How to Create a Facebook Ad: Step 1 (Create and Target an Ad)
This post is the first of a five-step process to set up, measure, and manage your Facebook ads.
First things first, make sure your Facebook fan page is built up and has some content. If you’re directing people from your ad to your page, you’ll want to make sure there’s some content. Start by going here, then follow the three easy steps:
1. Design your ad
- Facebook content: Choose where you want to send people: your fan page? or your website? Both have their perks and are dependent on your Facebook goals. Funneling fans through your page to your website is typically a successful strategy. Or, if you’ve already got a great fan base set up, send people straight to your website.
- Title: The title is the blue text at the top of the ad. If your fan page is the ad’s destination, the title will default to the name of your page. If your website is the goal, you can choose the title.
- Body Text: What is going to entice your audience to click? You can create a series of ads and experiment with what gets the best click thru rates and actions.
- Image: If you’re sending people to your page, the default will be your page’s profile picture. You can certainly change it to whatever you’d like.
2. Start targeting
- Location: Are you targeting internationally? Nationally? State-wide? City-wide?
- Demographics: Targeting a certain age? How about gender?
- Likes & Interests: What does your target market have in common? (e.g. my example might “like” business)
- Estimated Reach: Facebook will give you an idea of how large your ad audience will be on the right with “Estimated Reach”.
3. Keep targeting (Advanced Demographics)
- Birthday: Choose to target people on their birthday – this might be helpful for a specific campaign.
- Interested in: Choose audience based on romantic inclination.
- Relationship: Running a wedding-geared ad? Maybe you’ll want to target engaged women.
- Language: I’m going to stick with English.
- Education: Your audience may be comprised of PhD’s or high school dropouts, or anywhere in between.
- Workplaces: Targeting a specific workforce? You’ll be able to narrow them down here.
- Connections: Target users who are (or are not) already connected to certain pages, groups, events, or applications. [Note: you'll have to be connected to said page/group/event/application in order to list them.]
- Friends of connections: Target users whose friends are connected to certain pages, group, events, or applications.
Congratulations, you’ve just created your first Facebook ad! Next time, we’ll talk about how to finish the setup process and final review.