Gone are the days when Facebook was used solely for reconnecting with old friends and trying to make them jealous about your fabulous life and otherworldly success (kidding, of course). Now it’s far more than that, especially in the business world. Facebook is projected to earn close to $100 billion in advertising revenue in 2020. There’s a reason they’ve been enjoying this extraordinary revenue growth―Facebook advertising works, and works well.

Unlike Google Ads, Facebook advertising allows companies to target their prospective customers with more pinpoint precision. As a result of this better targeting, Facebook advertising often results in a lower cost per click (CPC) and better ROI. Like Google Ads, Facebook paid advertising is auction-based.

If you’re interested in advertising on Facebook, keep the following 4 elements in mind prior to jumping in. Yes, it works well, but it doesn’t just magically happen. It needs to be given careful consideration and thorough planning.

Choose a Campaign Objective

In Facebook, you can create an advertising campaign by selecting “Create Ads” from the dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the home page. From there, you’ll have the opportunity to select the campaign’s objective from a provided list of options. For instance, some businesses with a specific niche seek to build a following to whom they can their own unique content throughout the month. Others may be more partial to driving traffic to their website through clicks on a landing page.

Define Your Audience

Here’s where you can pinpoint your ideal target customer. You can select locations, ages, interests, and a host of other criteria. There are dozens of options for selecting your ideal target audience. For instance, a consulting firm specializing in HR-related issues can target those who work in human resources departments. Once you select your target audience, Facebook will list the potential reach based on these demographics.

Choose Budget and Bid Strategy

Simply enter the maximum dollar amount that you’d like to spend in a day or over a period of time. Also, you can select when you’d like the advertisement to begin and end. You may set your own bid, or you can select automatic bidding. There are a few other choices to make, such as paying per impression or paying per click.

Create Your Ad

After you’ve selected your target market and have set your budget and bid parameters, Facebook helps you create your advertisement. After selecting one of the different formatting options, you can begin to upload pictures, images, even a slide show. You’ll also need to enter your advertisement’s headline, your company’s URL, and any text to be included in the advertisement.

Manage and Maintain your campaign through Reporting

If you don’t review your Facebook’s campaign performance, how are you going know when or how to tweak your content and/or offering(s)? In Facebook Ads Manager, you can filter all your campaigns by, among other things, objectives and dates. And by looking at the Campaigns tab, you’ll be able to easily check out different metrics, such as cost-per-click, cost-per-conversion, impressions, and unique link clicks. Here you’ll get a pretty thorough idea how your campaign is performing. Also, you can pull reports from pre-determined ad metrics, or customize them to better address your needs. And they’ve included a ton of options for customization. For instance, if you want to gauge the performance of video in your ad, you can select the average time spent watching it, which includes options related time how long it was viewed: 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, etc.

Don’t be fooled by how easy Facebook makes it to advertise with them. The short time it takes to set up a campaign often gets translated into a short amount of time spent in the planning stage. Remember, you’re going to pay for this. You might as well get your money’s worth.

Questions about Facebook Advertising?

Talk to the highly experienced professionals at d2 Designs. d2 is the most innovative digital marketing agency in D/FW. We create, execute and manage multi-marketing solutions for customers with a focus on brand engagement that optimizes the digital experience through traditional media, video production, social media, lead gen and key analytics, and e-commerce and experiential events. Check us out at d2.designs, or email us at info@d2.design. And please follow us via social media for more great, informative digital marketing tips and suggestions.