Targeted Facebook Ads Campaign Part 1

Your small business can reach beyond likes and shares to turn your social media following into leads and sales.

Many small business owners use Facebook Business Pages to connect directly with customers. 

But Facebook isn’t just for posts, shares and likes. Facebook Ads give small businesses the power to target ads to potential customers among Facebook’s 1.71 billion users.

1. What are Facebook Ads?

Facebook Ads are “advertisements that can appear in users’ News Feeds on both desktop and mobile and also in the right column of Facebook on desktop. 

Their content is targeted based on the users’ behavior on Facebook, Facebook determines the best audience to target with ads based on pages that people like, links they click on, their demographic information and their location.

2. Do Facebook Ads Generate Leads and Sales?

When done right, Facebook Ads are “extremely effective” for generating leads and sales.

If you properly target your Facebook Ads, serve up relevant content, and make it easy for the customer, you’ll find success.

If you are targeting the right people, you will be effective in generating leads.

With Facebook, you have control over who is going to see your ad. 

They’re effective because you have that control and, on Facebook, you have 1.71 billion people at your fingertips.

3. What Should Your Goals Be with Your Facebook Ads?

You want to use Facebook Ads as a way to get people who are interested in your product to start engaging with you.

Once a Facebook user likes your page and begins interacting with your company on Facebook —leaving reviews, liking posts or commenting—you’d then want to use ads that get them to visit your website.

Facebook offers different types of ads for different marketing objectives. From your Facebook for Business account, enter the Ads Manager dashboard. 

What you’ll see is a collection of different marketing objectives organized under three different stages in customer decision-making: the awareness stage, the consideration stage and the conversion phase, where they actually make a purchase!

4. What Are the Different Types of Facebook Ads?

  • Decide which of the following describes the end goal of your Facebook advertising, and choose which ads option best suits your needs and budget:
  • People becoming aware of their purchase options:
  • Boost your posts (raise likes and comments on your posts)
  • Promote your page (get more people to like your page)
  • Reach people near your business
  • Increase brand awareness
  • People considering where to make a purchase:
  • Send people to your website
  • Get installs of your app
  • Raise attendance at your event
  • Get video views
  • Collect leads for your business
  • People ready to make a purchase:
  • Increase conversions on your website
  • Increase engagement in your app
  • Get people to claim your offer
  • Promote a product catalog

Within that, you can also have different placements, within Facebook’s News Feed, on the desktop side rail, on the mobile app, on Instagram, and on their Audience Network of different apps.

5. Which Businesses Do Best Using Facebook Ads?

Facebook Ads can work well for nearly every type of small business.

Facebook gives you access to 1.71 billion people–people of every age, of different walks of life, from different places. Why wouldn’t you tap into this audience as a business owner?

But just having access to that many social media users doesn’t guarantee success. 

You must know which of those users are likely to be interested in your products or services. As a business owner, you need to know who is your audience. That’s the golden ticket.

6. How Does a Small Businesses Determine Which People to Target with Facebook Ads?

Know your customer—this is the cardinal rule of Facebook Ad targeting. To figure out your target customers, ask yourself these questions, advised Cameron:

  • What am I selling?
  • Who will buy it?
  • What is my customer profile?
  • What unique attributes do my customers have?

“Then browse all the different targeting categories Facebook offers advertisers and piece it together. 

How accurate you are in targeting the right customers will determine how successful your ads are, he added.

Targeting options can be set around a seemingly endless combination of data available on Facebook users, including:

  • age
  • gender
  • location
  • interests
  • employer
  • job title
  • consumer profile
  • operating system
  • insurance status
  • credit history
  • language
  • keywords

If you can get a targeted, niche audience and serve them a message that’s relevant to their interests, you can be very successful.

For example, a shuttle service, is advertising a party bus route from Long Island to MetLife Stadium targeted towards New York Jets fans. “We’re selling out every weekend spending just $15 a day on ads.”

Should You Target a Big Audience or a Small Audience?

Businesses should focus on a happy medium when deciding the scope of their targeting.

The larger the audience, the more competition you’ll have. 

Too large of an audience, and you won’t get enough traction or engagement as your ad will not be shown enough.

If you target too narrow of a market however, you can miss out on potential leads in the spillover of you target market.

The best course is to ask yourself the following questions and target accordingly:

Is your product or service limited to a location? Focus on geographical targets first.

Is your product or service only appealing to a certain age bracket? Focus on age demographics first.

Can Your Company Afford Facebook Ads on a Small Marketing Budget?

Businesses with small advertising budgets should stick with boosting their posts or promoting their pages to increase the number of interactions, recommended Sykes.

You can spend as little as $5 to get more engagement with these ads. 

Facebook allows you to set a per-day ad budget or set a lifetime budget, which means your ad runs until that set budget is reached.

back to top