Facebook Ads For Small Business: A Compact Guide (2022)

With a staggering 2,9 billion active users spread across 156 countries, Facebook is a small business owner’s marketing dream.

Of these users, 1.6 billion interact with a small business Facebook page. Surely, no matter which niche or demographic your company targets, you will find the right audience on Facebook.

There’s more.

Not only are there billions of people on Facebook, but they are also highly engaged. They spend up to 33 minutes per day on Facebook alone.

As a small business owner, your goal is to reach the right audience with the right message at the right moment.

The Facebook ad targeting ad feature allows you to do just that. Small business owners can hone in on their ideal audience by targeting Facebook users by:

Another powerful Facebook online advertising feature is custom audiences. 

As the name implies, the custom audiences feature allows you to run tailormade ad campaigns by finding new audiences of people who have the same characteristics as your current customers.   

Here are the 4 types of personalized audiences you can craft using the Facebook Ads Manager.

Another powerful aspect of Facebook marketing is Ads Reporting.

Facebook reporting tracks more metrics and has accurate tracking compared to traditional advertising. 

Here’s a quick run-through of the major metrics.

With these and other metrics on hand, it’s super easy to track your progress and change things on the fly. Besides, the feedback is instant. In traditional marketing, reports come in after a while. Meanwhile, you pour money into ads that aren’t producing results.

Facebook ads for small businesses are a lifesaver.

Advertising can be expensive—I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, according to Statista, running 30-second TV ads costs $104k. Shocking, I know, right? At this rate, it’s clear running TV ads isn’t a sustainable strategy for cash-strapped small business owners. 

Not so with Facebook marketing.

It’s a pocket-friendly channel.

You can run an ad campaign on Facebook without spending a fortune. With only $50 per day, you can run a successful campaign.

On average, advertising your business on Facebook costs only $1.72 per click across all industries.

So Facebook advertising is superb for startups with limited marketing budgets.

It all starts with creating a company Facebook page.

You can’t run marketing campaigns on Facebook if you are not on Facebook, right? Here are some quick tips on how to come up with an impressive Facebook page for your small business:

As a small business, you don’t have deep pockets like Fortune 500 companies.

You must stretch every dollar as far as it can go. Keep a close eye on your ad spend.

See what works best for you: spend-based, goal-based, or manual bidding?

Facebook ads have many moving parts, and content is at the heart of them.

Therefore, staying organized can be tough. That’s where the Content Calendar comes in to save the day and help you schedule your social media posts. Content calendars answer 4 key questions:

Your content must be relevant and engage your audience while driving business goals in one smooth stroke. You unlock that relevance at the intersection of your business goals and the needs of your audience as shown by the graphic below.

A smart calendar helps you refine your process and share your brand’s posts consistently with your audience.

Importantly, get clues from Page Insights, so you schedule your posts and ad sets at when your audience is most responsive.

While your brand’s Facebook business page is a start, you must do more.

For further visibility and customer support, start a community page. A company group page also helps you understand your ideal customers deeply. 

As you interact with them daily on your business page, you pick info about what drives them and informs their decisions. You can use these intimate insights into consumer psychology and behavior to craft potent ad campaigns that resonate instantly. 

Make sure your page highlights your value proposition so people know what makes you different.

Optimize ads so they work like a well-oiled machine.

In particular, optimize their placement. 

Where your ad appears affects your conversion rates. Specific ads perform better in specific places. Facebook ads for small business placements options include:

By default, Facebook places ads for you where they feel they’ll perform best through their Automatic Placements feature. But don’t let that stop you from manual placement and learning firsthand what works best for your specific brand.

Ad placement affects your expenses. CPC varies widely depending on where you place an advertisement.

To win FB ads, you don't just have to flesh out an excellent ad campaign once and forget about it. That would be a recipe for disaster or mediocre results at best. To maximize results, build split testing into your advertising workflow.

Thankfully, standard Facebook ads come with the handy split testing feature. For high performing ads that bring a high return on ad spend (ROAS), test the following:

Test again and again.

Dump the losers and double down on the winners.

Small businesses often obsess over likes. 

Vain metrics are dangerous. 

They give a semblance of progress. But in reality, nothing is happening. In the end, you just earn bragging rights without moving the ROI needle an inch. 

For a tangible outcome, focus on link retargeting instead.

Add Facebook retargeting pixels to your carefully selected content. Implementing dynamic retargeting will ensure all your connections have a chance of seeing your relevant content in their news feeds. More eyeballs on your content mean you generate leads faster.

Comfy, a Ukrainian brand, saw remarkable results through dynamic retargeting.

Do you run a brick-and-mortar business?

Then you must take advantage of location targeting to get your brand message to potential customers with laser precision. Whether you run a flower shop or a local bakery, you can use Facebook’s geo-targeting powers to target consumers in specific locations.

With location targeting, you can create ads that target a specific:

Target every stage of the funnel with your ads.

FB ads are versatile. 

You can use them at any stage of the funnel to:

Carousel ads are trending.

Here are three reasons you must rope them into your ad workflow:

Here is a carousel ad illustration from Creatopy.

While your brand’s Facebook business page is a start, you must do more.

For further visibility and customer support, start a community page. A company group page also helps you understand your ideal customers deeply. 

As you interact with them daily on your business page, you pick info about what drives them and informs their decisions. You can use these intimate insights into consumer psychology and behavior to craft potent ad campaigns that resonate instantly. 

Make sure your page highlights your value proposition so people know what makes you different.

While your brand’s Facebook business page is a start, you must do more.

For further visibility and customer support, start a community page. A company group page also helps you understand your ideal customers deeply. 

As you interact with them daily on your business page, you pick info about what drives them and informs their decisions. You can use these intimate insights into consumer psychology and behavior to craft potent ad campaigns that resonate instantly. 

Make sure your page highlights your value proposition so people know what makes you different.