This blog is not intended to be a comprehensive how-to on creating Facebook advertising campaigns, but a guide to the strategy behind making a successful one and keeping your housework under control as you go.
Before you get started you need certain things in place to ensure your campaign is set with the end goal in mind, and to make it easy to identify your key performance indicators (KPIs) and areas for improvement whilst reporting.
Those things include:
Understanding your audience – buyer personas
Filing system – naming conventions for the campaign and ad-sets for ease of use
Having a clear budget
Knowing your key performance indicators – for tweaking ads later
Reporting structure – what to look out for
Tip: With housework in mind, a proper filing system will keep the whole campaign tidy and easy to refer back to, repeat or report on. Naming the campaign and ads comes further down the page, but naming your notes and files in your documents is equally important.
Get your strategy down
Aims – what do you want to achieve?
Audience – who are you engaging with?
Tools – Facebook ads targeting
Content – videos, professional images, 100% optimised landing pages
Resources – financial and time budgets, who will manage the campaign
Measure – analytics and comparison to KPIs
Review – knowing what to tweak for performance
Tip: Create an infographic or flow chart for your office wall. Use sticky notes or a white board so you can move elements around and take a photo of it. Just make it clear and easy to refer to.
Basic structure of a Facebook advertising campaign
The Facebook ad campaign structure is like a family tree. Starting with the campaign at the top, you can choose multiple ad sets and multiple adverts for each ad set, all under one campaign.
Campaign - Aim: To convert visitors to the Facebook page
Ad set – Goal: to convert visitors into more staff. Goal: to convert visitors into more clients
Ad – Buyer Persona: One for each type of person. For example, staff: fully qualified, trainee, college apprentice. Clients: large corporate, SME, age, gender
Tip: How you name the campaign, ad sets and ads at this point will help you review and edit each one within Facebook Ads Manager. For example, as an agency, Push Start Marketing’s naming convention goes, campaign: client, ad set: client - aim (Christmas promo/page followers) and the ads: client – aim - buyer persona.
Buyer personas – knowing your audience
Anyone in advertising, social media management, or content and copywriting will tell you, knowing your audience is key to success.
Here’s where the buyer persona will make or break your campaign, so nailing this early on is vital. We have created a template buyer persona for you to download and duplicate to get you started.
Tip: When creating your audience in Facebook ads, name your audience as campaign – persona. Again, this is a little housework you can do now that will make your life so much easier down the line.
The basics to understand about your audience include:
Gender
Age
Family make-up
Job role
Industry
Work / home issues
Social media platforms used
Decision maker?
Buyer journey stage: Awareness | Consideration | Decision | Action
Information consumption: Readers | Watchers | Listeners
Preferred type of information obtained: Video | Subtitles | Text | Images
Where is the information obtained? Mobile | Desk | Email
Interests to target
You will need to spend time getting these personas right. It can be useful to give them a name rather than a number – for example, think of a person you know who you would like to gain as a staff member or client, base your personas around them and call it by their name.
This guide is designed to help your campaign run with ease, and with the right knowledge of your audience and the right filing system in place it should work well for you. You will always need to return to the campaign for success reporting, so if you have any stories to share on how you have managed your own Facebook advertising campaign, we’d love to hear them!