Facebook Advertising: How to Create Facebook Ads

Do you want to grow your Edmonton business with new clients?

Have you tried social media marketing, but you’re not sure how to reach a wider audience?

Social media advertising is one of the best ways to amplify your message to reach a wider audience in Edmonton.

Out of all of the social media networks, Facebook is the largest and most popular.

In fact, according to a recent study at Ryerson University, there are over 31 million Facebook users in Canada and 79% of them use it daily.

In other words, there are about 25 million Canadians that use Facebook daily.

Regardless of the averages, do your patients use Facebook?

The best way to answer that question is to ask them directly. A patient survey is an effective tool to learn more about your patients and the social media platforms that they like to use. This helps you learn who your clients are, and how to find more clients like them.

If you’re already creating organic posts on Facebook, have you noticed that they’re getting less attention than they used to?

The reason is that in 2018 Facebook updated the News Feed algorithm and is reducing the priority of your organic posts from your Business Page. Instead, they’re prioritizing paid or sponsored ads in their News Feed.

According to a study by Ogilvy, the average reach of an organic post is about 2%-6%. In other words, if you have 1,000 followers or fans on Facebook, only 20-60 will see your posts.

Facebook is a large corporation and their primary source of income is advertising. According to Statista, they generated over $56 billion in revenue in 2018, most of which came from digital advertising.

In other words, if you want to promote your health and wellness practice in Edmonton to a wider audience on Facebook, you need to buy Facebook advertising.

The good news is that the average cost per click for Facebook ads in Canada is only $1.

The average cost to reach 1,000 people using traditional Canada Post flyers is about $150. The average cost to reach 1,000 people using social media ads is less than $10.

Does advertising on social media work?

According to a study published by Curalate, 76% of people surveyed have completed a purchase based on a company’s social media post.

We wrote this article to help you learn how to advertise on Facebook, including:

How to create a Facebook Business Page?

1. Sign up for your Facebook Business Page
2. Add images to your page
3. Edit account details

How to create Facebook ads?

1. Your marketing objective
2. Choose an audience
3. Set your budget
4. Create your ad
5. Analyze and optimize

Let’s get started!

How to create a Facebook Business Page?

In order to create a Facebook Business Page, it needs to be linked to a personal account on Facebook. The two accounts are kept separate and no one will be able to see your personal account when viewing your business page.

Sign up for your Facebook Business Page

1. Go to www.facebook.com/business
2. Select “create a page” in the top right-hand corner.
3. Select your type of page, likely “Business or Brand”.
4. Complete the fields that ask for your Page Name, Category, etc.

Add images to your page

1. Upload your company logo for your profile picture using 180 x 180 pixels.
   
2. Upload a cover photo that captures your practice’s personality. This is a great place to display a team photo. Use image dimensions of 820 x 312 pixels.

Edit account details

1. Click “Add a Short Description” to write a few sentences that summarize your health and wellness practice in 155 characters or less.
2. Click “Create a Username for your Page,” which determines your Business Page URL (i.e. website address), so try to use your business name or similar.
3. Click “About” on the left-hand side to complete any relevant fields and your business “Story,” which is a longer description of your practice and why your prospective patients should visit your clinic.

How to create Facebook ads?

Are you wondering how to advertise on Facebook?

There are two primary ways to create Facebook Ads: using the Facebook Ads Manager, or by creating ads directly inside of your Facebook Business Page. Your Facebook Business Page allows you to create ads quickly using a simplified version of Facebook’s Ads Manager.

You’ll see buttons around your Page that read: “Boost Post”, “Promote Local Business”, “Promote Website”, or “Create Ad”. Any of these buttons will open up a simplified version of Facebook’s Ads Manager.

Although creating ads directly inside of your Facebook Business Page is easy and quick, you sacrifice many benefits in creating more focused ads for your audience.

For example, the Ads Manager allows you to set specific marketing objectives, choose more placement options for each ad, customize your audience with more detail, and gain greater control over your spending strategy and creative options.

The Facebook Ads Manager gives you more options to manage your ad campaigns effectively. Although you’ll likely want to create ads for your Facebook Business Page, the Facebook Ads Manager is found under your personal name. Every personal profile on Facebook has a Facebook Ads account already created.

Once you’ve created your Facebook Business Page, visit the Facebook Ads Manager to see your account overview. Near the top of the page, click on the “Campaigns” tab, then click on the “Create” button below it on the left-hand side.

Next, determine if you want to create a “complete campaign” (guided creation) or a “campaign shell” (quick creation).

If this is your first time creating a Facebook Ad, you can select “Create complete campaign”, and the Facebook Ads Manager will provide step-by-step instructions for creating the entire campaign from start to finish.

If you’ve created Facebook Ads before, select “Create campaign shells” and you can build your campaign in any order that works for you.

Facebook organizes your ads into a hierarchy as follows:

1. Campaigns: contains all of your ad sets and advertisements, as well as choosing a marketing objective.
2. Ad sets: you can group or segment your audience into ad sets, as well as choose your budget, schedule, ad placements and price bidding.
3. Ads: the advertisements that an ad set or audience segment will see, as well as choosing an existing post or creating a new one.

