The Business Manager portal on Facebook is your go-to tool for creating an ad from scratch, rather than boosting a social media post, which requires you to publish the post on your feed ahead of time. This is a great way to clearly define your ad audience and ensure your advertisement gets in front of the right people at the right time.

Additionally, you can use the Business Manager portal to track and analyze results, such as reactions and engagements, to ensure your ad is working for you. If you’re ready to give it a try, follow these steps to learn how to create ads in Facebook Business Manager. 

How to Create Ads in Facebook Business Manager

1. Set an Objective

When you create a new ad, you first must choose your objective. For most ads, you will choose the “Consideration” option and identify what goal you want to accomplish via the ad. “Traffic” sends people to a specific webpage, “Engagement” encourages post engagement, “Lead Generation” enables you to collect email addresses in return for a free resource, “Message” encourages people to message you directly, and so on. Once you choose your objective, you will get to choose an audience.

2. Define and Create Your Audience

Creating an audience for an ad is the same process as creating an audience for a boosted post. You can create a new audience or use a saved audience that you’ve already created. 

To create and save an audience, go to the “Audiences” tab in your Business Manager portal. Define your audience and save that group with a title that makes sense, such as “Women’s Bible Study Tennessee” or “Eastern Virtual Event.” Now, instead of creating a new audience every time you boost a post or create an ad, you can choose a target audience from your saved list. 

You can define your audience by gender, age, location, and interests. When choosing your target audience, think about who would be most interested in what you offer. Depending on your audience, you can target specific cities, states, regions, or the entire United States. Be sure to also choose relevant interests by identifying keywords associated with your target audience as well. 

Additionally, Facebook enables you to create a “Lookalike Audience.” A lookalike audience is a group of new people that “look” or behave similarly to your current audience. These audiences are identified by Facebook and have a high likelihood of being interested in your brand, product, or service.

3. Establish Your Budget

You’ll then need to establish a budget for your ad. Be sure to check your potential reach against the cost of the ad and make adjustments as needed.

4. Choose Your Placement

When you create a social media ad, you can either choose for it to show up in specific places or let Facebook choose for you. Just last month, Facebook reported a 70% increase in engagement on the Messenger app, making it a great placement area for ads right now. However, if you aren’t sure where your ad will perform best (in feeds, Stories, on Instagram, etc.), let Facebook choose. Then, you can analyze the results of the ad and begin to understand where your content performs best across the board. 

5. Design Your Ad Creative

When designing your ad creative, be sure to include an engaging visual (photo or video), a clever CTA (Call To Action,) and a direct link to the webpage you want people to visit.  Right now, Facebook is being more strict on and in some cases censoring what ad content they promote. Keep that in mind when you write your ad copy. For example during COVID-19, unless it was absolutely necessary for your ad, it was best to not use coronavirus target words in your ad content. Trying to avoid falling into Facebook’s deeper content review process will also ensure your ad is approved promptly. 

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Now you know how to create ads in Facebook Business Manager. If you want to use social media ads to boost your brand, grow your audience, and increase engagement but don’t have the time or resources to do so effectively, we can help! Learn more about our social and digital marketing services today!