Let’s consider how much more successful your business could be by reviewing the basics of Facebook advertising and Facebook targeting.

Ad Types

Facebook offers different types of ads depending on your business’ objectives.  Whether you want to build your brand and awareness, engage your audience, or drive traffic and leads to your website, Facebook has an ad type specially designed for you.

Likes & Engagements

All Facebook ad types will help to increase audience engagement, content reach and likes to your page.  There are a few in particular which will help you to specifically promote each of these objectives.

Page Likes: these ads can be displayed on all placements, and will include a visible “Like Page” call to action for users to click.

Page Post Photo: these ads have an increased photo size limit, for your business to place the most appealing images to entice more comments, likes and page traffic.

Page Post Video: the popularity of video advertising is rapidly growing, so high engagement on these types of ads are likely.

Traffic & Leads

Increase the overall reach of your website, or drive traffic to your site to lead users to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, or sign up for an offer with the following ad types.

Domain Ad: the most basic of Facebook ads, this type can only be displayed on the right column, so is not available on mobile.  It’s the most affordable ad option, but also has the lowest click-thru rate.

Page Post Link: also known as Newsfeed Ads, this type includes a large image to attract attention, a link to draw users to your site or landing page, and a small section for a text description.

Multi-Product/Carousel Ads: Multi-Product or “Carousel” ads show up in newsfeeds just like the Page Post Links, but they showcase 3-5 separate products and links – so one ad can promote up to five different products or services.

Mobile or Desktop App Installs

App Install ads are designed specifically for businesses who are trying to promote their Android and iOS mobile apps or Facebook apps (which are only available on desktop). These ads are a great choice to increase the number of installs for your mobile or desktop apps.

Offers & Events

Offers and events ads should be used to drive visitors to your physical location or event.

Event Ads: Facebook Events will help you increase the number of visitors to an event that your business is promoting. Targeting, which we’ll discuss below, will help you make sure the right visitors are coming to your events.

Offer Ads: Offer ads will help you promote your products or services, and will help to generate physical traffic to store locations.  Your page must have at least 50 likes in order to advertise an offer.

Facebook Targeting

Besides having a huge audience, the other main reason that Facebook advertising works is called “targeting”. With Facebook ads, you decide the type of people you want to reach, by location, age, interests, behaviours and more. For example, you can set up your baby furniture ads to run for those who are between the ages of 25 – 35, who live in Montreal, QC, and who have a relationship status of “Married”.  Here’s a quick breakdown of how Facebook targeting works.

Location

Target ads by country, state/province or postal code, or even as targeted to the few blocks around your business location.

Demographics

You choose the audience you want to reach, broken down by gender, age, language, education, ethnic affinity, relationship status, etc.

Interests

You can drilldown to your audience’s specific interests and segment ads to those who like a particular brand of music, a certain sport, a movie genre, or shopping history.

Connections

Reach your audience through their connection to your brand – via Page likes, or mobile app access.  You can even extend this reach through your audience’s friends.

Custom Audiences

Custom audiences are used to find existing customers within Facebook.  You can create a custom audience by using details from a customer contact list or newsletter signup list, for example, or even through tracking on your website or through your mobile app.

Lookalike Audiences

This tool is a really great way to expand your reach to a desired audience. It takes a look at your current customers, and will find similar “lookalike” users to target.  It’s a great way to validate that your Facebook marketing campaigns are working.

Of course, as amazing as all of these tactics sounds, they will only work if you’re targeting the right audience. Using analytics will help you understand your visitors and your target audience, which will attract greater engagement and lower the cost of conversions for your Facebook advertising campaign.  Keep your eyes on our blog for our next post on optimizing your Facebook business Page and group Page and further improve your Facebook marketing strategy!

Learn the best tips for your Facebook Advertising campaign with our free download!  Click the image below to get started.