April 14, 2023
It’s very likely that your business is active on social media already, but are you using Facebook ads yet? Wondering how to use Facebook ads to promote your business?
The major social network offers a great, cost-effective, and simple way to reach your target audience using ads that are shown to people you target.
But Facebook ads are a finicky beast, and must be created with care to appeal to the audience you target.
Images, text, and the link you choose to send viewers to (or the post you choose to boost, alternatively) are all important components of these ads. For the best results, you should use Facebook ads to bolster your current content marketing plan.
In this post, we will show you how to use Facebook ads to support your content marketing plan and bring new, targeted visitors to your site.
What are the different types of Facebook ads?
Facebook offers several options and objectives for creating ads. Your ad objective is what you want people to do when they see your ad. Are you looking to:
- Get more likes on your Facebook page
- Promote a contest
- Send users to your website
- Collect lead information
- Boost an existing Facebook post
You can do all these things and more using the preset objectives in Facebook Ads Manager.
Most Facebook ad objectives require you to develop the ad creative–the images, text, and call to action shown with your ad. This can be time consuming, and it should be if you want your ad to perform well.
Keep your target audience in mind for every step of the process. For example, an ad for a product targeting women ages 25-45 would use a very different set of images and ad copy than an ad for a product targeting men ages 18-24.
One of the easiest and effective ways to use Facebook ads is by boosting existing posts. If you use this option, you won’t need to create any text or images for your ad because Facebook will simply promote an existing post that you choose.
How does boosting a post work?
When you visit your Facebook Insights page, you can see which posts are performing well and which ones are being ignored. Don’t make the mistake of boosting only the posts that aren’t garnering engagement–that’s a waste of your ad budget.
Instead, look at the posts that are already performing well and boost them to make them perform even better.
Here’s an example of two different posts from our Facebook page: One boosted, and one not boosted.
Notice only 65 people were reached without boosting the post (not uncommon with Facebook’s constantly changing news feed algorithms!).
Now, take a look at the reach on a post that we boosted for 2 days at just $10:
That’s an increase of 1696.9% in reach! Not shown are the number of likes, comments, and shares on each post. The first, unboosted post received 2 likes and 1 share. The boosted post received 62 likes and 3 shares.
When you visit your business’s Facebook page, you can boost a post right from the Timeline. Just find the post you want to boost, click the Boost Post button, and add your daily or lifetime budget for the ad. Choose the targeting for your audience by interests, job title, behavior, and more.
For example, if we were boosting a post about financial planning for business owners on the Conversational Facebook page, we might target users who are Small Business Owners (job title) interested in the topic of the post (for example, Financial planning) and have Liked Dave Ramsey’s Facebook page.
This would give us a nice, niche audience to show our boosted post to, gathering more clicks, likes, comments, and shares than if we showed the post to our Facebook fans alone.
That’s all you need to know about how to use Facebook ads! Stay tuned for our upcoming post: How Much Should I Spend on Facebook Ads?
