[Participant @emmanuel]

I see an entire family sitting at a dinner and every member of the family are staring at their phone. And more likely than not, those people are staring at Facebook. Facebook has taken over the minds of billions of people in the world to a frightening degree. Thereby, it happens to be one of the best ways to advertise products and services on the internet to reach billions of people. I am going to show you how to turn that attention that people have turned away from their families into money for your business. As we are doing that, you will notice some basic vocabulary that are quite necessary for you to understand what Facebook advertising is all about. We need to understand certain terminologies – Ad Campaigns, Ad Set, Custom Audience, Lookalike Audience, Facebook Ad, and Facebook Pixel.

Understanding how the above terms work together will help you to carry out a successful Facebook ad that will boost your business. For better comprehension, we will be going over the definition of these terms based on a practical hands-on approach. As you can see from the picture above, you can access these properties of Facebook ad by going to http://www.business.facebook.com. You will be prompted to log into your Facebook account to create the business account for your ads. After that, your Ad Manager page will open as seen in the picture below where you can launch your ad campaign.

Ad Campaign

Now the first important term to know in Facebook advertising is what a campaign is. An ad campaign is a word that is analogous to a war campaign where a troop is focusing on taking over a territory from a certain direction using a well-defined strategy. Similarly an ad campaign is focusing on getting revenue for a product or service for which the campaign is meant. It is the fundamental structural element in launching your ad. This is where you define the objective of the ad you want to set up. In other words, what you want people to do when they see your ad. For example, if you want to show your website to people interested in your business, you can create ads that encourage people to visit your website.

As can be seen on the picture above, there are three basic ways you can define your campaign objective. This can be based on Awareness, Consideration or Conversion. Let us take a closer look at each of these.

• Awareness: This option has to do with objectives that generate interest in your product or service. As shown above, you can choose to create awareness for your brand to people who are likely to patronize it or you may choose to reach as many persons as possible with your ad by selecting the option of Reach.

• Consideration: The objective of this option is to get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it. With it you can choose any of the options under it as shown in order to either drive traffic to your website or app, engage people to like your page, respond to your events or offerings, install your app, view videos, or get messages or emails of those considering your product/service. The Message option allows you to even get people to send messages to you about your product using their messaging feature. This is a real good way for businesses to interact with potential clients in real time.

• Conversions: Choosing any of the options under this objective encourages people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service. For example, if you are trying to promote your eCommerce store, this option allows you to tell Facebook to concentrate on getting people to buy items in your store. This is also the most expensive to promote in Facebook ads.

Each of the options above is very effective in driving revenue to your business which is the primary goal of any Facebook campaign. You just need to understand them well and choose the one that best suits your business goals and budget.

Ad Set

The Ad Set is where all the magic happens. Here you define your target audience, budget for the promotion, the schedule of the ad and bidding strategy for the campaign. In defining the target for your ad and the audience whom the ad is shown to, you need to bear few things in mind. If I am selling a writing material like pens, for instance, I need to target people who are interested in pens. That may be people within the school age that use pen, teachers, people that are interested in notebooks – who of course will need a pen to write on it. This is very important because if you are showing your ads to the wrong people who have little or no need for the item you are promoting, you will definitely lose lots of money.

Take note that before you set up an ad campaign for your business, you need to have a Facebook page for that business. As shown in the first arrow on the picture above, Fibroid Natural Remedy is the name of a Facebook page that we need to promote. There could be several other pages created by your Facebook account. All the pages would show in the drop down there, allowing you to select whichever one you wish to promote at the moment.

After that you will see Audience as shown by the second arrow on the image. This is where you select the set of people you want Facebook to show the ad. As shown in the picture, the ad is set for people living in Aba, Abia State in Nigeria. All genders between the ages of 18 – 65 years old and so forth. Looking at the dashboard by the right of the image above, you will see the estimated number that will be reached by the ad is 2,500,000 people. This figure is too high and needs to be narrowed down for effective promotion. The final detailed audience set and the adjusted parameters can be seen in the figure below.

