Unleash the Power: How Facebook Ads Manager Can be a Powerful Tool for Small Business Owners

Nine million. 

That’s the number of businesses that actively advertise on the world’s biggest social media platform, according to Statista. 

Nine million. 

For years, businesses both big and small have turned to Facebook to boost traffic to their websites or stores and increase revenue — and for good reason. Facebook has a library of compelling marketing tools that are user-friendly, effective, and affordable. That’s why this social media giant is a business owner’s best friend. With a click of a button, any company can reach thousands of digital eyes if they play their cards right!

This is even more important for small business owners who need to use their advertising budgets wisely. Enter Facebook Ads Manager, a multifunctional tool that lets owners create and monitor campaigns across tons of different social media and marketing platforms (provided they’re owned by Facebook, of course). 

Facebook Ads Manager can make a marketing guru out of anyone who invests the time and effort into learning about everything this tool has to offer. In fact, it’s so effective that Facebook was reported to have earned nearly $70 billion in revenue just from companies using Facebook Ads Manager in 2019. 

It’s especially useful for small businesses because by targeting audiences based on demographics and interests, Facebook Ads Manager can help you cut through the clutter to reach meaningful customers who convert. 

Who Benefits From Using Facebook Ads Manager?

Anyone and everyone. 

It doesn’t matter whether you run a mom-and-pop bakery shop or a small startup investing in the CBD craze. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the owner of a small local franchise or a man or woman on a solo mission. As long as your target market can be found on Facebook — which shouldn’t be a problem considering Facebook has 2.7 billion users — and you take the time to learn how to use Facebook Ads Manager correctly, you can easily reap the resulting benefits and grow your business. 

Any small businesses with a limited social media presence can quickly grow that presence and potentially reach thousands of new customers both in the U.S. and globally. Nonprofits, single-entity businesses, and entrepreneurial organizations will also benefit from learning how to use Ads Manager to establish advertisement campaigns on Facebook, create original ads, and target a wide range of audience demographics.

Start Your Facebook Ad Campaign by Choosing a Strategy and Objective

Luckily, you don’t have to go into this blindly. Facebook offers a guide on getting started with their Ads Manager to provide you with some basic knowledge. 

The first step in creating a powerful marketing campaign is choosing your marketing objectives. You’ll notice that Facebook provides you with three options: 

• Awareness: This is the top part of the marketing funnel, and it focuses on increasing your brand awareness among the general public and allowing potential new customers to discover your company.
• Consideration: This is the middle part of the marketing funnel, and it focuses on potential customers who have shown an interest in your product or service but are not ready to convert just yet. They’re basically keeping you on the back-burner while they decide which company will earn their business.
• Conversation: This is the bottom part of the marketing funnel, and it focuses on converting potential customers into customers. 

Each of these options breaks down even further to offer you specific types of campaigns. The objective you choose depends on a lot of factors. For example, if you want to drive more traffic to your website, you would choose the “Traffic” objective under Consideration. If you have a more-or-less established audience, and you just want to give them a little nudge in the right direction (hint hint, wink wink), you would choose the “Conversion” objective under Conversions.

Ultimately, you have to decide who your target audience is and where they fall on the marketing funnel.

Determine the Target Audience

Did you have the opportunity to take a marketing class at school? If so, you probably remember your marketing teacher repeating this phrase over and over and over and over…. Well, you get the point. Turns out, they were on to something. You can’t have a powerful ad campaign without a well-defined target audience. 

Knowing who to market to is half the battle. You can have the most engaging and innovative promotion, but if it doesn’t get in front of the right eyes, it will all have been for nothing. So, let’s learn how to create a good target audience by using Facebook Ads Manager. 

When you navigate to your Audiences tab, you’ll (again) notice three different options you can choose from: 

• Facebook Saved Audiences allows you to define your target market using demographic, geographic, and psychological data. You can choose your audience’s location, age range, gender, language, education, interests, and so much more. The more you input into this section, the more Facebook has to work with. Interests are particularly useful because they can broaden your reach. 
• Facebook Custom Audiences are the key to great remarketing campaigns. This tool uses your customer’s engagement history to remarket ads back to them. In fact, you can hit the jackpot and create repeat customers with Facebook Custom Audiences.
• Facebook Lookalike Audiences reach new potential clients by mimicking your existing customer database. You will need a Facebook Custom Audience to gain traction with this tool. 

The options featured under each Facebook Audience can get very detailed, and it can be overwhelming if you’re looking at it for the first time. But don’t be alarmed — just take it slow and have a clear picture of your target market and ad objectives in mind to make the process easier. 

Here’s a bonus tip: narrow down your audience to create a niche target market, which provides better conversion rates than broad target markets. 

Placement of Advertisements on Facebook

Last but not least, you have to choose where the ads appear… or not. Facebook has an Automatic Placement feature that optimizes ad displays. By default, your ads will appear on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Facebook Manager. The Facebook algorithm determines where the ads would perform best before placement. 

However, if you want to take it upon yourself, you certainly have the option to. You can choose whether to display ads on feeds, instant articles, in-stream videos, right column, and suggested videos for Facebook; feeds and stories for Instagram; native, banner and interstitial, in-stream videos, rewarded videos for Audience Network; and home for Facebook Messenger. Additionally, you can choose to display ads on mobile only, desktop only, or all devices, which is the recommended option. 

To determine which platforms will work best for your ad campaign, it’s important to have a deep understanding of your target audience and which social media platforms they prefer to use. 

Is your head spinning from all this new knowledge? I certainly hope not! 

Facebook Ads Manager is a very comprehensive tool, but that’s the beauty of it. The more you tinker with it, the more powerful your Facebook Ad campaigns become. 

However, if you are a little overwhelmed at the thought or sight of Facebook Ads Manager, just remember that 1SEO is here to help! As a Premier Facebook Marketing partner, we know social media marketing like the backs of our hands, and we’re always more than happy to help small businesses reach their maximum potential.