Congratulations!
Your business is finally up and running. However, it is now time you go global with your business reach. You find yourself pondering what makes my product a more viable solution compared to other similar products on the market? How exactly can I reach the right number of people? Moreover, how exactly can I find my target audience for the business?
Social media has now become a common norm and as I have previously discussed that more than a quarter of the world’s population is actively using it. I have discussed some interesting facts on Facebook in our Episode 1 of the series. In case, if you have missed out some important facts, now is the time to go back and re-check.
In Episode 2, I discussed the power of Social Media marketing and now it is time for me to take you through step by step journey to starting up your own Facebook Ad Campaign. So how exactly you can do that, let’s find out together 🙂
Setting Up Your Facebook Page
To set up your very own Facebook Page, you will first need a Facebook Account of your own. In case, if you don’t have one, Sign Up on Facebook. Now, once you have provided all your basic details and your Facebook account is up and running, you will be navigated to your Live Feed. on the left side of the screen, you can see a number of options, Select Pages from here.
From the top right, Select the Create Page option.
One other way of creating a page on Facebook is to select the drop-down arrow located next to the help option at the top right corner of the screen.
The Create Page option will navigate you to a new window representing six different categories to choose from. You choose the category which best describes your business. These categories include the following:
So whatever social media campaign you are planning to create, select a category which assists your business in the best possible way.
Assuming that you are planning to launch your e-commerce platform, where you will be selling a number of products such as cat accessories, dog accessories, farming accessories, horse accessories and so on… You can always make separate pages for all the products by simply selecting the Brand or Product category.
If your business has a physical location and instead of making sales online, you prefer your customers to become your walk-in clients, then you should select the category of Local Business or Places. So, you see depending on the type of business you are planning to run, you can choose the exact category for Facebook to create the right template for your Facebook page.
As this course is true for learning purposes, so just to guide you on how things work when we plan to create a page on Facebook, I am going to select the Brand or Product option.
This option will further inquire to choose a subcategory of the type of product which I am planning to sell using Facebook.
As soon as I am going to choose a category, I will be asked to name it. Once, I have decided the name of my page, I will simply select Get Started.
And voilà!, my first Facebook Page has now been created.
This is how it looks…
Here I can choose to Add a Cover photo of my choice. I can also add a short description related to the purpose of my page. I can also set a profile photo of my choice, add a website link and play around with the settings.
Important Note: Don’t forget to fill in all the information on your product/service by selecting the About section.
I can add the reviews section, posts, photos, videos, events and so much more as it befits my need.
I can also check reviews, posts, interleaved groups, likes and other things. As all these options are actually accessible for me from the left side options menu, I will spotlight the need of each as we keep going further into the course. For now, let’s move ahead with the prep ups.
Creating Your Adverts
Finally, I have created our Facebook page. So now we got a Facebook page of our own, it is time we create Adverts to market ourselves to the right audience.
To create the very first advert, click on the drop-down arrow located on the top right corner of the screen and select Create Ads.
This option will automatically navigate you to the Facebook Ad Manager. And this is where the real magic happens. It is the back-end of your Facebook business page just like a WordPress website. Just that this one is not for building websites.
Welcome to the Facebook Ad Manager. The first and foremost task of launching a Facebook Social Media campaign is to define the right marketing objective for your business.
To learn more in depth about the different marketing objectives in detail, Click Here.
The Facebook Ad Manager is pretty similar to the interface of the Facebook. However, the options differ a little bit.
At the upper right corner, you can click on the Help option to learn about a number of things, you get a notification option similar to Facebook only this time, it will show you all your business notifications.
At the upper left corner, you can choose between variable Adverts account. You can create as many advert accounts as you want using a single profile.
Setting Up Your Ad Manager Account
So we now have a quick overview of how we can create an advertisement of our product/service, it is now time that we understand how we can set up our Facebook Ad Manager Account.
Why is it necessary?
Well just like you can’t create an Advert strategy without a Facebook Page, you can’t go ahead with creating social media campaigns without setting up your Ad Manager Account.
To access your Facebook Ad manager setting options to click on the Settings Wheel located on the top right corner of the screen. It will navigate you to the settings screen.
The Settings screen contains four options.