The number of potential reach has been brought down to 340,000 people. Note the adjusted parameters in the orange box are responsible for the slash in potential reach, thereby making the ad more concise and effective. All these changes made here build up to get you a customized audience for your specific promotion based on their track record of likes and interests as shown on Facebook platforms. This set of people is known as Custom Audience in Facebook vocabulary. When you get an effective custom audience for your product, you can retarget these ones in subsequent related promotions and have good conversion.

Another Facebook terminology we need to mention here is the Lookalike Audience. This is a function of the custom audience that you earlier built. Assuming you have a list of 200 people who have already bought your product, let’s say the pen we were earlier selling, Facebook will look for people who share the similarities of the ones in your custom audience that have earlier bought the pen. This list of lookalike audience is created for you to promote the same product to. This is achieved by Facebook’s very advanced algorithm. And experience shows that when you target the lookalike audience they give similar result in conversion as the ones in your custom audience.

The next parameter on the Ad Set page is Placement. This determines where on Facebook and its related platforms, your ad is shown. As seen in the image below, the radio button for Automatic Placement is selected, thus allowing Facebook to show the ad wherever they deem suitable for your campaign. Locations might be on Instagram, News Feeds, mobile or desktop users, Messenger apps, etc. To narrow down to precise locations, which I personally recommend, you should select the next button Edit Placements. This will help you to choose exactly where on Facebook platforms you want your ads to show. Editing placement also allows you the option to preview how your ads will look like in any of the precise locations you select.

The last parameter in the Ad Set is the Budget & Schedule. This is where you define how much you are willing to spend on the campaign and schedule how the budgeted amount would be spent. Thereby let us assume your entire budget is ₦200,000 for the campaign. And as seen in our example on the image, ₦4,975 out of this lump is budgeted to be spent daily. That means the ad campaign will last for just about 40 days before the ₦200,000 will be consumed. If for instance you are billed ₦2 per impression, say page view, it means daily Facebook will show your ad to approximately 2,488 persons per day among the audience you have specified. That will translate to about 102,000 views by the end of the campaign.

Facebook Ad

The ad is actually the text, image or the audiovisual content that you want your audience to see on Facebook when they are browsing on the news feed or wherever on Facebook, Instagram or other platforms. You may have a good business or product to promote, get a very good custom audience that needs your product or service, but if your ad fails to capture their interest, the whole campaign objective will be defeated. Ads need to be well crafted to capture people’s attention in order to make them to click and buy on your website, fill a lead form or do whatever the objective of the ad campaign might be.

As can be seen in the image above, after producing your ad image or video, you are expected to upload it by clicking the image icon indicated at arrow 1. At the Media section (indicated by arrow 2) you can modify the image or video to your taste. You can even use the uploaded images to make a video ad which has proven to be more effective in recent times.

In Text & Links (indicated by arrow 3), this is where you put the primary text which is a short description of the promotion that will serve as a call to action for the ad to be clicked. This primary text is very important and needs to be motivating because it serves to complement the ad image or video. Then by the side of it in Mobile News Feed (indicated by arrow 4), you will observe a preview of how the ad will look like during placement. This preview helps you to modify your text and image accordingly.

The last section, Tracking, as seen in the image above helps you to track the conversion of your ad in the Facebook Ads Manager along with performance data of how your ad is doing. In this section you will also see another important tool in Facebook which is the Facebook Pixel (highlighted in green box). This is an analytics tool that you install on your website which allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. The Facebook Pixel can be used to ensure your ads are shown to the right people, drive more sales and to measure results. A follow up article on this will discuss more on Facebook Pixel and how to install it on your website to track results.

When all these are successfully implemented and you observe the income on your business grow, you will come to appreciate the power of the social media as a quick avenue to reaching your business prospects.

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