Facebook advertising is an amazing advertising system that uses a giant social network along with advanced technology to serve ads. It allows businesses to create attractive, well-designed ads and tailor them to a specific audience at a low cost.
According to Statista, In April 2022, there were over 12 million Facebook users in Kenya, making up 21.3 percent of the population. Overall, 35 percent of users were aged between 18 and 24 years, and 34.2 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years.
Advertising is in the focus of the Facebook team, so they are certainly hard at work making this technology extremely efficient and profitable for marketers. Let’s find out why Facebook advertising can help your business grow and increase your market share.
4 reasons to use advertising on Facebook
There are several reasons that make Facebook a constantly growing advertising platform. Large companies and small family businesses benefit from the following four factors:
- It has a massive audience. According to Statista, Facebook has 12 million active users as of 2022 in Kenya. That’s more than a third of the entire human population and the number is still growing. That’s why you can easily find a Facebook audience to tailor your ads to.
- It offers exceptional targeting options. Facebook Ads allow you to explore beyond basic age, gender, and location targeting. You can tailor your ads to potential customers based on their buying behavior, life events like getting married, getting a new job, moving to a new house, etc., and the composition of their home. With Facebook, you can advertise to new teen drivers, veterans, working women, etc. – with a precision that has never been available before.
- It is profitable. The price of Facebook ads depends on three factors: your marketing goals, the length of the campaign, and the targeting options you choose. Facebook claims that you can run effective ad campaigns on any budget, sometimes spending even more money on coffee than ads.
- Provides tools for successful outreach. You can use the “Similar Audience” feature to find audiences that are similar to the audience that converts successfully. This allows you to exponentially increase the number of warm leads in your audience.
What types of advertising are there on Facebook?
On Facebook you can promote almost anything. From an external page, to an app, an event, or even a specific place. However, before launching into a Facebook Ad it is important to define what the final objective of advertising is. Only then will you be able to properly decide the payment formula, as well as the type of campaign you need.
Depending on your objectives, you should use one type of advertising on Facebook or another. Although in the following paragraph you will discover all the types of campaigns that exist in the social network, you must also define if you pay per click (CPC), or if you pay for impressions (CPM).
The CPC is ideal if you are going to generate traffic to Facebook, or a third party site to look for visits or conversions. The CPM is more indicated if you intend to improve the visibility of your brand in general.
Types of campaign that can be done in Facebook Ads
Although you are already clear about what Facebook Ads are and the advantages they have, you still have one important thing pending before launching campaigns on this social network. These are the types of ads that exist on Facebook. It may seem like something really simple, but there are up to 14 types of boosted posts:
- Promote your posts. It is about promoting the content of your website or fan page.
- Promote your page. This Facebook Ad is aimed at publicizing your website.
- Reach people who are close to your business. It is an ad focused on appearing to those users who are close to your location. An address will be enough to configure it and start receiving visits.
- Improve brand recognition. In this case, it is a corporate advertisement that aims to reach the audience most likely to pay attention to you.
- Attract people to your website. It offers the possibility to the advertiser of obtaining more traffic on his web page.
- Increase your app installs. What is sought with this Facebook advertising is for users to install a certain app.
- Increase the number of attendees at your event. This ad promotes an event in order to increase the number of participants.
- Increase video views. It is aimed at ads that integrate a video, to increase the number of views.
- Generate leads for your business. This Facebook Ad model is aimed at capturing leads.
- Increase conversions on your website. This Facebook advertising is intended to improve the conversion of a certain marketing action.
- Increase interaction with your application. If you want more users to use your app and interact with it, this is your Facebook ad.
- Get people to request your offer. This type of advertising on Facebook is aimed at promoting a certain offer among the public of the social network.
- Promote a product catalogue. If you have a catalogue of products or services and want to place them in a Facebook showcase, this is your best option.
- Get people to visit your business. This Facebook Ad is launched to people who are close to your location to increase the physical visits you receive.
How to create a Facebook ad
Follow the steps below to create a Facebook ad campaign for your business.
Step 1: Go to your Ad Centre
First of all, you should familiarize yourself with the Facebook Ad Centre. Open your Facebook page and look for the “Promote” button. Clicking on it will open a popup window where you can start creating your ad campaign.
Step 2: Choose a goal
Your objective defines what types of ads you will be able to create. Choose between the four objectives:
- Promote your page;
- Promote your business locally;
- Get more website visitors;
- Get more leads.
Let’s discuss each type of campaign in more detail.
- Ads based on the Brand Awareness objective allow you to promote your Facebook page, increase engagement on your posts, reach potential customers, and increase overall awareness of your brand.
- Ads meant to promote your business locally are good at attracting the public around your physical store in a precise location. More specifically, these ads are displayed based on a custom radius around your store or any required location on a map.
- Ads that are designed to get more website visitors motivate users to examine your brand and learn more about your products and offers. Based on this goal, your ads will help you invite people to your event, increase video views, and get app installs.
- Lastly, you can use Facebook ads to get more leads for your business. Ads based on this objective will help you generate subscribers for your email marketing and Facebook Messenger chatbot, encouraging users to engage with your brand in many ways.
