In this episode, Sonja reveals the power-packed potential of ads on Facebook and Instagram for your brand and how new advertisers should approach the technical and creative set up.
With the world of social media changing the game for branding, Facebook and Instagram ads have become the new go-to strategy. But, should you be running ads on both of these platforms? Sonja walks through the common hiccups and provides a guide to successful campaign launches on both platforms. We go through the nitty-gritty of setting your ad budget and techniques to identify your target audience.
Whether you're an enterprising entrepreneur or part of an organization, this episode is brimming with tips and tricks to maximize the impact of your campaigns.
https://sonjacrystal.com/
In this episode, Sonja reveals the power-packed potential of ads on Facebook and Instagram for your brand and how new advertisers should approach the technical and creative set up.
With the world of social media changing the game for branding, Facebook and Instagram ads have become the new go-to strategy. But, should you be running ads on both of these platforms? Sonja walks through the common hiccups and provides a guide to successful campaign launches on both platforms. We go through the nitty-gritty of setting your ad budget and techniques to identify your target audience.
Whether you're an enterprising entrepreneur or part of an organization, this episode is brimming with tips and tricks to maximize the impact of your campaigns.
https://sonjacrystal.com/
Hello and welcome to today's episode of 10 Minute Marketing. I'm your host, Sonja Crystal Williams, so today I want to spend a time, a little bit of time, talking to you all about a topic that I get so many questions about, especially lately, as we are getting closer to the holiday season and with that seasonality comes to the desire to ramp up visibility for brands. So one question I've been getting a lot of, I guess you could say, activity around lately is should I be running Facebook ads, or Instagram ads, for that matter, and if so, like what do I even need to do in terms of basics, in terms of getting started? So this is a topic I really love to talk about. I even have a whole VIP day or power session that I do with clients, dedicated to really just working one-on-one and helping them launch those campaigns. But for those of you listening as you're looking at how do I begin to craft this for myself, there are some key things that you need to be thinking about as you're looking for ways to launch that campaign. So I want to walk you through today the ins and outs of Facebook and Instagram ad creation and look, if you're wondering, why is Sonja talking about Facebook and Instagram in the same sentence. If I'm only on Instagram, is Facebook even relevant? Or vice versa, if I have a really great following on Facebook, is Instagram even relevant? And the biggest reason why you should be considering those two together is because, of course, Facebook owns Instagram and I highly encourage you to run your Instagram Ads through Facebook's platform.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Now, first let me break out for you one of the most common mistakes that I'll see happen when newbies to advertising get into these campaigns. So first, if you have only been, if you're on Instagram, for example, launching your ads from within the Instagram app, you're missing out on tons of opportunities that can get your, your ads or your brand a lot more visibility. When you run your Instagram ads from the app itself, you're really giving yourself only the ability to do boost it posts. Now, this could be really impactful. If, number one, you're using that post to grow your follower count, so you can focus on getting more profile views. When they click your ad, they end up back on your profile and they could choose to follow. That's a great strategy. I'm going to talk about that sometime on another episode where we've used that strategy to really, really launch some new accounts that can be incredibly effective.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Beyond that, you can send people to your website, but your only choice is to do it off of a post that already exists and post that we exist. The images we use, the way we write them, may not necessarily translate as well for an ad, okay. So I would encourage you if you want to get more ad visibility through Instagram, you need to set yourself up with a Facebook Ads account. Okay. Same thing if you're running ads on Facebook Okay.
Sonja Crystal Williams:The one mistake I'll see newbies to advertising make is they hit that boost post button that they see next to their post after it goes up, and that form of advertising is great to do. Exactly, was it what it says? It will boost your post, it will get you more engagement, it can get you in front of many other people, but you again are missing out on the other ways that you could potentially run your Facebook Ads to audiences that you're interested in getting in front of. So if we can get past that, then we move into your next basic, which is making sure you have a Facebook Business Suite account set up. That that has also recently had a name change, so you may see it in your account when you log in, going by Meta Business Suite.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Here's the bottom line. Okay, when you have those set up, I want you to go to Facebook ads manager whenever you're going to launch an ad campaign. Also, make this note ads manager is not the same as ads center, so make sure my little shortcut, just so you know I go to Facebook. com/ ads manager. Spell it out just like that no spaces, no dash is nothing in com: Facebook. com/ ads manager, whenever I'm going to launch a new campaign on Facebook or Instagram, and that takes me where I need to be to get started, and that is Facebook's full self service platform. That gives you all the bells and the whistles when you get into ad creation. Okay, now again, if your goal is I just want to take like five seconds to create an ad, stick with, boost it, post Okay. But if you want to get more bang for your buck out of your ad campaigns, use Facebook Ads Manager, okay. So what else do we do from there? All right, we get into the campaign creation.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Now here's what I want to cover with you. There's two aspects of creating your ad campaigns and Facebook. Aspect number one, the technical side. Aspect number two the creative side. Okay, so there, the creative side and the technical side require pre work. So at no point do we ever want to go in creating a campaign from scratch without having researched some technical details or prepared ourselves from a creative standpoint before we get into that campaign. So let's cover some of the technical aspects that need to be done first.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Number one from a technical standpoint, you need to cover some basics, like, before you get into campaign creation, you need to have thought through what's my ad budget going to be? Some people say to me well, sonia, I don't know where what my budget should be. I don't even know what to start. Okay now, if you're working on a marketing team and you're working at a company, then that's an internal discussion. You need to have what's our budget. You need to have time to achieve with this campaign like. You need to kind of figure that out ahead of time.
