Facebook is the largest social network, with more than 1.15 billion active users worldwide. Without a doubt, one of the best options to advertise online. Of course, as in any advertising campaign, we must know our target well and be sure that it is mostly on this channel.

Planning campaigns and ads with strategy, is today one of the best channels to get your message to the ideal customer, directly and with reasonable budgets for SMEs.

Facebook Ads is the platform that makes this social network available for businesses to create and manage their ads, it has a very friendly and simple interface, anyone without much knowledge of systems or technology can operate it, but be careful! make effective advertising on Facebook goes beyond knowing how to use the tool, you will know to create strategic campaigns targeting clear goals. The objective of advertising on Facebook is to generate conversions, not just know how to use the tool.

What are the benefits of advertising on Facebook for your SME?

• Reach specific audiences that are focused on the world’s largest social platform.
• Your brand can reach a global audience, without borders. It is a channel that allows you to reach more people.
• Accessing this global market is much cheaper than in traditional mass media.
• It allows you to direct your message to the market niche that you are EXACTLY looking for.

Business objectives of advertising on Facebook

Facebook is an ideal channel to prospect, position and stimulate sales. The power to segment your advertising on Facebook makes the platform an ideal channel to reach the audience you are looking for by optimizing your budgets. These are its main objectives:

• Generate traffic and / or visits
• Generate calls to action
• Increase brand positioning
• Prospect
• Promote events
• Viralize videos
• Segment local target

Creating Facebook advertising is a strategic process. Advertising is not just designing and programming ads. It is very easy to get around this due to the simplicity of the Facebook Ads tool. What will work for you is the time you spend creating a correct strategy for each campaign, the rest is mere programming.

Advertising without results is not necessarily the fault of the medium in which you are advertising, in many cases, it is due to the lack of planning of a good advertisement, of a good campaign.

Types of advertising on Facebook

The Facebook advertising works in a similar way to Google Adwords as it also is based on the system of pay per click or pay per thousand impressions your ad receives. An impression is marked every time the ad is shown on Facebook.

The question you should ask yourself before creating a campaign is what does your business need? NEVER what campaign do I use?

The type of campaign is linked to an objective, take care that it is the one that YOUR business needs. You can promote URL’s, Fan Pages, Applications, Events, Places or Facebook URL’s. Ads are used to generate relevant traffic, increase the number of fans on Facebook or promote a specific event. You can hire them either by cost per click (CPC) or by cost per impression (CPM). You can set a maximum budget per day or for the total of the campaign, and the platform itself indicates the recommended bid price. If you are looking to generate traffic to a page, pay by CPC; if you want to give visibility to a brand, by CPM.

What kind of campaigns can you do on Facebook Ads?

There are three general objectives when choosing what type of advertising you want to hire on Facebook, and from there up to 14 different types of campaigns are derived:

1. Promote your publications:

It is used to promote a specific publication, whether you have published it before, or you can create a new one. These campaigns are ideal to activate and keep your fans up to date with your content, to increase your reach. Use it for important content.

This type of campaign can be useful for all lines of business, mainly those that produce valuable content or want to spread important news, promotional or your business.

• Promote your page:

Expand the audience of your page by getting more likes. It is an extraordinary way to connect with new clients with the profile you are looking for and to get to know your audience more.

Using Fan campaigns is a good idea for all types of business, as it is a very direct way to prospect ideal customers to get to know the brand. The key here is to segment very well so that the fans that arrive are the ones you need.

• Reach people who are close to your business:

Easily reach more people close to your business. You just have to indicate the address of your business and the area you want to reach, and your ad will be shown to as many people as possible on Facebook who reside in the selected area.

This type of campaign is ideal for local businesses, that is, those who want to visit them and locate where they are. Ideal for aesthetics, health and nutrition businesses, schools, retail stores, businesses, and businesses whose main market is the one that is close to its physical location.

• Improve brand recognition:

Reach the people most likely to pay attention to your ads to increase brand awareness.

• Attract people to your website:

Attract more people to your website from Facebook. When they click on your ad, you can direct them to any page on your website, including the online store.

The best practices are for companies that have websites optimized for CONVERSION, that is, they send traffic there to be able to capture leads (data). Ideal for Online Stores, Business Services, Commerce, Educational Institutions.

• Increase the installations of your application:

Use your app installs goal to get people to install the app.

• Increase the number of attendees to your event:

Inform people about a special event with a Facebook ad. When they see it, they will be able to participate in the event and even add it to their Facebook calendar.

These campaigns are to promote specific events, more of the type of meeting, party, training to internal communities, such as schools, inaugurations, cultural and artistic events. You can use this for courses or seminars if you accompany it with other campaigns.

• Increase video views:

Use the video views goal to get people to see your video.

• Generate leads for your business:

Facebook Lead Ads give people a fast and secure way to sign up for business information such as newsletters, offers, and quotes. Use this goal to create a form that will collect information from people, including newsletter sign-ups, price estimates, and follow-up calls.

If your objective is to gather contacts to follow up on sales, these campaigns are ideal. Shops and companies with sales teams or automated monitoring systems. Schools, Universities, Online Services. You must include a subscription incentive.

1. Increase conversions on your website:

Use the website conversion goal to increase valuable actions on your website.

1. Increase interaction with your application:

Use your app engagement goal to get more people to interact with your app.

1. Get people to request your offer:

Create special offers to attract more customers. You can offer discounts or other rewards. You decide how long the offer lasts, who can see it, how many people can request it, etc. Promote a product catalog. Create ads that automatically show products from your catalog according to the target audience.

They are ideal for local businesses / shops that offer tangible products with attractive discounts. For service businesses, they also work if what is being sold is easy to understand and does not require much explanation. For online product stores they can also work very well.

1. Promote a product catalog:

Create ads that automatically show products from your catalog according to the target audience.

1. Get people to visit your business:

Use the business visits goal to promote multiple locations to people nearby.

Keys to success of advertising on Facebook

There are basically two keys to the success of your advertising campaigns on Facebook that you must take care of.

• Your Ads: Format, Content, Copywrite, Quality, Emotion, Insights, Multimedia.
• Your Segmentation: Campaigns to correctly segmented audiences. Management of market niches.
• Advertising Segmentation.
• On Facebook, you can target your ads to the exact people you want to connect with. By targeting your ads, you can:
• Find the right clients on different devices, such as computers, cell phones and tablets.
• Convey relevant messages to specific people.
• Get the most out of your investment by reaching only the people you care about.
• You decide what audience you want to reach. You can choose the option or combination of options that best meet the needs of your business and help you reach the people you care about.

Most businesses do not take advantage of this fabulous tool due to lack of knowledge of their own customer or fear of reaching fewer people.

You can segment different by criteria:

• Basic Segmentation: Location | Age | Gender
• Advanced Segmentation: Interests | Behavior | Connections
• Custom Audiences: They visited your Web | They downloaded your App | Client list
• Similar Audiences: Fans | Clients | Custom

As criteria are selected, Facebook will indicate the approximate number of target audience that it has on the platform.

It is also possible:

• Select up to 25 countries or cities as the target audience for an ad.
• Segment by birthday date, so that the user only sees the ad on their birthday.
• Give preference only to people who have studied at a certain university.
• Only to Fans of your corporate page
• Only to people who are specifically NOT fans of your page

Take advantage of this segmentation tool , but do not restrict your target too much because you exhaust the possibilities, do not forget to always look at the market number that you can reach that Facebook tells you when you make this selection.