A basic guide to setting up social media ads

By Marc Clifford

It’s a common question I hear every day: “Are ads for me?”

Well, in short, yes, ads probably are for you, unless you’re advertising something prohibited by social media platforms, like firearms, narcotics, or adult services.

Promoting your company’s products or services through social media and search engines is one of the most highly attributable forms of marketing, with the lowest costs. There are at least 1.6 billion active monthly users across Facebook alone, and you can reach hundreds of thousands of those for a small investment.

You can track where each customer has come from, what actions they take within your brand, and re-target them anywhere on the internet. You can reach new cold audiences, send traffic to your pages, and generate sales effortlessly all from your Facebook page.

“So, where do I begin?”

It may not be as difficult as you think. In this article, I’m going to explain, step by step, how you can set up your first social media campaign, which can help generate revenue for your business.

STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

Who does your product or service benefit? What issue does it solve for them? And where does that audience sit?

For example, let’s say your product is a gift box for bridesmaids. This product is most likely going to benefit recently engaged females looking for gift ideas for their bridesmaids. Your product solves the time and creative issues they may have when thinking about these gifts. Now, where does that audience sit? The average age for brides in the UK is mid–late 20s, which makes up a large segment of the 45 million active social media users in the UK. As a gift box is largely an aesthetic product, your audience is more likely to convert from visual sites, such as Instagram and TikTok.

So, now we know you want to be using Instagram to target recently engaged women, aged 24–35 and based in the UK.

STEP 2: SETTING UP YOUR AD ON YOUR SELECTED SOCIAL MEDIA SITE

Facebook and Instagram are managed as one platform, which now comes under the ‘Meta’ brand. To advertise here, you’ll need: a business or personal profile on both platforms. If you’re advertising through Instagram, you’ll need to change your profile to a business account. If you’re using Google, you’ll need to create your advertising account through Google Ads Manager.

You’ll then need to create a Business Manager. You can do this by heading to business.facebook.com and clicking ‘Create’ in the top right-hand corner. It’s a quick and easy process to do, and from here you’ll be able to manage your entire business presence on the Meta network, including your domain, pages, inboxes, ad accounts, and tracking.

Once your Business Manager is set up, you can create your ad account. It’s important to note, you can only have one per business. This is where you’ll manage all of your ad campaigns.

Key Checklist: • Payment information • Linked to your website • Domain verified with Facebook • Pixel installed on your website (this helps track your users)

STEP 3: SETTING UP YOUR CAMPAIGNS

Now it’s time to set up your campaign, push it in front of your audience, and start getting sales.

You can choose one of six campaign objectives for your ads: • Awareness • Traffic • Engagement IMPORTANT: with your location, you want to select people living in this location, or you’ll be wasting money targeting people who’ve been passing through and won’t convert.

You can then browse by demographic for ‘recently engaged couples’ and add that to your targeting.

Finally, you need to create your visuals and copy for your ad. The correct size for a Facebook ad image is 1080px x 1080px. It needs to be a clear on-brand image of your product that shows its function/purpose/content.

Your text should do the same: describe what the product does, who it’s for, and include a clear call to action. The website link should ALWAYS go to the product page of your website.

And there you have it, your first advertising campaign.

It’s important to note that social media ads are a lot more comprehensive than this, but this is the foundational building block of advertising for your business. If you want to know more, have your ads managed for you, or even learn how to do it yourself, you can contact me on the channels below.

• Leads • App promotion • Sales If you choose ‘Sales’, Facebook will automatically place these in front of people more likely to purchase. At this point, you should name your campaign and set the budget. To begin with, I’d recommend starting with £5 per day as a minimum for cold audiences and 10% of your monthly ad budget for warm audiences. Then, you’re going to choose your audience. In ‘demographics’, select your target gender (female), age (24–35), and location (UK).