How Do I Start Marketing on Facebook?
What is Facebook Marketing?
Facebook marketing provides a way for business to reach and target current and potential customers with ad creative and messages relevant to them. Marketers create campaigns that have specific goals and create ads within those campaigns to help them reach those goals.
Facebook ads are shown to audiences for desktop and mobile in the News Feed and/or the right column. Showing your ad in these placements helps you reach your audience wherever they are.
How much does Facebook Marketing cost?
You decide how much you want to spend on your Facebook ads by setting a budget for each campaign you create. Facebook uses an ads auction system so you can bid to have your ad shown to the audience of your choice. These bids are based on the cost per click on your ad or the cost per impression on your ad. There are a few main factors that can influence the cost of your Facebook marketing:
- Bidding type and amount
- Audiences
- Ad quality
- Your industry
- Ad sizes
How to advertise on Facebook?
If you already have a Facebook business page (and you should), you can head straight to the Facebook Ads Manager or Business Manager to create your Facebook ad campaign. If you don’t yet have a business page, you’ll need to create one first.
Step 1. Choose campaign objective
Choose a campaign objective based on your goals for this particular ad. Keep in mind that for conversion-oriented objectives (like sales) you can pay per action, but for exposure objectives (like traffic and views) you will pay for impressions.
Step 2. Name your campaign
Name your Facebook ad campaign and declare whether your ad fits into any special categories like credit or politics.
If you want to set up an A/B split test, click Get Started in the A/B Test section to set this ad as your control. You can choose different versions to run against this ad after it’s published.
Step 3. Set your budget and schedule
At the top of this screen, you will name your ad set and choose which Page to promote.
Next, you decide how much money you want to spend on your Facebook ad campaign. You can choose a daily or lifetime budget. Then, set the start and end dates if you want to schedule your ad in the future, or choose to make it live right away.
Keep in mind that running your Facebook paid ads on a schedule may be the most efficient way to spend your budget since you can choose only to serve your ad when your target audience is most likely to be on Facebook. You can only set a schedule if you create a lifetime budget for your ad.
Step 4. Target your audience
Scroll down to start building the target audience for your ads.
You’ll see the first option is to add a custom audience of people who have already interacted with your business on or off Facebook. We’ve got a separate guide to walk you through Facebook custom audiences, so here we’ll focus on the targeting options.
Start by selecting your target location, age, gender and language. Note that under location, you can specifically choose to include or exclude cities over a certain size.
Step 5. Choose your Facebook ad placements
Scroll down to choose where your ads will appear. If you’re new to Facebook advertising, the simplest choice is to use Automatic Placements.
When you select this option, Facebook will automatically place your ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network when they are likely to get the best results.
Once you have more experience, you may wish to place your Facebook ads in specific locations.