3 Things to Do Before Getting Started with Facebook Ads

If you want to be successful with your Facebook Ad campaign, it’s critical that you take certain steps before its launch. Here are the three things you need to do before getting started with Facebook Ads.

1. Define Your Goal

How can you tell if your Facebook Ad campaign was successful?

Unless you have clear goals of what you’d like the campaign to accomplish, you probably won’t know if and when your campaign achieved it. Plus, different businesses will have different goals.

Before you create and launch a Facebook Ad campaign, you need to define your goals.

While you might measure the success of a Facebook post on your personal page by the number of Likes, Shares, and Comments it receives, those metrics are not what’s most important to your bottom line.

The ultimate outcome of your Facebook Ad campaign should be to generate leads and sales, and your goal should be related to this. Goals such as hitting a certain number of conversions or sales related to how much you invested into the campaign will help give you a clearer picture of what’s working (and equally important, what’s not working).

There is some benefit to engagement-only campaigns. However, unless this is part of a larger leads and sales strategy with a clear plan, odds are high that you’ll end up frustrated with your actual ROI on Facebook ads if you only focus on engagement.

2. Identify Your Audience

Clearly, you would waste a ton of money if you created a Facebook Ad campaign that targeted everyone. It’s also impossible to truly sell every Facebook user. Not everyone is a potential buyer for your product or service.

For example, imagine that you’re the owner of a high end holistic anti-aging beauty product line in New York City. Most of your customers are local, wealthy, women in their 40s and 50s.

It would be a waste of money to broadcast your Facebook Ad campaign to all New Yorkers or even to all women. Instead, you need to be honest about who actually buys your product and make sure that’s reflected in your campaign targeting.

For example, in this case you could choose an audience of professional working women, making over $250,000 per year, who live in New York City, and are interested in holistic health.

When identifying your target audience, consider the following:

Demographics- age, race, gender, geographic location
Interests- What else do they like to do?
Online Behaviors- What other websites do they visit online?

3. Choose the Ad Style that Matches Your Goal

When you break it down, there are really two primary types of Facebook Ads.

One ad is an Engagement Ad, where your goal is to start a relationship with prospective customers and engage with your current followers. The other ad is the Direct Response Ad. Direct response ads are ads that ask a prospect to take an action as part of your sales process. These ads have some type of call to action such as “learn more” or “call now”.

Between these two types of ads, there are 11 Facebook Ad styles that target different aspects of these goals. You must decide what Facebook Ad style best meets your goals and needs.

Taking these steps represent just part of what your business can do to prepare for a successful Facebook Ad campaign. As with any campaign, start small and run a test first so you can make adjustments as necessary.