Next, we’ll review our 5-step process for creating your Facebook advertisement:

Step 1: Your marketing objective

The first decision that Facebook Ads Manager asks you to make is: what’s your marketing objective?

Facebook Ads are designed to help you achieve one of three campaign objectives: awareness, consideration, or conversion.

• Awareness: display your ads to the maximum number of people possible to increase their awareness of your health products and services.
  • Brand awareness: introduce your business to a new audience.
  • Reach: display your ad to as many people in your audience as possible.

• Consideration: promote your ads to encourage people to interact by visiting your website, commenting, sharing or liking your post, watching your videos, and more.
  • Traffic: increase traffic of people to your website or app.
  • Engagement: increase the number of post comments, likes, and shares.
  • App installs: encourage people to install your app.
  • Video views: encourage people to watch your video.
  • Lead generation: get new potential patients into your pipeline.
  • Messages: encourage people to contact you using Facebook Messenger.

• Conversion: encourage your audience to take action by purchasing a product, or by visiting your clinic in person for an appointment.
  • Conversions: encourage people to take a specific action on your website, such as subscribing to your newsletter or booking an appointment.
  • Catalog sales: connect your Facebook Ads to your product catalog to show people ads for the products they may want to buy.
  • Store traffic: encourage people to visit your clinic by displaying ads to people who are nearby.

For awareness goals, you pay every time a person views your ad, known as an impression. For consideration and conversion goals, you pay every time a person takes action, like clicking a link to visit your website.

Deciding your marketing objective affects how Facebook displays your ad to help you achieve your goal.

Step 2: Choose an audience

Once you’ve set your campaign marketing objectives, you can start to segment your audience into groups within the ad sets. You can create multiple ad sets that focus on different audiences.

For example, if you offer health services for seniors and also for parents with young kids, you can create two different audience categories. By creating two different ad sets, you can create different ads that are relevant to each audience segment. Ads that are more relevant have higher success than generic ads for everyone.

Facebook’s extensive information database allows you to create highly focused audience segments based on various demographic and psychographic information, such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Languages
• Relationship
• Education
• Work
• Financial
• Home
• Ethnic Affinity
• Generation
• Parents
• Life Events
• Interests
• Behaviours
• Connections

Since you can save your audience segments as ad sets, you can experiment with the different segmentation options to find the best audience for your business. After conducting various tests, you may be surprised by which audience segment is most receptive to your ads.

Step 3: Set your budget

When selecting your budget, you have two options to choose from:

1. Daily budget: ads are displayed continuously throughout the day, up until your daily budget limit. You can also set a start and end date for your ad schedule.
2. Lifetime budget: set a schedule for when to display your ads and they are shown to your audience until your lifetime budget runs out.

You can also choose specific budget spending options, such as your bid strategy, whether you’ll get charged per view (impression) or per click (engagement), and even what time of day your ads will be displayed.

If you already have an audience of followers, you can review the analytics of when they’re using Facebook to determine the best time to display your ads.

The average cost-per-click on Facebook ads in Canada is about $1.

Step 4: Create your ad

You can either use an existing Facebook post that your Business Page has already created and published, or you can create an entirely new post. Facebook’s algorithms favour posts that have higher levels of engagement, so it helps to use posts that have already been published and are well received.

Next, you can decide the format for how your Facebook advertisement will be displayed. There are five ad formats that Facebook uses, including:

1. Carousel: you can include up to 10 images or videos, each with their own link, all in one ad. This works well to showcase different features of a product, to explain a step-by-step process, or to present multiple products.
2. Single image: in addition to a photo, you can also include 125 characters of text, plus a headline and link description. You can also add a call-to-action button, like “Book Now” or “Call Today”.
3. Single video: display videos ranging from short mobile videos to longer ones for desktops that are up to 240 minutes long. Shorter videos have higher completion rates and many people typically watch a video on Facebook without sound, so ensure that your message is succinct and supported with text.
4. Slideshow: this ad format creates a video from several static images. This offers the dynamic motion of video, but using basic images. This ad format loads faster than videos, so keep that in mind if your audience has a slower Internet connection.
5. Collection: this ad format highlights your products right in the Facebook feed. The ad includes a cover photo or video, plus product images with pricing, which allows people to learn about your products without leaving Facebook.

Step 5: Analyze and optimize

Once you launch your Facebook Ad campaign, it’s important to review the performance metrics of your campaign using Facebook’s Ads Manager.

When logged into your Ads Manager dashboard, select the campaign that you want to view, then click on the “View chart” link found either below the campaign name, or on the far right-hand side.

You may have an idea of what you think will work well, but only the results can validate that idea. If your ads are performing well, continue with your plan. If your ads are not performing well based on your goals, consider pausing your campaign and re-evaluate your strategy.

Conclusion

Most of your patients are using Facebook daily. As a result, it’s one of the best ways to promote your health products and services and grow your Edmonton business with new patients.

Facebook marketing using organic posts is getting less attention, as their News Feed algorithms prioritize paid or sponsored posts. About 2% of your followers or fans will even see your organic posts.

Leverage Facebook’s large database of information to focus your ads to a specific group of people that are interested in your health products and services.

Facebook advertising is a cost-effective way to promote your health and wellness business to a wide audience and grow your business with new clients.

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