By: Cori Widen, Product Marketing Lead at Boosted by Lightricks

With 2.45 billion users, Facebook is the largest social network in the world. Businesses across the globe are all trying to reap the benefits from tapping into its colossal user base.

But how?

No thanks to changing algorithms, it’s become harder than ever to expand your organic reach. That’s why many businesses are turning to targeted ads to boost their Facebook business pages. Facebook’s targeted advertising platform leverages its sophisticated pool of data to deliver your message to the people who are most likely to want to see it.

If you’ve been eager to see what Facebook ads can do for your business page but don’t know where to start — this post is for you.

We’ll walk you through your first campaign ad and help you make the most of this powerful advertising tool.

Step 1: Create a new campaign

To get started with your first ad campaign, go the the Ads Manager on Facebook. You can access it by visiting facebook.com/ad and clicking “Create an Ad” on the upper right side, by selecting “Manage Ads” from the drop-down menu on the upper right corner of your homepage on Facebook, or by clicking “Promote Page” on your business page.

Click the green “+ Create” to get started.

Step 2: Choose your objective

Now you need to choose the goal of your campaign. Selecting the goal helps Facebook make decisions about ad placement and design that will best serve your objective.

If your goal is to increase your following, we recommend choosing the “Engagement” option under the “Consideration” column and selecting “Page likes.” This kind of campaign will make it easy for people to like your page, because it’ll place a big “like” button right on the bottom of the ad.

After selecting your objective, click “Continue.”

Step 3: Pick your target audience, budget, and schedule

Next, you’ll need to fill out the information on the “Ad set” page.

Here, you will be able to pick a very specific audience who will see your ad. This includes their location, age, interests, language and whether they are already fans of your page. You can also choose to exclude certain subsets.

Use the “Narrow Audience” feature to hone in on the target audience most likely to be interested in your page. For example, if your business is a café with a strong literary theme, rather than placing both “Coffee” and “Books” in the first box, add “Coffee,” and then click “Narrow Audience” and add “Books” to the second box. That way Facebook will only target people who are interested in both coffee and books — who are much more likely to be interested in your business than people who are interested in only one or the other.

Below the audience section, you’ll select whether to manually place your ads or let Facebook place them automatically. We recommend keeping the automatic option selected for now.

Then you’ll set your budget and schedule.

Ideally, when you pick a Facebook advertising budget, it should be based on a calculation that works backwards from your end goals: how much conversion you want to generate, how far a reach you’ll need to generate that number of conversions, and the cost of achieving that reach. For now, though, it might be best to simply set a small budget aside for this experiment (say, $1 a day for 14 days) and see what kind of results you get. The more experience and data you have, the more you’ll be able to accurately calculate an optimum budget for Facebook ads.

Step 3: Create your ad

Here, you can choose to boost an existing post, or add an image or video to display alongside a small amount of text.

We recommend using a video rather than a static image here. Videos consistently generate more engagement than still images. Don’t have a video? No worries — there are super easy ways to make one, such as using the templates on Boosted.

Facebook recommends using 125 characters or fewer in your ad text. Keep it short, sweet, and to the point — and orient it toward your campaign goal. If you selected “Page likes” as your campaign goal this time around, it’s a good idea to include that as a call to action in this text.

You’ll see a preview of how your ad will appear on mobile or desktop on the lower right side of this page.

Step 4: Confirm

Once you’ve filled out all the sections of the form, click “Confirm” on the lower right corner of the page. There you go — you’ve just launched your first Facebook ad campaign! You can track the stats of your ad on the Ad Manager page.

Action Items:

1. Use an app (you can try Boosted!) to create a video for your ad.

2. Set aside a small budget to experiment with FB ads.

3. Set up your first campaign, following the steps and tips above

4. Experiment! Adjust the perimeters of your ad — schedule, target audience, etc. — and analyze the results to see what works best.

Cori Widen is the Product Marketing Lead at Boosted by Lightricks. She has been leading product marketing campaigns and doing qualitative market research in the tech industry for 10 years.