How to Use Facebook Ads for Your Business Marketing Campaign

Facebook’s advertising strategy can become an important part of your business marketing campaign. The self-service option for placing ads on Facebook offers many targeting options, such as being able to reach engineering students at Ivy League schools or engaged women between the ages of 21 and 35. This figure shows Facebook’s advertising launch pad from which you can create a new ad or manage an existing ad campaign.

Facebook offers an incredibly sticky — meaning users come back often — site for advertisers. In fact, with a 50-percent daily return rate, consumers spend more time on Facebook’s News Feed pages than they do on Yahoo!’s, MSN’s, and MySpace’s combined. Facebook has even surpassed Google as the most popular site based on the number of minutes spent on it.

You can place three types of ads directly through Facebook:

A traditional text ad.
A display ad, which includes text and an image.
A unique Facebook engagement ad, which needs to be ordered via a Facebook advertising sales rep and requires spending at least $30,000.

Facebook ads appear in the far-right column of the user’s page in the ad space. Up to four ads can appear in the ad space, but you can’t control the order in which your ad appears.

Targeting your Facebook ad audience

Facebook focuses its advertising strategy around its vast member data, allowing advertisers to target an audience segment precisely. In fact, Facebook offers advertisers the ability to reach their exact audience — from a broad demographic, to a geographic preference, and to a more granular interest.

Here are some ways that you can find the right audience for your Facebook ad:

Targeting by location: Facebook allows for precise location targeting, based in part on your profile data and the IP address of the computer you log in with. Most cities in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. allow you to expand the targeting to include surrounding areas of 10, 25, and 50 miles, if you want to reach specific regional markets.
Targeting by interests and likes: Facebook leverages its members’ profile data to allow advertisers to drill down to specific keywords. These keywords represent a member’s interests. Topics that users are passionate about — such as their musical tastes, television preferences, religious views, and so on — can be used to further micro-target your audience.
Targeting by connections: You can target people already connected to your Facebook Page or connected to another Page of yours. You can also target ads only to people who aren’t already connected; therefore, your existing fans aren’t shown your ad. And you can target the friends of people who are already connected to your Page.

Setting your Facebook ad budget

Facebook employs a bidding structure for its advertising inventory based on supply and demand. If more advertisers want to reach a specific demographic, the ad typically has higher bids. The company also provides a suggested bid for you based on the approximate range of what other ads reaching this demographic have historically cost.

Here are some quick facts about Facebook ad costs:

Facebook’s ads are based on a closed bidding system; you can’t see what others pay for ads, nor can they see your bid.
Facebook provides a recommended bidding range when you create your ad and updates that range throughout the life of your campaign.
You can monitor your campaign to see whether the ad performs at your given bid.
You can set a daily maximum budget.

Your purchase strategy should be based, in part, on your goals. Facebook allows you to purchase ads based on two types of pricing:

Cost per click (CPC): With CPC, you pay each time a user clicks your ad. If your goal is to drive traffic to a specific page, paying based on CPC will probably be the best performer for you.
Cost per impression (CPM): With CPM, you pay based on how many users see your ad. If your objective is to get as many people within your target demographic to see the ad but not necessarily click through, ads based on a CPM basis may be your best option.

Test your ads on a CPM basis because using a CPM model allows you to identify the best performing ads and gives you a good idea of your cost per click. Therefore, when you run your campaign, you know the best model to purchase your ads.