The holiday season is around the corner and like many small businesses we serve at ezClocker, we know how important this time of the year is for your business. To prepare you need a marketing plan, and one of the best tools for marketing has been Facebook advertising. Why Facebook? Unlike flyers, radio, or newspaper ads where you can’t control who sees these ads, using Facebook you have much more control. You can target an area where your customers live, like a city or zip code, specify gender, age, and even interests. This allows you to do target marketing which is very powerful, and for the more advanced user they can also re-market to these customers. This is where you can show your ad again but only to the folks who visited your website and didn’t convert (meaning they didn’t buy or signup for your offer/product). You can show them another ad later which has a higher conversion rate because as most marketers will tell you, it takes multiple touch points to get your customer to buy. Facebook ads consist of three parts:
Campaigns: this is where you specify the purpose of the ad, for example, you want more likes for your business page, website traffic or getting more post views. In each campaign you can have multiple ad sets.
Ad sets: this is where you specify your target audience, how long the ad will run for, and budget. Every ad set contains one or more individual ads.
Ads: these are the individual ads you’ll be running, say for one ad set you test out an ad using a video, another using an image, and one displaying a slide show. It’s a way to show different ads to one target audience.
Let’s say you own a janitorial or cleaning service and you’re running a special for 30% off of cleaning for the holidays. Your campaign would have an objective of website clicks (get more clicks to your website to show them the offer or signup). You can create two ad sets; one targeting women and the other men of the age range 30 to 60 years old, and if you want to compare the results to see which one does better (this is commonly known as A/B testing) you would budget both the same. So say $10/per day for 5 days, then on the individual ads you create 2 ads for each ad set. One with an image and another a video. Why? Because at this point you don’t know which one would do better so you give a couple of ad choices, and let Facebook determine which one gets more clicks. As you can see from the example you are testing different variations of your 30% off ad. Now lets see how to get this all setup:
Select “Create Ads” option by clicking the drop down icon next to your name.
Setting up a campaign
The first step is to setup your campaign. What’s the purpose of the campaign? For this tutorial we’ll choose “Send people to your website” option and then scroll down to enter the campaign name.
Setting up ad sets:
Next step is to define the ad set under your campaign (remember the purpose of the ad set is to target a group of people, define how you want your ad to be delivered, budget and for how long). Start with defining your audience. By default, “Create New” will be selected. Here you’ll pick the location you want to target; you can pick a state or specific zip codes or leave it to target a particular country. Age range is great if you know your target audience’s age range, but if not you can leave it to the default values.
Scroll down and you’ll see a very powerful part of the ad set feature called “Detail Targeting”. Here you can filter by job title (Restaurant business owner for example), likes (people like a particular business e.g. QuickBooks), and many other choices. If your product is something related to restaurants for example, if you type the word “restaurant” a popup will show you choices related to restaurants, categorized by job title, behavior, demographics, .etc.
Important note: the choices in the detail targeting list do not overlap. As an example if you pick anyone who has a title of a restaurant manager, that might bring your audience down to 3,000. Then if you add people who are interested in smartphones (say your product is an app that restaurant mangers might find useful), your total target audience will grow to 32 million because adding a match choice is an OR operation not an overlap. That means it picks everyone who has a title of restaurant manager OR everyone who’s interested in smartphones. As a beginner try to get your target audience to under 100,000 people, and to do that you’ll have to play around with location, gender, job titles and other settings.
Scroll down and you’ll find “Budget and Schedule”. Here you’ll pick how much you want to pay for the ads. As an example, if you pick a daily budget of $10 per day for a month you’ll see it shows you the total spent will be $300 for this ad set. Keep in mind you can end the campaign anytime, this setting just prevents you from going over your budget limits.
As you scroll through the page leave the rest of the options as default, name your ad set, and save.
Setting up individual ads
Here you’ll setup your individual ads, you can pick a single image, a carousel which is a format where a customer can scroll through several images in the same ad, slide share, or video.
Here we selected a single image, scroll down and you can pick the headline, text, and the url you would like to send the customers to when they click your ad. Best practice is to create more than one ad per ad set, then Facebook will optimize which ad is doing best and serve it more frequently. As an example, you can do one image of a person, another a short video of your offer, and a third as a carousel of images of your product/service. A good image is essential to the success of your ad. If you don’t know where to find good images for your ad check out this blog post here:
That’s it! Congratulations you just setup up your first campaign. Keep in mind that Facebook marketing is a process where you have to experiment with different ads, images, headlines, and interests until you get the results you want. Your journey to a successful marketing campaign has just begun.
Author: Raya Khashab
Raya is the CEO and co-founder of ezClocker. She is passionate about customers and building products that change the way people run their business. She is also a big supporter of the startup community and helping people achieve their dreams.
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