Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available to you, so including paid advertising in your social media marketing strategy could be an excellent way to grow your business in 2021.

Many businesses choose to advertise on Facebook because, since it has so many users, you can reach staggering amounts of people and specify demographics, behaviours and more. In fact, this article from Sprout Social says that there are nearly 2.45 billion active monthly Facebook users, making it the most used social media platform in the world right now.

You may be pleased to hear that advertising on Facebook is not only cost effective, it’s also really simple to do. However, one stumbling block that some people come across is choosing an objective for their advert.

When you run a Facebook ad, you’ll need to choose an objective. In short, this determines (1) what you want your advert to achieve, (2) how Facebook runs your ad and (3) who it shows your ad to. 

Once you’ve got to grips with choosing your ad objectives, the Facebook ad process should be incredibly straightforward. That’s why we’ve written this guide to the 11 Facebook campaign objectives, all of which fall into either the awareness, consideration or conversion stages.

Awareness, Consideration and Conversion

Step 1: Awareness

Brand awareness – If you want to reach new audiences and tell them about your business (and have them remember it!), the brand awareness objective could be the one for you.

Facebook predicts an advert’s ‘recall’ ability by looking at people’s interactions with ads and questioning users who have seen the ad before via a poll. 

It’s worth noting that, with the brand awareness objective, the aim isn’t to get engagements of conversions, so you probably won’t see much of either of those – the idea is to spark the interest of new audiences and have them remember your brand.

Reach – To reach as many people as possible in your target audience (and within your budget), using the reach objective can be a good move. You’ll be able to choose the ‘frequency’ of the adverts, meaning how many times people see them.

However, it’s worth noting that, although you’ll be maximising your reach within your target audience, Facebook won’t consider who is most likely to engage with your advert. So, your ad could be shown to people who tend to skip over adverts whereas other objectives can filter these people out.

Step 2: Consideration

Traffic – The traffic objective encourages users to go to a URL of your choice. That could be to your website, a Facebook event, a ticket website, an app, etc. Facebook decides who is shown this type of advert based on which users have clicked on these types of adverts in the past.

Engagement – Adverts with engagement as the objective use social proof to determine which Facebook users are most likely to engage with the advert. Based on users’ previous interactions with adverts, the algorithm will show the adverts to people who are most likely to like, react to, comment on, or share it.

Keep in mind that, in many cases, when someone engages with your advert, their Facebook friends will be able to see that engagement too, spreading your reach further and further.

App installs – For app downloads, choose this objective. This type of advert links to the App Store or Google Play so that users can download your app. With the app installs objective, Facebook targets people who have downloaded apps from adverts before.

Video views – If you have a video that you want to get as many views as possible, choose video views as your objective. While this is the most obvious choice for video adverts, there’s more to this objective than meets the eye. When you choose video views, you’ll also get the option to retarget adverts to those people who have watched your video before. 

Lead generation – This objective aims to promote leads magnets and get leads, all the while the user gets to stay on Facebook. Facebook users will submit their information (such as an email address) to get something free from your business, such as an ebook, a free course, or newsletter.

Messages – The objective here is to encourage Facebook users to send a direct message to your page. This lets you talk to them directly and answer any questions they might have. When you run this type of advert, it’s really important that you respond to any messages you receive promptly. If for whatever reason you’re not able to respond to messages quickly (within a few hours), it’s best to choose a different objective.

Step 3: Conversion

Conversions – The conversion objective is there to drive meaningful actions on your landing page (e.g., app installs, email signups, purchases) and works best when your advert is shown to people who are already familiar with your brand and products/services.

To be able to use the conversions objective, you’ll first need to download the Facebook pixel to your website. 

Catalog sales – As the name suggests, the specific goal of the catalog sales objective is to get sales and only to get sales. Instead of promoting just one product or service, the idea behind this type of ad is to show relevant items from your catalogue to people who are interested in those types of items, or who have bought those types of items before. 

If you want to run an advert with the catalog sales objective, you need to make sure that you’ve integrated your product catalog with Facebook.

Store traffic – If you have a brick and mortar store and you want to drive footfall, store traffic could be an excellent objective for your next Facebook ad. This type of advert will focus on people who are close to your store, but it won’t let you target specific demographics (e.g. job title or relationship status).

For this ad objective to work, you need to make sure that your business location is properly detailed on your Facebook page. Plus, consumers need to have their location services enabled.

Hopefully this quick guide has helped with your Facebook ad strategy. Lockstep offers social media marketing, as well as SEO, web design, and more. Click here to learn more about our services.