This is an easy to follow blueprint for using Facebook Advertising to boost your lead generation and sales. In the social media world, Facebook is the big kahuna with almost 2 billion active users each month and about 1.2 billion users daily.

Yeah, you read that right…

It means that on any given day, about 1/7th of the planet’s population will log into Facebook!

Those stats are mind-boggling.

No matter what niche you’re in, the audience that you want to reach with your online business and blog is on Facebook. And this article is going to teach you how to get your own little slice of that pie so that you get a steady flow of quality traffic to your site.

Think of Facebook as a really big traffic store where you can just go and buy affordable traffic any time you want using Facebook Ads. Even with an investment of as little as $5 per day, you could grow your traffic reliably and predictably in no time at all.

A lot of successful people in Internet marketing use Facebook ads to put their message in front of their ideal audience in order to grow their traffic, grow their list, and ultimately grow their revenue.

Gone are the days when Facebook Ads were optional and viewed by most as something that the ‘big boys’ did.

Now if you want to compete in your market, this is something that you’re going to have to do because like it or not, when it comes to traffic, we now live in a world where you have to pay to play.

Yes, you can always get your traffic organically (eventually) but if you want a way that is instant and predictable, then this is a great way to do it.

5 Reasons You Should Use Facebook Ads For Your Business or Blog

Being able to run paid traffic is a necessity for online businesses these days whether big, small or just getting started, and most of the action is happening on Facebook.

There are tons of reasons why businesses and brands invest money and time into Facebook Ads.

Here are 5 reasons why you need to be in on this too:

1. Instead of relying on whatever traffic Google deems you’re worthy of, using Facebook Ads puts you in the driver’s seat and you decide on the quality and quantity of traffic to your site. It’s also extremely affordable compared to other alternatives such as Google Adwords.

2. Using Facebook Ads allows you to put your lead magnets and blog content in front of your ideal audience who are more likely to respond to what you have to offer.

3. Facebook Ads are the quickest and more reliable method of building a blog or online business from scratch.

4. Using Facebook Ads brings all the vital components of your online business together to help you discover the right product/market fit. This gives you a firm foundation for monetization (more than most other bloggers and online business owners out there).

5. You get full control over who sees your content as well as what they actually see. This means that you can laser target your content marketing instead of letting visitors scatter aimlessly all over your blog or website.

With the immense customization options that Facebook Ads offers, you will have total creative control over your ad campaigns. The targeting and retargeting options are just amazing.

Whether you want to target single moms living near Soho who like yoga, or if you want to target people who are already connected to your business or Facebook page, you can do both.

Facebook Ads give you a variety of cool, creative ways for you to target and reach your perfect audience. Instead of playing the hit-and-miss SEO game, with Facebook Ads you know for certain that what you’re doing will have an impact.

Even if one idea that you have doesn’t work, it’s still a fast pivot to the next one.

This is especially important when starting an online business or blog from scratch. If you have no platform to springboard from, then you should definitely be using Facebook Ads from the very start.

Also, Facebook Ads are connected to Instagram Ads which means that you can run both of them in a single campaign and connect to audiences on both social networks.

Now, on to the main stuff:

Facebook Ad Blueprint for Beginners: Your First Campaign

Step #1 – Develop Your Strategy

You need to have your strategy in place even before you start looking at the Facebook Ads Manager.

If you skip this step, you will be swept over by the sheer number of options which will result in you creating an ad campaign which isn’t focused on anyone in particular and doesn’t actually target anybody useful.

Before creating a campaign, ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the products or services that I’m promoting specifically?
• Who is the ideal audience that I want to target?
• Are they a cold or warm audience?
• How are they going to use the product?
• What objectives do they have, and what are their pain points?
• What stage of the funnel are they in?
• What is the main goal of my campaign?
• Do I want brand awareness, leads, site traffic, or something else?

Having a strategy and a goal of what you’re trying to achieve will help you to create strong ads, so make sure that you first develop your game plan.

Step #2 – Choose An Objective

Facebook optimizes ad placements based on the objective you set, so choosing the right objective is vital to the success of your campaign. The right objective can even lower your CPC and improve your results.

Choose an Objective From the Following:

• Reach
• Brand Awareness
• Traffic
• App Installs
• Engagement
• Video views
• Messages
• Lead generation
• Catalog Sales
• Conversions

Select an objective that aligns with your underlying goals most cohesively.

For example, if you are running a video campaign designed to drive sales, then choose the option for ‘conversions’ rather than the one for ‘video views’.