Sonja Crystal Williams:If you are a really busy entrepreneur and you are launching this on your own and you're trying to figure out, then same thing here you need to think about how much am I willing to spend? And then you need to launch your campaign and really pay attention to what your cost per click is, if you can do some research ahead of time for your industry. Do some research, do some Googling and find out what the average is. A really great resource I'll drop a link to is the mainstream publishes annually benchmarks for, I'd say, about 20 of the major industries globally and they give you some ideas on about what the average cost per click is. You need to think about that. Okay, now here's what I tell people I don't know where else to start, particularly for those of you that are busy entrepreneurs, then I would say start yourself somewhere in $10 to $20 per day budget.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Okay, I think currently Google or, excuse me, Facebook recommends a $21 a day budget. That's spending roughly $600 bucks a month. It's. It's an okay place to start for you to test your campaign and for you to get a really clear idea of where you're going to land cost per click, because that's really what you also want to be paying attention to. What is my cost per click? And Then, over time, it's nice to get clicks, but you need to know are those clicks leading you to getting conversions, which could be sales, which could be people downloading something that you're offering, which could be people requesting a demo or filling out a contact form or joining your email list? You got to know what cost is associated with that. So that's eventually what you'll get to. So figuring out your budget it's going to be really important and you need to know that before you even get into setting up a campaign. Okay, so we want to start there, and that's good for small business owners. If you are Again working on a team within a larger organization, then you may want to start more around 50 or 100 dollars per day to give your brand a great chance of getting good visibility.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Once you've established the budget, you also need to be thinking about who am I targeting in this campaign? Okay now, this is one of the reasons why I launched my ads out of Facebook because of the targeting features. Now, if you're new to advertising, then you don't. You're not carrying some of the baggage in history I carry. We're back in the good old days, used to do all kinds of great fun things with targeting, and it's a little bit more Limited now, but it's still great opportunities.
Sonja Crystal Williams:You target people in Facebook either based on interest or demographics, which could be. Demographics could be things like their job title right, they're their employer, what company do they work for. Interests could be things like I'm interested in golf. I'm interested in travel. You need to really know what that looks like, based on having done some research on your buyer personas and really knowing what your target audience is interested in. Okay, if you've done that well enough in advance, then you're gonna build out that target list in Facebook and Determine who your ad is gonna get in front of.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Now, listen, there's some nuances here and this is why I do those one-on-one VIP days, because there are some nuances in terms of how you implement the targeting. But just giving you the process and the steps you want to make sure you do that. You also could build if you've ever heard these terms look alike audiences, custom audiences. Look alike audiences would be something like I have a thousand Facebook People already following my page. I have a thousand people on Instagram following my page. I want more people like them. They and engage with me. They convert, so you could build a lookalike audience around that. There's a section in Facebook ads manager that allows you to create what are called lookalike audiences. Okay, so that's gonna be in your settings and on Instagram. If you were running ads directly out of Instagram, you can't do that, so that's why I don't run those ads out of Instagram.
Sonja Crystal Williams:I built my audiences up through Facebook if I wanted to do a custom audience. That gives me the ability to do remarketing. All right, if I already have a really good website and I've been getting people converting on my website, how do I get more of that? And so part of that also might be Remarketing to some of those site visitors who abandoned their shopping carts or came and browsed your site but they weren't ready to contact you or make an appointment or anything like that. So custom audiences allow you to connect with website visitors who have previously been on your site.
Sonja Crystal Williams:If you're gonna use the custom audiences feature, you need to do the pre-step there, which is making sure you set up your Facebook Pixel before you do that. Okay, the Facebook Pixel links Facebook Ads Manager to your website so it can track your previous visitors and they become eligible to see your ads. So with targeting, we have just kind of the targeting you could do by things like Demographics, interests and behaviors, as well as custom audiences and look-alike audiences, All right. So that's part of your technical setup. And then the other final big piece with technical setup is also making sure that you've done the research where your ad will appear. We call those placements. All right, now Facebook is automatically gonna set you up so you can get placements everywhere.
