Even with all of the changes Facebook has undergone in the past few months, it’s still a great place to advertise your business. Ads are affordable and you have the ability to target your “ideal” customers. With approximately 1.93 billion people using this social media platform each day, you’re bound to reach the audience you’re looking for.

Like any marketing or advertising platform, you’ll want to go into this endeavor with a solid plan or strategy. Without one, you might as well be tossing flyers off a bridge and hoping for the best.

Facebook Ad Strategy 2023

If you’re new to advertising on Facebook, this landscape may look like a frightening new frontier where no business has gone before… but it’s not. There are more than 3 million businesses actively advertising on Facebook.

“Wait… then isn’t it oversaturated? Shouldn’t I advertise somewhere else?” There are so many advertisers on Facebook because it works. It’s an excellent way to reach your desired audience and inspire them to take action (ideally, purchasing your product).

Now, what you do need to know is that not all of those 3 million advertisers are successful. Many have failed to understand who their ideal customer is and how to target the people they want to sell to.

As a result, the question isn’t whether you should advertise on Facebook. The question is, how do you advertise properly so the ROI is worth your time and money.

What to Know Before you Set Up your Facebook Ad

We get that you’re excited, but some pre-planning will help make your campaign much more successful.

First, you need to understand who your customer is.

• Who are they?
• What does their family situation look like?
• How much do they make?
• Where do they live? (Both geographically and whether or not they own or rent).
• Where do they work?
• How do they spend their free time?

Once you understand who they are, you’ll want to take it one step further and understand how they think.

What keeps them up at night? How is their emotional state and what needs are they looking to have fulfilled? How do they identify themselves? The way they see themselves is often more important than how you see them (even if your view is more realistic).

Next, you’ll want to walk through the average customer journey. What steps do they take as they:

• Recognize that they have a problem
• Identify what that problem is
• Discover potential solutions
• Become aware of you as an option
• Choose to purchase your product

For each customer, this journey may be slightly different. However, they generally fall into 3 categories:

1. Awareness Phase (top of the funnel)
2. Consideration Phase (middle of the funnel)
3. Decision Phase (bottom of the funnel)

Why does this matter to you as an advertiser? Because you will tweak your content, offers, verbiage, and Call to Action based on whatever stage of the customer journey your potential buyer is in.

Finally, you’ll want to break your audience up into segments based on where they are situated in the customer journey. This will allow you to make the right offers to the right people at the right time.

Here are a few examples of potential audience segments:

• Any new customers in the “prospects stage” are entering your funnel as warm leads because they are interested in your product.
• Lukewarm leads visited your website but didn’t engage, you may wish to use Retargeting to remind them that you are there, waiting in the wings, with the solution to their problems.
• Engaged blog readers like your blog and keep coming back for more. They’re more likely to share your content on Facebook or make a purchase.
• Landing Page visitors came to a specific landing page and are therefore probably interested in that particular product.
• Shopping cart abandoners were so close to making a purchase… but something stopped them. They may just need a gentle push to finish their purchase.
• Return customers love your brand. They’ve already purchased from you in the past and come back time and time again for more. These customers can serve as brand advocates, singing your praises and recommending your product to their friends.

Now, consider how your Facebook strategy will differ based on who you are advertising to and where they are in their journey (and in your funnel). Consider these possibilities.

• When you are looking to attract prospects, you may create ads around your brand or content that will help them understand their problem (and position you as an expert).
• As your goal shifts and you want to CONVERT the prospects, you will utilize contests and giveaways, free trial offers, and lead ads.
• When it’s time to CLOSE the prospects, you’ll incorporate lead nurturing campaigns, discount offers, sales campaigns, and limited-time offers to encourage them to buy.
• Once prospects become customers, it’s time to DELIGHT them with premium offers, referral programs, upsell campaigns, and helpful information about their purchases.

There’s one more step before we dive into Facebook Ad Strategy. It’s called a Facebook pixel and if you want to track your conversion (which you definitely do), you need to install it. The Facebook pixel is a string of tracking dots that you take from Facebook and embed in your website. It then tracks what visitors do when they get to your site. This allows you to better hone your advertisements based on actual user behavior.

Not super techy but still trying to handle your own website? Facebook has step-by-step instructions to help you install a Facebook pixel on your website.

Facebook Ad Strategies

Now that you’ve set up the foundation for strong Facebook Ads, we can take a look at different strategies you might employ with your advertising.

Depending on what audience segments you choose to target, these may not all fit the bill. Make sure to keep all of the audience research you did, in mind as you look through these options.

1. Combine Facebook Ads with Content Marketing

Many companies make the mistake of targeting warm leads with ads designed to turn them into paying customers. You know better. You know that a warm lead is not ready to buy from you yet. Instead of turning them off with straight sales offers, provide them with useful content that answers their questions, and solves their pain points. This needs to be short, interesting, and valuable. Be patient. Eventually, you will convert these warm leads into customers.

How do you do this?

1. Create content.
2. Share content on Facebook.
3. Ask your team members (and maybe a handful of friends) to like and share the post.
4. Boost your Facebook post so you can reach a wider audience.

2. Use Giveaways and Contests

Facebook contests needn’t focus on sales all the time. You can instead offer a potential high-value prize to create increased brand awareness that will pay off in the long run by bringing new leads into your conversion funnel. Before committing to a contest or giveaway strategy, review Facebook’s policies to ensure you aren’t violating any of their rules.

3. Use Lead Ads to Build Up your Marketing List

A large Facebook following is great, however, Facebook “owns” your contacts. If they decide to change their algorithm or shut down, you will lose access to those people.

