Wholesale Vendor List

Find vendors and suppliers
Dropshipping 101

A guide on fashion dropshipping
Building Your Website

Custom shopify builds
chevron_left chevron_right

10 Steps to Create Facebook Ads & Grow Sales!

Facebook Ads are a game-changer for boutique owners wanting to expand their audience and boost sales. With over 3.7 billion monthly active users, this social platform offers immense opportunities for sales growth. In fact, 89% of businesses run Facebook ads as their primary advertising tool. If you are not using Facebook ads, please read on!  In this blog we cover how to prepare for ad strategies and the TEN steps to create a Facebook ad.

Preparation is the key to success for any new endeavor, so we will begin the Facebook ad creation process with four marketing pillars that can lay a foundation for strategy and success.

Define Your Ad Goals

Before delving into creating Facebook Ads, it’s important to first define clear business objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic or boosting sales. Also critical is having a trusted wholesale supplier who can fulfill and ship product orders quickly to accommodate any bump in sales from the ads. If you need help in that area, don’t miss reading our blog on USA Dropshipping Suppliers and Vendors.

Know Your Audience

Facebook offers sophisticated features that allow you to target specific demographics, interests and behaviors. To utilize this tool, you must know your typical buyer profile to understand your target audience. In other words, what demographic and/or age group is interested in the fashion you curate? Once identified, you can tailor your ads to resonate with their preferences to increase odds of higher engagement and increased sales.

Use Compelling Visuals

In the crowded digital space, eye-catching visuals are key to garnering attention. Invest time and resources to create high-quality images and videos to show your products. Crafting concise and catchy ad content that communicates the key features or trends of your apparel products will also help to encourage users to act. When creating ads, it’s tempting to make your messaging vague enough to resonate with everyone. But if you want your Facebook ads to be effective, , tailor them to a specific audience.

Measure, Measure, Measure

Analyzing the traffic or clicks your ad is generating is a must-do to measure the success of your ad strategy. Go ahead and experiment with different creatives, images and placement to see what resonates best with your audience. Facebook offers many free measurement tools. The one we like the most is called the A/B test that lets you experiment with different images, texts and ad placements to maximize results and keep to your budget.

There are many strategies to market successfully, but the above four pillars are generally accepted as key practices and a good place to start. Next, we will go over in detail the ten steps required to create an ad campaign on Facebook.  

 Ten Steps to Create a Facebook Ad Campaign:

1.      Create a Facebook Ads Manager

To use the Facebook Ads Manager, you need to first set up a Facebook Business Page (learn how to set one up here). You cannot run ads through personal profiles. Part of the setup is creating a payment method, which is used by Meta to charge you for active ads. The Ads Manager is the control center for your Facebook ads, and it can also be navigated from your Facebook page account:

 2. Create a New Campaign  

Once logged into your Ads Manager, look for a performance dashboard where all of your campaigns, ad sets and ads will be listed, including any results they’ve driven.

Unless you’ve already created an ad, this dashboard will be empty. To create a new campaign, ad set, or ad through the Facebook Ads Manager, tab over to the type of ad you want. Note that Meta gives users two choices for buying type: Auction and Reservation.

Auctions offer more flexibility and choice for campaign objectives like daily or a lifetime. Ads can be placed on Facebook, Insta, Messenger, and other sites.

Reservation offers less flexibility but lets you plan your campaigns in advance. Ads can be placed on Facebook and Instagram. Reservation also offers frequency control.

For a better understanding and clear difference between the two, read their help guide.

3. Select Campaign Objective  

Facebook Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed around using campaign objectives, which gives Facebook an idea of your goals. Below are the options you can select from:

  • Awareness – Raises awareness for your brand/products to boost customer reach
  • Traffic – Directs traffic to your website, a social page or a specific landing page
  • Engagement – Used for posts, websites, or any link to increase the conversion
  • Focusing on leads – Influences actions, like making a purchase or learning more
  • Sales – Influences people who are likely to make purchases

Setting up a campaign objective is critical to the success of your ads. Choosing the wrong objective will leave your ad undirected, which can lead to poor results.

4. Name Your Campaign

Next, you can name the ad campaign to align with your business goals. For instance, name your campaign “XYZ Traffic,” with a brand name of “XYZ” and the objective is traffic.

Facebook has a special ad category that limits the audiences for certain ad types to prevent discrimination. It’s good to note that this is optional and only relevant to four special ad categories – Credit, Employment, Housing and Social Issues.

Selecting these categories ensures that your ads remain compliant with Facebook’s advertising discriminatory policies.

