Facebook Ads – Beginner’s guide for photo product sellers

Years ago, having a simple company page on Facebook was enough. However, these days that isn’t enough to reach your customers. If you want to succeed and get noticed, you need to invest in paid ads. Fortunately, this can be easily done on a very cheap budget – if you know how. Here are 5 tips on how to get started!

While Facebook’s organic reach might be declining, the social network is still one of the best mediums for reaching your target audience – if you have a budget for advertising, that is.

Don’t spend all your money on Google Adwords, as Facebook ads are viable method in their own right. While Adwords will guide your ads towards people looking for a particular product or service, Facebook will display your company towards those who are interested in what you are offering, even if they aren’t actively aware (or searching) for it yet.

This is a big difference and, done alongside Google’s own advertising model, can be great for your photo product business. Ready to get started? Here are 5 things you need to consider.

Or maybe you already know something about Facebook ads? Download our advanced guide to get more useful tips.

Setting Up Your Campaign

Before you start to plan out your ads, you should consider implementing Facebook Pixel to your website. This will give you more possibilities when it comes to which people you target.

To start your first ad campaign, you will first need to activate the tool. This is simple to do: just head to Facebook’s business page. and click “create an ad”. After your account is setup, you will then be transferred to the Ad Manager – this is where you can really start to plan your campaign.

Have A Goal

Once you’re using Facebook’s Ad Manager, the first thing you’ll be asked to do is choose a campaign goal. There are many different goals to choose from, as Facebook advertising can be used to increase brand awareness, user engagement, traffic to your website or even sales and store visits.

However, your main focus should be on conversions, although you could also run numerous campaigns, each with different objectives.

Targeting

The biggest advantage of Facebook’s advertising is its ability to target specific users, so make sure to use this feature! You can target people via geographical areas, age, gender or even by their specific interests or past familiarity with your brand.

Facebook can tell if a user has linked to your page in the past, responded to one of your events or has friends that have… all of this let’s Facebook know how ‘close’ a user is to your brand already.

So, which options should you choose? Let’s take a closer look at the various targeting options that are open to you.

Location

If you want to target people within a close proximation to your store, location lets you choose a location, further restricting to the surrounding area itself or any city/town within a set radius. Yet the scale is really up to you: Facebook let’s you target a whole country, or continent, if you wanted to. There’s even the option of multiple locations.

Demographics

After this, you can further target users by what age and gender they are. Photo products, for example, are the most popular with consumers aged between 18 and 34, as well as parents of younger children [direporter.com].

Can you target such specific groups? With Facebook Ads you can! By using these detailed targeting options, you can find people who are engaged, recently married, having a birthday and much, much more. We’ll provide more targeting examples in our advanced Facebook guide, which you can download at the end of this article.

Interests

You can also target users by their specific interests. This can let you find people who are actively interested in personalized gifts or photobooks in general. Likewise, if you’re aware of your competition, you can target people who are interested in rival businesses – this all helps your ads get displayed in front of people with an active passion for your products.

Here’s just some of the possible targeting options available:

Placement

You can let Facebook decide what placement – where and how your ads are displayed – is best or you can decide this yourself. For example, you could choose to set your ads to only display on desktops, on mobile phones. You could also set additional factors, such as whether they only appear on Facebook and/or Instagram, just for users on specific operating systems (such as android or iOS).

For a photo printers needs, such specifications really aren’t necessary, so you can let Facebook decide what’s best.

The one area you should consider, however, is where the ads are placed on Facebook. You can choose to have them appear on the right column, directly in the newsfeed or even both, in addition to various advanced options such as video advertising. Generally, ads get more engagement when they are placed in the news feed, rather than to the right.

Set A Budget

The last step in the process is setting your budget. With Facebook, you can choose amounts to be set per day or for the entire campaign. You can further set your ads to run constantly, or only between certain, predefined points.

For your first campaign, it’s best to start with a small budget. Once you gain an understanding regarding what is effective for you business, you can spend more.

After you’re done with these 5 steps, all you need to do is upload graphics and text for your ads. Just remember to keep this short – it’s proven that adverts are more effective when they’re kept to 150 characters or less.

Want to know more? Our guide with advanced Facebook tactics for printing companies can be downloaded below.