Getting Started With Facebook Advertising
Facebook ads can be a valuable marketing tool for your estate sale company. Here, we will break the ad creation process down into five simple steps.
- Defining Your Goal and Brainstorming
- Setting Your Objective
- Choosing Your Audience
- Setting a Budget
- Tackling the Ad Creative
Defining Your Goal and Brainstorming
To begin, brainstorm and define your goals: what do you want to do with your advertising? Defining a goal will help you decide the who, what, when, where, why, how, and cost it will take to achieve that goal. This step may take some time up front, but will save time once you start the process of creating the ad.
A well-defined goal is one that is measurable. E.g. “I want 100 more followers on my Facebook page.” “I want 75 more visitors to my website.” “I want 15 new leads this month.”
Once you've defined your goal and brainstormed, you're ready to log into your account and create your Facebook ad. Remember, you are creating an ad that will help you achieve your goal.
Setting Your Objective
Choosing an objective is the first step to physically creating your ad. To start, log into Facebook and click the down arrow menu button and click the “create ads” button. This takes you to the first step of the Facebook ad manager.
Next, select the objective that will best help you reach your defined goal. There are three main objectives that you will most likely use: engagement, brand awareness, and traffic. Engagement objectives are about getting users to interact with your content. Brand awareness places your ads in front of new customers. Traffic drives users to your website or sale ad.
Once you have chosen the appropriate objective, enter your campaign name at the bottom of the page. You are now ready to set your target audience.
Choosing Your Audience
Facebook lets you choose who will see your ads. This is the one of the most powerful tools of Facebook. The key is to reach the right audience based on your goal. There are four main areas to consider when selecting your audience: custom audience, demographics, and detailed targeting.
Custom Audiences: The custom audience area is a more advanced Facebook feature for targeting. You will probably not use this for your first ad. The custom audience section lets you upload customer email addresses, phone numbers, app IDs, and/or Facebook user IDs to create your audience for your ad. If you use this feature, be sure to respect your customers’ privacy when uploading their data.
Demographics: You can target your ad by homing in on a specific location, or on other user characteristics such as age, gender, and spoken language.
Detailed Targeting: This where you can select your audience based on their interests, behaviors, and other more detailed options. For example, you might want to target an audience based on their interests in estate sales and antiques. Maybe you have vinyl records available at your next sale. You could target individuals with an ad about records, if they have shown an interest in them on Facebook. This, combined with location, allows you to reach a very specific, targeted audience with your ad.
The “audience size” box on the right hand side of the page will give you an overview of your selected audience. The “estimated daily results” will tell you how many people Facebook believes you could reach with a high enough budget, based on your selected parameters.
Once you have selected your audience, remember to click the “save this audience” box to save your audience for future use. This will speed up the ad creation process in the future.
Placements: Here you can choose where you would like your ad to be shown. You can leave this set to “automatic placements,” or choose the “edit placements” option for better customization. If you select “edit placements,” you can choose where your ad will be shown on Facebook, Instagram, the Audience Network, and/or Facebook Messenger.
Setting Your Budget
Facebook allows you to chose a budget based on a daily amount or a lifetime amount. (The lifetime being the amount of time you wish to run the ad.)
Select a budget you are comfortable with. The “estimated daily results” box will give you an overview of how many people could potentially see your ad based on the amount of your budget.
Tackling the Ad Creative/Message
The ad creative/message area is where you will determine how your Facebook ad will look to the public. You will be given several options for how the ad creative page may look based on your selected objectives, but the differences between them will be minimal. If you are creating a new ad from scratch, you will be given the option to insert the title and ad verbiage. If you are using an existing post as an ad, Facebook will pull the post information so you do not have to recreate it.
Keep your goal in mind when putting together your ad creative. The creative should entice the viewer to do something. The “something” should be based around what helps you achieve your company goal.
Once you have finished your Facebook ad creative, it is now time to submit your ad to Facebook for approval. Once the ad has been approved, it will start being served to the audience you had selected.