Creating a lead magnet such as a free e-book or course and then running a lead ad, will help you build your marketing list. Consumers can enter their email address directly into Facebook (no added steps or friction during which you may lose them) in exchange for their free gift. You can then add their email to your marketing list and include them in your email marketing campaigns moving forward.

4. Incorporate Video Ads

If you’ve been running ads for a while and aren’t seeing the returns you’d hoped for, or you’re brand new to Facebook ads and want to try a few different options and see what works best for your situation, video ads may be just what you’re looking for.

Not only do people love videos, but they also have the lowest effective cost per click (eCPC) compared to other ad types. Need to sweeten the deal even more? Adobe found that “shoppers who view video are 1.81 times more likely to purchase than non-video viewers.”

5. Create Facebook and Google Ads

While many marketers see these platforms as one-or-the-other, Facebook and Google can actually complement each other quite nicely.

Once again, your strategy must depend on your campaign goals and the audience segment you’d like to target. For example, someone searching for a specific product, say a new computer, is likely ready to make a purchase and is simply researching their options. Using the right keywords and creating Google ads around them may be better than targeting warm leads on Facebook with increased brand awareness.

6. Utilize Facebook Mobile Ads

Before we go any further, is your website or landing page optimized for mobile viewing? This means that users will have a positive viewing experience no matter what device they use. If your site is not set up for this, you aren’t ready for mobile ads. Despite the fact that 94% of Facebook’s advertising revenues were generated via mobile, you will be throwing money out the proverbial window if you send potential customers to a site that causes them frustration.

Over to You

When it comes time to devise your Facebook ad strategy, the most important thing you can do is understand your audience better. All of the fancy strategies and new tricks won’t help if you don’t know who you are selling to and how close they are to making a purchase.

Spend some time getting to know your ideal customer, learning who they are, what they do, and what they want. Once you understand where your potential customers are in their buying journey, you can better usher them towards purchasing your product.

Facebook may have changed, but the value of understanding your customers never will.

Types of Facebook posts

Different post types that you can use to share your brand’s message with the world, each serving its own purpose in marketing a particular product or service.

Here are some types of posts you can incorporate into your Facebook marketing and content strategy:

• Text post: The simplest of post types, text-only content is rare in Facebook marketing. This is because posts with photos, videos, graphics, or links are more likely to grab users’ attention. Text posts are typically used on personal accounts to source information, ask for recommendations, or share big announcements.
• Photo post: Photographs can elicit strong emotions. Using one (or a few) high-quality photos in a Facebook post can showcase the available colors of a summer dress, spotlight a restaurant’s best appetizer or cocktail, or promote a tropical beach destination.
• Video post: Videos in Facebook posts can help a business tell its brand story or deliver live updates. According to an analysis from ChatterBlast, 53.5 percent of completed videos are played without sound (which means subtitles are important!) [2].
• Linked content post: Posts can include a link to your website, blog, or news article. Linked content can include a call-to-action (CTA) that may directly lead to sales, brand awareness, or promotions.
• Facebook story: Facebook stories are photos or short video content that appear on the top of a news feed and remain for 24 hours. These tend to be casual updates, sometimes cross-posted from Instagram.

For all post types, you should use high-quality photos and videos whenever possible, take advantage of holidays, and craft genuine messages that reflect the brand. Preparing media assets like photographs, videos, and graphics requires time, so it is wise to plan ahead. Businesses typically use a social media content calendar to execute a plans in a timely, organized fashion.

You have the option to publish each type of post on your business Facebook page for free. Posting for free will create a public post shown to users navigating to your Facebook page and may show up on the news feeds of people who already like or follow your page. You can also pay to boost your posts using the Ads Manager.

How to start marketing on Facebook

To build your brand on Facebook, you will need to develop a marketing strategy that delivers high-quality content promoting your brand.

First, you will need a Facebook business page, which can be easily created using a personal account. Facebook has comprehensive step-by-step guides if you need assistance creating or setting up your page. This video also provides an introduction for setting up your social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.

Learn how to set up your social media presence.

Getting likes on Facebook

Once you have your Facebook page, you’ll want to start acquiring likes. When people like your page, they’re essentially joining your network and will start seeing your posts in their news feeds. The more likes you have, the more visibility your business will have on Facebook.

As you begin to build your Facebook presence, it’s important to know who your target audience is. Knowing who you are targeting will enable you to create the right content for your desired customers.

Once you know who your audience is, you can intentionally seek them out on Facebook, either organically, inviting members of your personal network to like your business page, for example, or through paid ads set with parameters that match your target audience. As you build your audience, you can learn more about who they are using the Facebook Insights tool.

How to create a Facebook marketing strategy

Creating your Facebook marketing strategy is similar to creating your general content strategy, only in this case, you’ll be focusing on creating compelling content specifically for Facebook users.

The steps for creating a Facebook marketing strategy are:

1. Define your goals.
2. Research your target audience.
3. Conduct a content audit, if relevant.
4. Choose your post types.
5. Create your content plan.
6. Develop a process for content creation.
7. Measure the success of your content.

Build your brand with Facebook Ads

Since Facebook launched paid advertising in 2007, it has played a key role in how businesses use social media as a marketing tool. With the influx of content in Facebook news feeds, organic posts can get lost in the algorithm. Paid ads help businesses target specific demographics to get their message out.

After creating an organic brand presence on social media, you can focus on the two types of paid advertising available on Facebook. The first type is a boosted post. This increases your visibility by boosting certain posts, so you can get the most out of your organic content. The second is to create paid advertising campaigns using Facebook Ads Manager.

The fourth course in Meta’s Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate is all about Advertising with Meta and guides learners through the processes described below. Watch this video from the course to hear more about your advertising options on Facebook:

Learn about advertising options on Facebook.

Learn how to navigate Ads Manager.