It’s time to move on to creating your ad.
Step 3: Create an ad
First, choose one of the four ad formats. These are:
- single image;
- single video;
- slideshow;
- Carousel.
The available ad formats vary depending on the objective you chose in the previous step. For example, the “Promote Your Page” objective doesn’t allow you to use a carousel format. At the same time, the “Promote your business locally” and “Get more leads” ads are created in a completely different format to reach specific goals more effectively.
Once you choose the format, add copy, images, or video to your ad. The Facebook Ad Center in partnership with Shutterstock allows you to use a library of free stock images. Don’t worry, the watermarks will disappear when the ad is shown to your audience. There is also a default text available that will fit the target.
Step 4: Define your audience
Precise targeting is where the magic of Facebook ads begins. First, you can target your audience based on location (including country, state, city, ZIP code, or geographic radius to attract local users), gender, language, interests, and user behaviour purchase. You can also exclude or include users connected to certain pages and events.
Scroll down to the “Audience” section and click “edit” next to “People you choose through targeting” to change a default target audience. Choose gender, age, location, interests and behavior.
You can also choose “People in your local area.” This will allow you to target your audience based on a mile radius from a specific point. An interactive map will help you determine the specific location to target your audience.
You can also expand your custom audience using the “Similar Audience” feature. This will help you find audiences similar to your custom audience, thus increasing the number of interested leads for your marketing and advertising campaigns.
Step 5: Set the duration and budget
After choosing your target audience, you need to decide how long your campaign will run and how much money you can spend on it. You can choose to “Run this ad continuously,” which means your ad campaign will run until your budget expires. The algorithm estimates how many likes you can expect to get each day of your ad campaign.
Another option is to use “Choose when to end this ad”. Here you can set the duration or choose the end date, as well as set your daily ad budget. You can see the amount of money you will spend at the end of your campaign.
Step 6: Choose your payment currency
Lastly, you must choose a currency to pay Facebook for your ad campaign.
You can start your promotion or save it as a draft (which expires in seven days, be careful).
Now, since you’ve learned how to create Facebook ads, let’s find out how to analyze their performance.
How to track the efficiency of your Facebook advertising
To track the performance of your ads in great detail, you should use Facebook Ads Manager. Like Google AdSense, it allows you to analyze your ad’s competition, reach, and level of engagement.
You can add filters to limit the data in your reports. For example, you can analyze how much money people between the ages of 17 and 35 bring to your business, compare it to the money you spend on advertising, and remove this age group from your target audience if it’s not worth it. Alternatively, you can spend more money advertising for this age group if they give you a lot in return.
How much does Facebook advertising cost?
The price depends on several factors:
- Synchronization. The time of year, day of the week, and even the hours you choose to display your ads can affect their performance and ultimately your ad budget.
- Bid strategy. A bid is the amount of money you choose to pay for a specific action. You can choose to pay on a model of CPC, CPM, cost per likes, cost per app install.
- Ad placement. Whether your ad shows in News Feed on mobile or desktop can also influence its success.
- Target audience. This parameter is crucial, especially if there are many other advertisers targeting the same audience as you. In this case, the price per click and thousand impressions will go up.
Let’s do a comparison of two tech giants making the most of online advertising.
Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads
These two companies are often considered rivals. Yes, they both dominate the online advertising industry, but they offer different kinds of value to advertisers.
Google is primarily focused on search engine advertising, which is extremely efficient due to the nature of shopping today. At any stage of the sales funnel, people use search engines to find solutions, products, services, compare different stores, prices, and other options. Apart from this, Google AdSense connects advertisers with relevant websites that receive a lot of traffic, so site visitors see highly relevant ads based on their preferences and behaviour.
Unlike Google, Facebook is a social media platform, so its advertising activity is focused on collecting and leveraging behavioural data on Facebook. What is common between Facebook and Google (and sometimes makes them look like competitors) is the immense scale of their operations and their tendency to monopolize the digital advertising market.
Let’s end this guide with some best practices for mastering your Facebook advertising skills.
6 Best Practices for Creating Efficient Facebook Ads
Remember, Facebook advertising can be extremely beneficial only if you do it correctly. We’ve put together some practical tips to help you run high-quality ad campaigns.
- Use vertical videos. A vertical or square aspect ratio allows your ad to cover more of a smartphone screen. This is because the best part of users hold their phones upright while checking their News Feed.
- Avoid text on images. Put all your text information in the title or description boxes.
- Shorten the text. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, it takes 0.4 seconds for people to see and recognize ads on mobile devices. Make sure your ad copy is short and clear; otherwise, you may not be able to get your message across.
- Add multiple images using the carousel format. If you have a lot of professional photos of your product, add them in a carousel to highlight more specs and give a better and clearer impression of your brand.
- Add GIFs and videos to your ads. Adding some movement to your ads is a great way to stand out in the news.
- Use calls to action. Facebook offers different call-to-action buttons to get attention and encourage people to engage with your ad. Choose the right CTA based on the type of interaction with your ad that you expect from users.
Congratulations, you’ve learned a lot about Facebook advertising and you’re ready to create your first ad campaign.