Sonja Crystal Williams:And what do I mean when we say placements? Placements means if my ad's gonna appear in Facebook. There's so many places where it could appear. It could appear in the newsfeed. It could appear if someone's on their desktop on the right hand column. It could appear in Stories. It could appear in Reels. It could appear in Facebook Marketplace. It could appear in someone's messaging app. So many places. Same with Instagram. There's multiple places Instagram Reels, Instagram Stories, Instagram newsf eed, Instagram profile feed, Discovery section so many places.
Sonja Crystal Williams:And so when you go into placements, you can control where your ads appear and you might not want them to appear everywhere. You've gotta do what's appropriate depending on the ad that you set up. So my biggest note from my playbook is I always control my placements, and if I have an account that's dominant on Instagram and I don't have much visibility on Facebook, I can also set up my placements to remove my ad from appearing on Facebook at all and have all my budget float toward appearing on Instagram only, although I'm setting it up through Facebook Ad Manager and I'm getting the benefit of the additional targeting options and other things I can do with the ad. So those are gonna be the most important things you need to think about from a technical setup standpoint, all right, final thing. Final thing is going into your creative. Okay, so we have the technical side, then we have the creative side.
Sonja Crystal Williams:Now my pre-work on the creative side involves either the creation of video content, because you could do video ads and even deciding is this a video ad that needs to appear in the news feed of like Facebook, where it's more horizontal, or is it a video ad that's gonna appear in Reels or maybe even Stories, and if so, that's gonna even determine the length of how long the video should be. If it's a regular graphic or photo ad, then I also need to be thinking about the size of that, and that goes back to placements. If I'm gonna run a photo as my ad, it needs to be eligible to be resized from square to portrait style, to horizontal, landscape style, and you can, as you upload and create your ad, you could put it in all those different ways, all right. So those are different things you can kind of toy around with once you have thought through what your creative is. Your creative needs to be actionable, right.
Sonja Crystal Williams:If it's a video, there needs to be a script written that gets people to wanna take action or at least have an interest in engaging with your brand, and you need to think about tone. Is this something fun? Is it entertaining, is it humorous, is it authoritative? What kind of appeal am I going to have? Same thing, even with imagery. If you're gonna do an image instead of a video, how does that image come across and how much text am I using in that image? And you could play around with that. Facebook's been a little bit more lenient on allowing people to show more text on their ads. Play around with that, though I'd be careful. I don't always run ads that are text heavy. Usually, making the image more visual is more important than having a lot of text, but you can play with that feature and figure out what works best for you, okay, so those are your basics.
Sonja Crystal Williams:The last thing you do when you're even in the creative section of setting up the ad is again just making sure you link your pixel and making sure that you've linked your URL so that if you have an ad that's gonna click over to your website. You need to have a landing page in place, not your homepage. Okay, not your homepage. Most homepages don't convert that well, so in most cases you need to take people to a landing page on your website. That's going to be something that gives them the opportunity to convert. This looks different across industries. It just depends on your product or service. But you really wanna make sure you've coordinated with your web developer, your IT team, to have a landing page that can actually convert.
Sonja Crystal Williams:All right, so in 16 minutes, I've given you kind of the basics on launching a Facebook or Instagram ad campaign and some of the secrets that I use when I'm setting it up. Now, if you want more information, there's two ways I'll work with clients. Sometimes I'll just set up a one-on-one, one-hour session, so that's option one. We'll put the link in the comments. Or your other option is to set up a full-out, one-on-one VIP day. That's a full day, that's more than an hour. That's us spending about six or seven hours together really digging into the full creation of your ad campaign and helping you with launch and then following up a few weeks later to make sure your campaigns are running smoothly. So either way you cut it, you could do that or take it. Take what I've taught you today. Go do your own research, figure out how to set up your campaigns effectively, or do it and then come back and set up a one-on-one one hour so I can help you optimize those campaigns.
Sonja Crystal Williams:But yes, it's a great time a year to get started on your Facebook and Instagram ads. Just know what's the objective of my campaign, what am I trying to get out of it, where am I sending people, where's that ad gonna run and who am I targeting. That's the most important stuff you wanna remember. All right, so that's it for today's episode 10 Minute Marketing. Tune in next time. I've got some more guest interviews lined up where we'll dig into the backend of more entrepreneurs' businesses and secrets of how they are using online marketing to grow their businesses. See you next time. I'll see you then.