How to Create Your Facebook and Instagram Ads Like a Pro (Part 1) : Start Thinking

Welcome! How Did You Land Here?

The moment you start to see the flip side of the disturbing advertisements that stalls you from scrolling down your daily dose of social networking service, you probably will start thinking about money. Or, you could have landed on this page while searching for ways to understand and learn how to create advertisements for your own business in the first place.

Below is my attempt to answer the rhetorical and practical questions you might have before creating facebook or instagram advertisements.

The Rhetorical

Before anything, get a pen and a paper. Outline your reasoning behind why you want to learn how to create Facebook or Instagram advertisements. You could be planning to raise awareness, promote events and causes, or market your products and services. In order to maximise the efficiency of your ads, you must have clear objectives in what you wish to achieve from running ads on social media platforms.

After all, your attempt at social media marketing needs to bring back results. While it may be cheaper than the other expenditures of your business, such as production costs or office rents, it is not for free. Thus it is best to maximize your return on investment (ROI) by setting clear objectives before you start. This gives you a criteria to assess your performance. For example, if your core objective is to increase traffic into your business website, you will be able to pay more attention to keeping track of the traffic counts, using Facebook’s Ads Manager, and spend more time devising a plan to maximize and increase traffic flow.

I Came to Learn

Yes! Now that you have answered the first and most important rhetorical question, it is time to learn how to do it. You need to set up three accounts to create your advertisements. First you need a general Facebook account. You can create a new one if you do not already have one, use your already existing Facebook account, or create a new one despite the fact that you already have a facebook account. You probably do not want to show your posts from your middle school years to your clients.

Now, on the Facebook account that you will be using, you can create a new page for your business, event, or cause. Creating this page allows you to utilize both the Facebook Business Suite and Facebook Ads Manager. There are plenty of Youtube videos that explain in depth about the functions of both. You can also refer to the tutorial that I’ve created to help yourself. So in short, you will be able to keep track of your business performance on the Facebook Business Suite, and will be able to create advertisements on the Facebook Ads Manager.

In summary, you need to set up:

1. Facebook account
2. Create a page dedicated to your business
3. Facebook Business Suite
4. Facebook Ads Manager

Thankfully, the Facebook Ads Manager integrates and shares the ability to create instagram advertisements as well. You will have to link your instagram account to your Facebook Business page to generate advertisements on Instagram simultaneously.

You can find the step by step tutorial here.

Zero Your Rifle

Now that you have built your tools to execute your mission, you have to formulate your advertisement. You have to pick on the creative and mathematical side of your brain, and use common sense. You have set up a clear purpose for your marketing journey, now you have to build your marketing strategies accordingly.

The Facebook Ads Manager allows you to control your advertisements’ exposure. Area, time, demographics, age, interests and the media format of the ads. You can explore the options of photo and video posts, stories, carousels, collections, slide shows and app demos. Put on the shoes of your potential clients and think who and when would they be able to catch your advertisement.

Depending on which formats you are going to select, your creative side of the brain has to warm up. All the general rules of thumb for advertisement apply here. For example, a screen filled with texts would not be so effective. You could incorporate links to your business website, take your time to take good photos of your product, or think of a catchy phrase that could stall your intended audience from scrolling and make them look at it twice.

I don’t want to keep you for so long

This is a general guideline of how to start thinking about creating Facebook and Instagram Advertisements. If you skim-through this, it could look like there are millions of tedious tasks you have to accomplish. You have to take your time and take one step at a time before you realise that you are up and going. The more time you spend on tweaking your exposure settings and creating drafts of your advertisement, you will have a higher chance of reading positive results on your Facebook Business Suite.