Facebook Ads — A Basic Understanding Of This Powerful Marketing Tool
By: Jarred Laros
Tags: Facebook Marketing, Facebook Ads, Marketing, Business, Digital Marketing

In today’s day and age where people around the world are spending more time on their digital devices than ever before — particularly their cell phones, tablets and laptops — it is essential for businesses of all sizes and in all industries to adapt and make changes to their marketing strategies with the implementation of targeted and optimised digital marketing campaigns.

The advertising product offered by Facebook — known as Facebook Ads — is without a doubt the most powerful marketing tool available to businesses today.

If your business is not making use of Facebook Ads and all that it offers, you are missing out on potentially increasing your customer base, revenue and bottom line exponentially at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing platforms such as radio, television, newspapers, magazines, billboards and flyers.

In a single sentence, the main reason Facebook Ads leaves traditional marketing platforms in the dust, is this: Facebook knows more about you, and 2.5 billion other individuals around the world, than anyone else does.

Read that statement again and think about what it means for your business.

I’ll tell you: It means that, as a business, you can use the data Facebook has and run adverts which are targeted towards very specific groups of people, thus ensuring you’re not wasting your marketing budget on showing ads to thousands of people who actually have no interest in the product or service you are selling.

You may be asking, what could Facebook possibly know about me, and all its other users?

Let’s start with the information you provide to Facebook when you sign up and as you use the platform:

Name

Gender

Age

City You Live In

Relationship Status

Family Members

Interests & Hobbies (based off all the pages you ‘like’ and the content you ‘share’.)

And lots more.

What about the information Facebook learns about you over time?

Your current location based on you checking into restaurants and events

What devices you use to log in to your Facebook profile.

Further interests based on the websites you visit from Facebook, videos you watch, etc.

Life events such as having a child or getting married.

And lots more.

That’s literally just the tip of the iceberg, we haven’t even gone into detail on Facebook’s pixel which is installed on most of the websites you visit these days (that’s a topic for an upcoming article.)

So, how do business’s actually access and use this information in their marketing campaigns?

For the purposes of this article, let’s use a fictional person as an example — we’ll name her Michelle. Michelle is a 24 year old female who lives in Somerset West. She enjoys a good gym session and playing tennis on the weekend. Michelle has recently gotten out of a relationship, resulting in her changing her relationship status on Facebook to ‘single.’

Let’s also come up with a fictional business — Urban Active Wear. Urban Active Wear sells stylish, fashionable gym clothing for men and women. They have an online store which sells its products directly to the public, and they have recently released a new line of gym vests with the following caption printed on the front: “Weights Over Dates”

Urban Active Wear has allocated some of its marketing budget towards a Facebook Ads campaign to promote the release of this new line of vests. (Smart move.)

Here’s what a sample Facebook Ads campaign might look like in this case:

Step 1: Choose Marketing Objective And Set A Budget

As you can see in the images below, Urban Active Wear wants to drive sales through their online store, which is why they’ve selected the ‘Conversions’ objective. They have also allocated a budget of R250.00 to this campaign — for now (this can always be increased or decreased over time.)

Conversion (Online Purchases) Objective Selected

Daily Budget Of R250.00

Step 2: Demographic Targeting

Here, Urban Active Wear has chosen to target females between the ages of 17 and 30 who live within a 35 mile radius of Cape Town, or a 25 mile radius of either Sandton or Durban.

Demographic Targeting

Step 3: Detailed Targeting

When arriving at the detailed targeting section of this campaign, Urban Active Wear decided to target people who express an interest in physical fitness, weight training, tennis and running. They then narrowed this targeting criteria by targeting people who are single.

Detailed Targeting

Step 4: Ad Creation

As you can see below, Urban Active Wear has created its first advert for this campaign, and it is now ready to be published. Urban Active Wear could run multiple adverts here, making use of differing headlines as well as different creatives — such as videos, various images, etc.

Example Of A Facebook Advert

Depending on how long Urban Active Wear runs this advert for, and what type of budget they land up spending on it, there is a decent chance Michelle might actually see the advert and she could possible land up making a purchase for herself! This is because she meets all of the targeting criteria which Urban Active Wear specified for this campaign.

What other marketing platform gives you the ability to target your ideal customer as accurately as Facebook Ads?

This is a very basic example of what a typical Facebook Ads campaign can look like. There’s a whole bunch of additional features and clever optimisation tactics you can use to ensure you’re getting the most out of Facebook Ads and seeing an increase in the bottom line for your business — after all, profit is all that matters at the end of the day.

If you have any questions or would like assistance with setting up your own Facebook Ads campaigns, feel free to get in touch with Level Up Media — we’ll happily tailor a solution to suit your needs and budget.