Facebook is a favourite of ours here at Aspiring Digital Solutions when it comes to social media marketing. Some people may say the Facebook Ads platform is can be rather complex, with too many options which eventually becomes a little confusing. While it is true that there is a huge amount of customisation available on the platform, this also makes it enormously powerful, and hence, it is worth the time and effort to get it right.

Like anything, you soon get used to the Facebook Ads platform and once you have mastered it, you have great creative control to really target the market you want to. So let’s look at some of the basics of the Facebook Ads platform.

Main advantage

The main benefit of Facebook Ads is that you can target customers and put yourself in front of them, you are not waiting for them to find you. You can also run the same ad campaign on both Facebook and Instagram, increasing your audience.

Think about strategy

Who are you targeting? Will they be receptive to your product/service and the way you are promoting it? Targeted ads can put people off.

Set objectives

What are your objectives? This could be direct sales, leads, site traffic or just brand awareness, but your ad campaign needs to be tailored accordingly. Facebook starts the process by asking you to choose an objective to help optimise where your ad is placed. This is split into three categories: awareness, consideration and conversion.

Audience customisation

You have thought vaguely about your target audience but now you can really drill down into the demographics and locations, with lots of options for customising who you are targeting.

Placement

Next you can choose where your ad is placed, which should be tailored according to how you expect your audience will view it; for example on mobile only, desktop only or both.

Schedule

Here you can set the frequency, time and start/end dates for your ad campaign. This, in turn, updates a budget calculation so you can always see exactly how much the ad campaign will cost you. Again, there are lots of options to create a detailed customisation which meets your needs. You may find the advertising platform will make recommendations for duration when paying to promote an advert/post.

Type of ad

This can be a single image, a video or maybe a carousel of images? There are many ways you can display your advert and each has its own benefits, so you can choose the format that you think suits the audience you want to target. Testing is essential here to learn more about your audience and optimise for it.

Once your ad is live you can monitor its performance in Facebook’s Ads Manager, which has a range of interesting metrics available. You can also opt to run a ‘split test’, which allows you to create two advert campaigns to run simultaneously so you can monitor which one performs the best.

Undoubtedly, the power of customisation is a great tool and makes Facebook Ads an excellent platform to suit whatever business objectives you might have. Even if you get it wrong the first time it is easy to see where you can make changes to improve your ad performance.