Ad Accounts
This section contains three different windows; the first is the Ad Account Setup which allows the user to adjust basic personal information settings for the Ad account. You will need to enter your Ad account name, Business name, set your currency, select your location, input your address, specify advertising purpose, and your Tax ID number. You can also deactivate your account from this window. Once, you are done with adding all your personal information, click on the Save Changes button to save your info.
The second window is the Attribution Window. Attribution window allows Facebook to monitor the clicks and views on your ad. Here you can set the period or window at which the Facebook measures the Ad results. You can set the frequency in between a day and a month as per your product requirements. For example, if you have a fast selling low price product, then you may set the frequency window small, but in case if you have a slow-selling high price product, then you may set frequency window large.
The third window is the Ad Account Roles. This option simply allows you to add different roles to your Ad account. You can choose to make them as administrator, advertiser or simply an analyst. The choice is yours.
Pages
The page section list all the pages that you can control using your Facebook Ad manager. You can also see your role on these pages listed right next to their names.
Payment Settings
The payment settings allow you to define the payment gateways for your Facebook Ads as they aren’t going to allow you to advertise for free.
It contains the information of when your next bill is going to arrive, and in case, if you haven’t spent any money yet, you will not receive any invoice. You will need to add a Payment method which is either you can pay using a Paypal account or your credit/debit card information.
However, one of the best things about the Facebook payment method is that you can set your account pay limit as per your preference. As soon as your expenditures reach your specified limit, Facebook will automatically stop the payments from taking place any further. Your ads won’t run until you either increase the limit or remove it altogether.
Notifications
Last but not the least is the Notification option. From here, you can turn All Email and Facebook Notifications on or off. Please keep in mind that these are not your Facebook notifications or your page notifications. These are notifications related to your Ad performance. In case, if you don’t wish to track them, you can turn them off from here.
You can also control whether you wish to get email alerts on your Ad performance or not. The Facebook Ads Team sends you email notifications and marketing updates about your ad accounts to keep you informed. You can control which emails you wish to get in your mailbox and which of them you wish to avoid. For that, you get a number of options to click your picks.
Just like emails, you can also control what Facebook notifications you wish to see and which of them you don’t wish to see at all. These notifications are all related to your ad accounts and not your personal notifications.
Once when you are done with customizing your notification options, all you have to do is select the Save Changes option to confirm the new ones.
Three Things To Avoid At All Cost
With the passage of time, Facebook has introduced more stringent policies for using its Social Media Platform for Marketing and Advertising. I have been using Facebook as a tool of marketing for quite a long time, and I would like you to know it is not an easy experience if you end up getting a permanent ban on your Ad Manager account. It’s because you have invested a certain amount of finance on it, I don’t think you will be satisfied if your Ad manager is blocked.
Is there a way I can keep myself safe from getting permanently banned from Ad Manager?
As a matter of fact, there are three main pitfalls which people easily fall into, so my advice to them is basically don’t do this.
1) Avoid profanities at all cost. Make sure that you don’t use any curse words within your ads. Don’t use them in your content, not in your copy, not in your images, videos or just about anything you are posting as a Facebook advert. Facebook will automatically disapprove of your ads. If you keep going on with such practice, you will ultimately suffer a ban.
2) Under no circumstances don’t ever advertise the following products:
- Gambling sites
- Dating sites
- Hookup sites
- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Adult content
- Financial Products/Service
The best thing to do is visit the Facebook policy page and learn more about what kind of products you can advertise and what you should avoid.
3) Don’t use fake features in images
For example A Play button on one of your adverts which is not clickable. This is not a severe policy violation, but yet, it is still a violation that should be avoided nevertheless.
Learning OutComes
So finally let’s wrap it all up for today. Just to get a quick overview here is an insight of what we have learned by far in the following episode:
- We have understood how we can set up our first Facebook Page for a specific niche or business.
- We have learned how to access the Facebook Ad Manager for creating Ads.
- We have learned how to set up our Facebook Ad Manager account and identified the various settings option.
- We have learned what pitfalls one should avoid in order to avoid a permanent ban.
What’s Next?
Facebook Advertising is not a single step solution to all your marketing problems. But, yes it is a profound strategy that brings a vast majority of the interested crowd to your product. We have now learned how to set up a Facebook Ad Manager account. In our next series on Facebook Advertising, we are going to discuss how to create an effective Facebook Ad Structure. So stay tuned for the next series, and keep learning, it’s the only way forward 🙂