5. Consider A/B Split Testing

Competing in Facebook ads means you can’t just set it and forget it. Once you launch a campaign, it won’t run consistently—you will need to check in on it, analyze performance and continue optimizing to see success. Simply put, A/B split testing can help you choose the right version of your ad and help you experiment with different images, text, ad placements and CTAs (call to action) to maximize ad performance and save budget! The screenshot below shows how to toggle on or off your AB test options:

6. Create an Ad Set

The next steps decide your budget, the audience you want to target and where you want your ad to appear (i.e., Facebook, Insta, Messenger

Budget is basically the maximum amount of money you set for the ad campaign. Budget can be scheduled for either a daily or over the lifetime of the ad campaign. Here’s how they differ from each other.

  • Daily budget. To run your ad continuously throughout the day, select this option. A daily budget means that Facebook will pace spending per day. Note that the minimum daily budget for an ad is $1.00 and must be at least 2x your CPC.
  • Lifetime budget. If you desire to run an ad for a specified length of time, select the lifetime budget to have Facebook pace your spend over a certain time period.

Next, select your target audience from three filters: location, gender and language. Facebook also uses a new Meta Advantage+ audience feature to broaden the audience using AI to create an audience based on specific insights. If you are just starting, I recommend experimenting with several different targeting options to find an audience that fits just right.

For each type of campaign objective (refer to step #3), there are a few sets of performance goals. I.e., the campaign objective below aims at driving traffic. Depending on what you select, the Ads manager gives various selections for performance goals — like maximizing the number of clicks or increasing the number of conversions. It can also estimate your audience reach using your selected criteria. It’s a very helpful set of data!

Like their target audience, Facebook has an AI-powered Advantage+ placement to maximize your ad reach and placement. Meta’s AI system will automatically place ads across multiple places based on where they’ll perform the best.

For experienced advertisers, you can decide on the ad placements by choosing the manual placement. This will give you various filters to set to streamline ad placement, such as the devices, platforms (i.e., Insta, Facebook & Messenger) and placement types.


7. Setup Ad and Format

This step allows you to choose an existing post or create a new ad using the ad setup option. Additionally, Facebook has a new creative mockup feature where advertisers can create a mockup of ads to test which type of ad suits their audience's needs.

 

Note that you can choose between two formats: Links and Carousels. Essentially, this means you can either display a single-image ad (Links) or a multi-image ad (Carousel) with three to five scrolling images at no additional cost.

For each type of ad, Facebook requires users to adhere to certain design criteria. For single-image ads, Facebook asks that users adhere to the following design recommendations.

For multi-image ads — also known as Carousel Ads — Facebook provides the following design recommendations:

If you select “boost your posts,” you will be presented with different ad options like the Page Post Engagement: Photo ad. This ad has a unique set of design recommendations.

 8. Create your Ad.

The next step is to create my ad with graphics and descriptive text. You can choose either existing ones in your Facebook library or upload them from my computer or mobile device.

Here’s what else your Facebook ad includes:

  • Primary text. You can add up to 5 primary texts to use on your different ad placements. Display your product savings and offers here.
  • Headline. This appears below the visual and is meant to grab the audience’s attention.
  • Description. The appearance of descriptions may vary based on ad placements. Add the text here to give a detailed description of your ad copy.
  • Call-to-action. Choose what action you want your audience to perform.

9. Review and Publish Your Ad!

You are almost there! But rather than letting your excitement to finish get the best of your judgement, don't overlook the most important step of all -- conduct a thorough review of your draft ad. Once satisfied, simply (and happily) click the publish button!

10. Monitor your Ad’s Performance

Thought you were done? The last and final step is to keep an eye on how your ad is doing! To get the results, look in two places: the Facebook Ads Manager and my marketing software.

There are over 350 different metrics and terms in Ads Manager and chances are that you might get bogged down in this massive pool of data.

According to Facebook, here are some of the key metrics to look for (and their definitions):

  • Performance, which can further customize results, reach and frequency
  • Engagement, to further customize metrics like Page likes and post engagement
  • Videos, which can be customized to increase the percentage of video viewed
  • Website, to utilize customized metrics for checkouts, payments, purchases, etc.
  • Apps, which can be further customized to include metrics like app installs, app engagement, credit spends, mobile app actions, and cost per app engagement.
  • Clicks, which can be further customized to include metrics like clicks, unique clicks, CTR (click-through rate), and CPC (cost per click).
  • Settings, to further customize metrics like start date, end date, ad set name, ad ID, delivery, bid, and objective.

I hope this blog has been helpful to learn how to approach and create Facebook ads. Facebook (and other social sites) continue to leverage a growing base of mobile users that allow businesses to post ads where they’re likely to find a prime audience for their products. This trend, together with Facebooks well-thought-out ad strategy and tools, is what makes Facebook ads so effective. So don’t delay, use the above steps to boost sales and cast the net wider on potential customers!