I started out in digital advertising during my time in NYC five years ago. At that time Facebook wasn’t used by any of the major advertisers we worked with and it wasn’t even a sparkle in the advertising eye for small businesses. Now, 50% of all Americans have a Facebook account. With that kind of penetration you get traffic and where’s there’s traffic, there’s advertisers.

Usually digital advertising can be too expensive and ineffective for small businesses because they’re paying for national exposure while desiring to focus on a local market. True, online advertising is one of the cheapest ways to promote nationally, but who cares about that when you just want to get the word out to the community you do business in. For this reason there’s been a big barrier to entry for many startups and small/medium size businesses to advertising online…until now! You can get started advertising on Facebook here.

The beautiful thing about Facebook is that it is a great venue for small businesses to get into digital advertising because it is affordable, easy to use, and is highly targetable – most notably – geographically.

Here are some quick tips for getting the most out of a Facebook ad.

Use a headline that communicates a benefit. Your headline must quickly and simply communicate the value you are offering to potential customers. Don’t make the mistake of putting your business name as the headline.

If branding, use your logo as the image and if advertising, use an image that communicates a benefit. A decision needs to be made between branding and advertising. Branding is concerned with increasing the awareness of your company, its logo, mission, etc. Advertising is focused on communicating a specific benefit, service, feeling, etc. Make sure you determine which one your ad is for and then choose the image appropriately (see examples below). And definitely make sure to size your image to the correct pixel dimensions! They are 110 pixels wide by 80 pixels tall.

Use the detail text to further explain the headline and give a call to action. Digital ads work best when a “call to action” is used. This can simply be something like, “click here to get started” or “act now.”

Make good use of Facebook’s targeting. One of the most important things in advertising is targeting! As you target your ads you’ll see Facebook calculate the number of people in that audience on the right side of the page. The smaller this number is, the more efficiently your money will be used.

Pay by click, not by impressions. I’ve seen the best results using the “pay by click” choice. If you notice that you happen to be getting a ton of clicks then try switching it up…so far I’ve been much better off by not using the “pay by impressions” option.

For your reference, here are two of our ads. You’ll notice one is for branding and one is for our web design service.