Facebook Advertising: How To Get Started
Facebook advertising can be a great way to drive sales and make money for your business. The clicks aren’t very expensive and your targeting options can get really specific depending on your product.
We’re talking so specific that you can advertise to male college sophomores in a specific city if you want to. Same goes for female college juniors in a different city.
You get the idea. It can get even better than that, but let’s focus on some basic points for getting started that can set you on the right path and hopefully earn your business some sales here.
First, let’s look at examples of a few companies that are crushing it with Facebook advertising.
Facebook advertising example: The Penny Hoarder
The Penny Hoarder was able to grow significantly by using Facebook. Their founder, Kyle Taylor, has even been pretty open about the whole thing in the past with guest articles like this one in Entrepreneur magazine. How much did they grow with it? Well, the company just sold for about $100 million at the end of 2020.
A lot of the growth was due in large part to them being able to target very precisely with advertising. If you want some ideas on the kind of Facebook advertising they do, you can see their active campaigns in their page’s ad library on Facebook.
A lot of the ads are simple and cater to large groups of people. It’s things like “If you have more than $1000 in your checking account, do this now” or “If you’re 50+, make these money moves asap.”
Their conversions come in the form of people clicking on affiliate links and doing things like signing up for services or products they promote.
Another Example: LDS Man
Another example of a business leveraging the Facebook advertising tools is the eCommerce website LDS Man. This is a slightly older example, because this website was grown using Facebook, and sold a couple years ago in 2018. Nevertheless, what the site’s founder did is still very applicable today and you should consider using some of the same strategies.
In a nutshell, Trevor Chapman, the founder, was highly motivated to get into a different line of work. He was at the office (or in the field) 12 hours a day and didn’t have much time for family. His solution was to use eCommerce, specifically selling viral products from China, to build another stream of income.
He found products through Alibaba and Aliexpress, which he then listed on a Shopify website that he set up. After investing $200 into highly targeted Facebook advertising, he was profitable over night.
It should be noted, though, that the first products he tried selling were pieces of religious artwork and those didn’t go anywhere. So, there was some trial and error.
In any case, he built up the site to $1 million in annual sales pretty quickly and sold it for $10 million not long afterward. He was also able to sell courses on how to do what he did.
There’s only one weird thing. If you try to go to their website now, it just says “Goodbye” and that’s it. Maybe the company who bought it didn’t do a good job running things. Huh.
Anyhow, here’s some important things to know for getting started:
There’s Two Facebook Advertising Dashboards
You can set up and run Facebook advertisements from two different places. One is called the Facebook Ad Manager and the other is the Facebook Business Suite. The business suite is recommended by Facebook’s marketing consultants but you can use either of them.
Your ads will be accessible from both of those dashboards one way or another.
You’ll Need to Choose A Goal
When you first start to create a Facebook advertisement, you will need to choose what your goal is. These can currently range from the following:
- Add to your advertising plan
- Get more people to contact
- More messages
- Get more website visitors
- Boost a post
- Boost an Instagram post
- Promote your page
- Get more leads
Some of those do overlap, like getting more leads and getting more website visitors. You might be collecting leads on your website (or prefer to) rather than on Facebook. One of those should end up working for you.
Choose Your Creative
You’ll need to choose engaging and hard-to-miss pictures for Facebook advertising. They actually give you access to Shutterstock photos right there so you don’t even need to pay for your own subscription. That was a mistake I made a while back myself when I accidentally signed up for a year of that service and shelled out about $400 some dollars.
Clicking “browse media” during your ad creation process will bring you to this window, where you can search their stock images. Alternatively, you can upload your own.
The Facebook Advertising Hook
Make sure that whatever you choose as your hook sentence really compels people to sign up for your site. It’s crucial that whatever text you put into an ad is brief, too.
The average attention span for most people these days is about 8 seconds. So, you won’t be able to stick a paragraph with a bunch of information or even more than two sentences. Two might be pushing it, so try to keep them short and sweet.
Yes, clickbait-y type stuff does still work.
Leverage Facebook’s Marketing Consultant Program
A few months ago, Facebook launched a program where they pair you up with a marketing consultant. The consultant holds 3 phone calls with you to help collaborate on creating a solid advertisement that gets results.
When I went through the program, I paid for $100 of ads and was given a credit for another $200. As far as my results went, I did get a lot of impressions and clicks.
My cost-per-click was pretty good, too. If you set a budget of about $10 per day then that should be enough to start seeing results (or not and make adjustments) quickly.
Facebook Advertising: Final Thoughts
You can run a ton of different types of ads on Facebook. If you find the right strategy, it can pay dividends for your business or whatever you are trying to promote. Following this guide should get you up and running with your ads in no time. Just make sure you come up with some good creative, a great image, and that whatever you promote has the potential to convert once people land there.