Yes, you may want video views, but obviously not at the expense of getting more conversions.

Step #3 – Target Your Ideal Audience

When creating your ad campaign you should have a very strong idea of the type of audience you want to target, and now is the time for fleshing that out.

In order to do this effectively, you can use:

• Custom Audiences:

This allows you to target users on your email list or those who took specific actions on your site, on your Facebook, or on your Instagram business profile.

• Lookalike Audiences:

With Lookalike Audiences, you can replicate qualities from your custom audience:

• Demographic Targeting
• Location Targeting
• Interest or Behavior Targeting

• Connection Targeting:

You can use this to determine whether or not you want your ads shown to people who aren’t connected with your brand.

Step #4 – Choose Ad Placement

The next step is to choose where you want your ad to be displayed.

At the ad set level, you can choose the placement, apps, and devices that you want your Facebook Ad to be displayed on. You have a choice between desktop only, mobile only, and both mobile and desktop.

There are also multiple options available to you on Facebook and several on Instagram as well as the audience network.

If the ad you choose to run is an Instagram Story Ad, you can only use that placement, otherwise, you can select almost all of the placement options when running your ads.

Of course, that is not to say that you should.

You can disable and enable certain ones according to your needs.

Step #5 – Setting Your Budget

Now it’s time to choose your budget and schedule your ads, as well as to select a method of optimization.

You can choose from a daily budget or a lifetime budget, and your ads can either run indefinitely or you can schedule certain start and end dates for them.

There’s even an option for ‘day parting’ which allows you to run ads only on certain days or at certain times.

This stage is where you can also choose whether or not you want your ads optimized.

Facebook has already made this easier by automatically setting things up for you. I would recommend only going in to manually update them if you have familiarized yourself with the platform and have a good reason for doing so.

Having said that, you can change what you’re bidding on (for example, impressions or link clicks) and you can also choose whether you want your ad budget spent as quickly as possible, or if you want it spread out over time.

Step #6 – Choose the Ad Format

Facebook has a variety of amazing ad formats that you can choose from including:

• Video Ads
• Single Image Ads
• Carousel Ads (these allow you to show multiple pictures and/or videos)
• Canvas ads
• Collections (these open up to become a full-screen mobile experience)

Each of these ad types has its own unique benefits, but the ones that typically have the highest CTR rates and engagement are carousel ads and video ads.

Don’t Forget the Details

At the bottom of the creative section, there are some small details that most people miss. They include multiple sections for placing copy, as well as stuff like URL descriptions and CTAs.

They are important and you should use each one of them.

For example, being able to use the right copy in the correct places will make all the difference to your campaigns and the CTA button will help to drive conversions.

Step #7 – Monitor Your Ads

Now that you’ve started your campaigns, it’s time to monitor them very carefully. You may start to see increases in CPC of some campaigns when the frequency gets high, while others may start out with a CPC that is significantly higher than you would expect.

Some of your ad campaigns just might not perform the way you expect.

It happens…

The Ads Manager shows you all the details of your active campaigns and you can carefully watch the most important metrics such as the CPC, relevance scores, frequency, and the number of actions that are taken.

Facebook also has a split testing tool that you can use.

It’s not perfect and it has some limitations but it’s pretty useful for beginners. It’s particularly great for split testing ad strategies, although, you will have to test your ad’s creative aspects manually.

Facebook makes it super easy to split-test your audience, ad placement, and ad delivery.

After you’ve chosen your objective you can just click on the ‘split-test’ box. At the ad set level, you can select whatever it is that you want to split test, after which, you’ll see the option for creating your A & B criteria.

For those with big budgets, if you want to aggressively split-test your campaign, it might be a good idea to use third-party tools such as AdEspresso which lets you create ads from right within the tool and you can input multiple descriptions, headlines, and images which they will then mix and match up for you.

Final Thoughts on Using Facebook Ads for Beginners

A lot of people find Facebook Ads to be intimidating, but it’s actually an exceptional platform that is easy to use once you get the hang of the basics.

Yes, there are a lot of options to choose from, and sometimes the more research you do, the more overwhelmed you feel because there are just too many so-called online marketing experts touting their growth hack strategy as the best one to choose.

But if you’re new to Facebook Ads, your best bet is to keep it simple.

Just make sure that you have a plan before you jump in, and you will find that the process for creating campaigns becomes much easier. And once you become familiar with the platform, it won’t seem so overwhelming.

Follow this guide and set up your first campaign to boost your lead generation and sales today.

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published June 14th 2018