Step 4: Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is very important as this will determine the potential impact of your campaign. Also, remember that your goal is to have your ads placed before those who will need whatever it is you are offering. Facebook offers the following demographics for targeting your audience:

Location - Could be as broad as a country to a state, city, zip code or address. You can refine your targeting further into those within a mile radius from you.

• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Interests
• Behavior
• Connections

Step 5: Set Your Campaign Budget

Setting your budget to a figure you would like to spend for your ad campaign. This is the highest amount that you are willing to spend for the campaign and you can set the budget to either Daily or Lifetime:

• Daily- Average amount that will be spent daily throughout the duration of the campaign
• Lifetime- This is the total budget that you are willing to spend during the lifetime of the ad campaign.

Step 6: Create Your Ad

This is where you get to choose the different components that make up your ad campaign. Things like the headline and body text, images or videos to use and where the ad will be displayed on Facebook. You have a maximum of 90 characters for text that can be placed alongside an image or video.

You can create ads using an existing post or by creating new ads.

Using an existing post is best when you want to boost a previous post made. You can get this done by selecting the "Use Existing Post" option from your Facebook ads Manager dashboard from where you select the individual post you want to use.

A new ad can be created from a blank canvas by selecting the format you want to use. There are currently 5 formats to use on Facebook which are carousel, single image, single video, slideshow and canvas.

Note that available formats will be determined by the objective you selected in step 3 of this guide.

To optimize your campaign, you may want to consider using image specs of 1200 x 628 pixels size, image ratio of 1:91:1 and using an image with little or no overlaid text.

For videos, use .MOV or .MP4 files for best results with a resolution of at least 720p and a maximum file size of 2.3GB. The recommended aspect ratio for videos is 16:9 with duration of 60 minutes max.