10 Steps to Grow Sales with Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are a game-changer for boutique owners wanting to expand their audience and boost sales. With over 3.7 billion monthly active users, this social platform offers immense opportunities for sales growth. In fact, 89%(link opens in new tab/window) of businesses run Facebook ads as their primary advertising tool. In this blog we cover how to prepare for ad strategies and the TEN steps to create a Facebook ad.
Preparation is the key to success for any new endeavor, so we will begin the Facebook ad creation process with four marketing pillars that can lay a foundation for strategy and success.
Define Your Ad Goals
Before delving into creating Facebook Ads, it’s important to first define clear business objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic or boosting sales. As the sale season transitions from summer to fall, it's a great time to define your goals.
Know Your Audience
Facebook offers advanced features to target specific demographics and interests. To utilize this tool, you must know what demographic and age group is interested in your fashion products. Once identified, tailor your ads to resonate with their preferences to increase odds of higher engagement.
Use Compelling Visuals
In the crowded digital space, eye-catching visuals are key to garnering attention. Invest time and resources to create high-quality images and videos to show your products. Crafting concise and catchy ad content that communicates the key features or trends of your apparel products will also help to encourage users to act.
Measure, Measure, Measure
Analyzing the traffic or clicks your ad is generating is a must-do to measure the success of your ad strategy. Experiment with different creatives, images and placement to see what resonates best with your audience. Facebook offers many free measurement tools.
Now that we've covered the four pillars to building a marketing strategy, let's discuss the 10 steps to create an ad campaign on Facebook:
1. Create a Facebook Ads Manager
To use the Facebook Ads Manager(link opens in new tab/window), you need to first set up a Facebook Business Page (learn how to set one up here(link opens in new tab/window)). You cannot run ads through personal profiles. Part of the setup is creating a payment method, which is used by Meta to charge you for active ads. Think of the Ads Manage as the control center for your Facebook ads:
2. Create a New Campaign
Once logged into your Ads Manager, look for a performance dashboard where all of your campaigns, ad sets and ads will be listed, including any results they’ve driven. To create a new campaign, ad set, or ad through the Facebook Ads Manager, tab over to the type of ad you want. Note that Meta gives users two choices for buying type: Auction and Reservation.
Auctions offer more flexibility and choice for campaign objectives like daily or a lifetime. Ads can be placed on Facebook, Insta, Messenger, and other sites.
Reservation offers less flexibility but lets you plan your campaigns in advance. Ads can be placed on Facebook and Instagram. Reservation also offers frequency control. For a better understanding and clear difference between the two, read their help guide(link opens in new tab/window).
3. Select Campaign Objective
Facebook Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks(link opens in new tab/window), is designed around using campaign objectives, which gives Facebook an idea of your goals. Below are the options you can select from:
- Awareness – Raises awareness for your brand/products to boost customer reach
- Traffic – Directs traffic to your website, a social page or a specific landing page
- Engagement – Used for posts, websites, or any link to increase the conversion
- Focusing on leads – Influences actions, like making a purchase or learning more
- Sales – Influences people who are likely to make purchases
4. Name Your Campaign
Next, you can name the ad campaign to align with your business goals. For instance, name your campaign “XYZ Traffic,” with a brand name of “XYZ” and the objective is traffic.
5. Consider A/B Split Testing
Once you launch a campaign, you will need to check in on it, analyze performance and continue optimizing to see success. Simply put, A/B split testing can help you choose the right version of your ad and help you experiment with different images, text, ad placements and CTAs (call to action) to maximize ad performance and save budget! The screenshot below shows how to toggle on or off your AB test options:
6. Create an Ad Set
The next steps decide your budget, the audience you want to target and where you want your ad to appear (i.e., Facebook, Insta, Messenger). Budget is the maximum amount of money you set for the ad campaign. It can be scheduled daily or over the lifetime of the ad campaign. Here’s how they differ from each other.
- Daily budget. A daily budget means that Facebook will pace spending per day. Note that the minimum daily budget for an ad is $1.00 and must be at least 2x your CPC(link opens in new tab/window).
- Lifetime budget. If you desire to run an ad for a specified length of time, select the lifetime budget to have Facebook pace your spend over a certain time period.
Next, select your target audience from three filters: location, gender and language. Facebook also uses a new Meta Advantage+ audience feature to broaden the audience using AI to create an audience based on specific insights.
For each type of campaign objective (refer to step #3) there are a few sets of performance goals. I.e., the campaign objective below aims at driving traffic. Depending on what you select, the Ads manager gives various selections for performance goals — like maximizing the number of clicks or increasing the number of conversions.
7. Setup Ad and Format
This step allows you to choose an existing post or create a new ad using the ad setup option. Facebook also has a new creative mockup feature where advertisers can create a mockup of ads to test which type of ad suits their audience's needs.
8. Create your Ad.
The next step is to create my ad with graphics and descriptive text. You can choose either existing ones in your Facebook library or upload them from my computer or mobile device.
Here’s what else your Facebook ad includes:
- Primary text. Add up to 5 primary texts to use on your different ad placements
- Headline. Appears below the visual and is meant to grab the audience’s attention
- Description. Appearance of descriptions vary based on ad placements. Add the text here to give a detailed description of your ad copy.
- Call-to-action. Choose what action you want your audience to perform
9. Review and Publish Your Ad!
You are almost there! But rather than letting your excitement to finish get the best of your judgement, don't overlook the most important step of all -- conduct a thorough review of your draft ad. Once satisfied, simply (and happily) click the publish button!
10. Monitor your Ad’s Performance
The last and final step is to keep an eye on how your ad is doing! To get the results, look in two places: the Facebook Ads Manager and my marketing software. Here are some key metrics to look for:
- Performance, to customize results, reach and frequency
- Engagement, to customize metrics like Page likes and post engagement
- Videos, to increase the percentage of video viewed
- Website, to customize metrics for checkouts, payments, purchases, etc.
- Apps, offers metrics like app engagement, credit spends, mobile app actions, etc.
- Clicks, offers metrics like clicks, unique clicks, and CPC (cost per click)
- Settings, to customize metrics like start date, ad set name, ad ID, and objective
Facebook ads leverage a growing base of mobile users that allow businesses to post ads where they’re likely to find a prime audience for their products. This trend, together with Facebooks well-thought-out tools, is what makes Facebook ads so effective. So don’t delay, use the above steps to boost sales and cast the net wider on potential customers!