Feeling like your small business is invisible online? Facebook advertising can help you cut through the noise and reach your ideal customers fast—no need to wait months for organic traffic to grow.

How to Get Started With Facebook Ads

Making ads part of your Facebook marketing strategy requires more than just setting up a page. You’ll need to think about your goals, plan a budget and schedule, and then actually create the ads.

That said, it’s one of the simpler ways to market your business. In this section, I’ll take you through the steps of launching your ads on Facebook. That way, you can start promoting your brand, highlighting your products and/or services, and engaging with potential customers.

1. Set Up a Meta (Facebook) Business Manager Account

The first thing to do is set up a Meta (Facebook) Business Manager account for your Facebook business page. Do this by heading to business.facebook.com and creating an account. If you already have an account, log in and click “Create ad account.” This will give you access to all the tools to help you create different types of ads.

2. Define Your Campaign Objective

After you choose the type of ad you want to run, determine what you want from your campaign by setting your ad objective. You can let Facebook choose the most relevant goal or select one of the following:

Get more messages

Get more website visitors

Get more Page likes

Get more leads

Get more calls

Get more visits

A Facebook Ads campaign.

Source: Meta

One of my top Facebook marketing tips: You can always start with simple ads and create more complex ones as you get more familiar with the tools and learn what your audience responds to.

3. Identify Your Target Audience

Reaching the right consumers is a critical part of your Facebook marketing strategy. Build your target audience based on gender, age, location, and language. Once you’ve got a broad sense of your ad reach, you can customize your audience based on user behaviors and interests to improve your chances of reaching the right people.

4. Create Compelling Ad Content

Need some ideas to get started with your Facebook ad? It has three key components: visuals, text, and an action button.

The visuals can be an eye-catching photo, a previous post on your Facebook page, or a must-watch video about your business.

The text should complement the image and lead your customers to take the action you desire.

The action button directs people to take that next step.

5. Set Your Budget and Schedule

You can set a daily budget for a certain duration with start and end dates, which will average the spend on your ad each day. You can also set a “lifetime” budget for the entire duration of your Facebook marketing campaign.

If you want, you can schedule your ad based on time zones to ensure your target audience is most likely to see it. For example, you can run your ads during U.S. daytime hours if you’re targeting a U.S. audience.

6. Choose Your Ad Placements

Decide where your ad should appear. For beginners looking for Facebook marketing tips, you might be best choosing Advantage+ placement (formerly automatic placement) so Facebook can determine where you’re likely to get the best traction.

Otherwise, you can customize placement by choosing whether your ads should appear on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger, or a combination.

7. Launch Your Ad Campaign

Finally, review your ad settings. You can also preview how your ad by choosing a thumbnail image.

If everything looks good, hit “Publish.” Note that Facebook automatically reviews ads to make sure they’re in line with their policies. To see if your ad has been published, check the Delivery column of Ads Manager.

8. Monitor and Optimize Your Campaign

Monitoring your campaign performance is a must. By adjusting your strategy based on results, you’ll get the best return on your investment from marketing on Facebook.

In Ad Manager, you can view charts that show the number of people who click on your ad, how it performs among different age groups and genders, and more.

If you’re not seeing the level of engagement or response you want, you can switch out images, change ad types, or make other changes to optimize your ads and improve results.