out 

4. Adjusting Budget to Meet Your Business Objective

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO ADVERTISE ON FACEBOOK?

A common question may every business or marketer consider about the most!

Primarily, there are two types of budget, costing with the Min Budgets and the matching Budget to Goals. The basic measure line of these budgets are as follows.

The Min Budget

• Awareness / Reach / Impression: 1$ per day
• Click / View / Like / Post Engagement: 5$ per day
• Low frequency event / offer claim or app install: 40$ per day

Match Budget to Goals (as a guideline ONLY!)

• Facebook fans: $0.50 per fan
• Email Subscribers: $1 per subscriber
• Web Traffic: $0.35 per web visit
• Product Sales: $30 per conversion
• App Install (free app): $2 per install

And, there are two kinds of periods for boosting the budget you set daily, or you want to set a period of time as your ad budget lifetime, so it will cost you what you prefer to use in the budgeting for your ad. When you create an ad, you may see it in the budget & schedule part of your ads manage panel.

However, it will be flexible to change accordingly to what is your marketing objective or business strategy is about to be applied. You have to learn about that carefully before setting up any budget for boosting in order to make your budget in a low costing effective way.

5. Ad Creative

We have learned something about the audiences, funnels, formats, and budgets for creating an ad on Facebook, as explained above already. Now, let’s go to the ad itself. What are the points we have to pay attention to at the time of creating an ad? There are four particular parts in the ad creative we have to go through in order to make our ad more effective when it’s getting in front of the right audiences and leading to close sales or meeting our marketing objectives.

Firstly, you have to consider how is the image or design of the ad post. Is visual? It’s a simple way to visualize what you want to attract your audiences with a clear image or a clean design, which is easy for your audiences to see your brand, product, or the message in the ad you boost. Then let’s consider it relevant. What are the related criteria you want to show in the ad post that makes the audience’s attention to your brand and leads to your product purchase. So how your ad leads the audiences to that action? Next, you have to put the ENTICING OFFER included in the ad for the lead sales. It’s the reason to motivate your audiences to push on your offer button. So, in the final part, you have to include the STRONG CALL-TO-ACTION to grab the opportunity of making purchase decisions from your audiences instantly. In conclusion, in order to create a great ad creative to meet your marketing objectives, you have to consider its visual, relevant, enticing offer and include a strong call-to-action.

After getting everything ready about your ad, now let’s start to publish your ad boost. However, in order to make sure how does your ad work from the beginning, there is another to split testing your ad as briefing as follows. 

6. Split Testing

In order to maximize budgets, you need to find out what is most effective in terms of copy, imagery, targeting, and so many things. We can do all of the things in the split test as an example of the criteria as follows.

• To Test with Ad Creative, you have to consider your ad headline, image, landing page, and placement (where ads display). 
• To Test with the Targeting such country, gender, interests, and the custom audience.
• Or, Other criteria include ad type, bid type, and much much more!

7. Tracking & Reporting

Define Success

Tracking and reporting is a way to measure how you define your success in the Facebook marketing platform. Of course, before you create the ad, you have considered and made your own plan already about the definition of its success. However, there is a key to tracking your success with the built-in tool on Facebook, and the matter is how you use it to define your success ONLY.

Business Goals

Actually, your business goals are set earlier. So let’s follow them accordingly to set up your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the Ads, and finally, you can assess your ads’ performance as well as the result you get from the ads accurately to make your next step or another plan to meet your goals. (Define Business Goals > Set KPI for Ads > Assess Result)

How You Understand the Metrics shown in Your Ad Report

There are Metrics like CPM, CTR, and CPC that are important to understand, but your main focus should be on Cost per Desired Action. The cost will determine what action and budget you plan to boost your ad most effectively for a low-cost plan.

• CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions): The average cost for 1,000 impressions.
• CTR (Link Click-Through Rate): The percentage of times people saw your ad and performed a link click. 
• CPC (Cost Per Click): The average cost for each link click.

You also can enable conversion tracking with the Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics. The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. And Google Analytics it’s another analytics tool using Google service and also can be integrated to track and report with the Facebook Platform.

IN CONCLUSION

The 7 things you should know before creating your Facebook ad it’s involved the cycle of testing, learning, and iterating, which allow you to use reporting as a feedback loop to improve your next campaigns and set aside budget experiment. It’s very clear to you if you have understood all of these, you can do more about your ad to reach your objectives. Let’s start your first ad and go through the flow or cycle what each thing you have known about. And, don’t worry if it may fail at the beginning, but the practice makes you a perfect result. So try to do it more and more practical for your ad campaign. Remember, if you are the first time to this platform or new to this thing, even the experience one, PLEASE DON’T EXPECT MASSIVE RESULT FROM THE 1ST CAMPAIGN.