How To Get Started With Facebook and Instagram Advertising
Paid advertising is one of the most immediate ways to get your content in front of prospective customers. But there are lots of questions that come with it – we want to help you navigate getting started with Facebook & Instagram ads including:
- How Facebook and Instagram can help you reach your target audience
- How to get started advertising on Facebook and Instagram
- How much you should spend on Facebook and Instagram advertising
How can Facebook and Instagram help me reach my target audience?
Facebook and Instagram both allow you to choose an objective for your campaign based on what you would like to get out of the campaign. They offer objectives such as brand awareness, lead generation, traffic, engagement and video views.
From there you can also use Facebook’s targeting options to narrow your audience:
- Geographic targeting
- Demographic targeting
- Interest-based targeting
Facebook also allows you to create custom audiences using information from code and data from your website and your Facebook or Instagram pages’ visitor data. You can upload a customer profile, and Facebook will try to match the information you have with Facebook users.
By narrowing your audience and focusing on what objective will help you reach your goal, you are less likely to waste your advertising budget and have more success.
How much should I spend on Facebook advertising?
“It depends!”
For each business, it will be different. E-commerce business best practices include these factors when considering an ad spend:
- Your advertising goal (Revenue target)
- The average revenue per sale
- Number of sales to hit the revenue target
- Website conversion rate
- Link clicks required
- Average ad click-through rate (CTR)
- Estimated cost per click (CPC)
Buffer ran a series of text ads to see what a $5 budget per day would yield.
You can also check out Wordstream’s report on average click-through rate, cost per click, conversion rate and cost per action on Facebook by industry.
For example, the average click-through rate on Facebook ads in the technology sector is 1.04% and the average cost per click is $1.27.
How do I advertise on Facebook and Instagram?
All you need to start advertising on Facebook is a Facebook Business Manager account as well as a published Facebook page for your business.
To advertise on Instagram, you need a Facebook Business Manager account as well as a published Facebook profile for your business. You cannot run ads on Instagram without them or an Instagram account.
You can use Facebook’s ad manager to advertise on Facebook and Instagram, or just Facebook. You can use the Instagram Business manager to advertise solely on Instagram.
Create a campaign
Head over to Facebook Ads Manager via facebook.com/ads or by clicking “Manage Ads” in the drop-down menu in your Facebook account.
Next select your objective – i.e. what do you want your ad to do for you? It can be brand awareness, traffic to your website, or sales. See all of Facebook’s objectives here.
You will then be able to narrow your audience down, as we mentioned before, via location age, interests, and more.
Next, select where your ad will run – Facebook recommends using their Automatic Placements option, as default, but you can opt-out of different placements – such as Instagram stories, or Facebook messanger in this section.
Finally, you can set your budget. Decide whether you want to set a lifetime budget, or daily and if you want your ads to run all the time, or within a specific date range.
The last step of the campaign setup is to create your ad. Select your ad type and add in your text, links and calls to action.
Don’t forget to carefully review your ad. You can select different placements and preview what it will look like.
Then you are set to publish!
Facebook Ad Types
There are so many great Facebook ad types to choose from. Photo ads or video ads? The choice is yours! There are also different and engaging ways to use them. Social media is partially entertainment, so make your ads informative and fun.
Some of our favourite ad types are:
- Slideshows: take 4-6 photos and turn them into a short video. You can even overlay text on them
- Carousel ads: perfect for showcasing different products or services your company offers; users can scroll through images directly in the ad
- Mobile collection: let your mobile users engage with your ad in a full-screen experience that allows them to browse different images; this includes calls to action.
- Tried-and-true video ads always perform well on Facebook. No video? We can help build videos out of images and text.
Ensure you create your Facebook or Instagram ad to follow the specific guidelines so your ad will run. You can find the most up to date ad specs here.
Ready to stop wasting money and start improving your ROI on your ads? Contact Digital Giants for more information.
