Creating a Facebook campaign

Overview

You can use the new Facebook Ads tool inside SendinBlue to boost your marketing efforts in several ways:

1. Engage your current customers on a new channel. Reinforce an important marketing campaign with both email and Facebook Ads, or re-engage email contacts who are drifting away.

For example, if you are running a 7-day promotion, your strategy might look like this:

Day 1: email campaign announcing the promotion
Day 1-5: Facebook Ads campaign announcing the promotion
Day 6-7: Facebook Ads campaign reminding that the promotion ends on day 7
Day 6: email campaign reminding that the promotion ends tomorrow
Day 7: email campaign with a “last chance” message

2. Find new customers. Use Facebook’s intelligent targeting to find more customers like your best customers.

For example, you could sync your top customers into a specific SendinBlue contact list and display Facebook Ads to people with similar interests and characteristics.

Good to know: If you don’t already have a Facebook page for your brand, you will need to create one here. When creating your first Facebook Ad, you will authorize SendinBlue to connect to Facebook and your brand’s Facebook page to display your ads.

Tips for creating your first campaign

Think about what you want your Facebook Ad to achieve. Do you want to drive traffic to your website to gain new email subscribers? To promote a new product or sale? Knowing your goal will help you create a more effective ad campaign.
Confirm that your brand’s content is not prohibited or restricted by Facebook’s advertising policies.
Confirm that you have a valid payment method active in SendinBlue here.

Creating your campaign

Setup

From your account dashboard, click on Facebook Ads in the left panel menu and then click the Create a Facebook campaign button.

On this page, you will select which Facebook page to promote in your campaign and give your campaign a name (for internal reference).

First-time users will need to click the Connect to Facebook button and follow the steps on-screen. Once returned to SendinBlue, please confirm the Facebook page to promote in the campaign.

Good to know: If your desired page is not listed, it is either unpublished or associated as the primary page in another Facebook Business Manager. To create ads for a page, it must be published and may not be the primary page for another Facebook Business Manager then the one connected to your SendinBlue account.

Continue to the next step: Content.

Content

Select an ad format: Single or Carousel (coming soon).

Next, you will build an ad by inputting a bit of content:

Enter some text describing your promotion
Upload an image that illustrates your promotion (recommended size: 1,200 x 628 px)
Add a link to a page that you want your audience to visit
Decide whether to add a button that describes a specific type of “call to action”
Decide whether to let Facebook automatically insert your linked page’s default title and description or to customize it for the ad

In this example, let’s create a Facebook Ad for our imaginary coffee shop, Roaster’s Coffee!

1 - We choose the campaign type, and add the text for our ad. This is where we tell our audience a bit about what we are promoting. We could simply showcase the shop itself and promote our brand, but in this instance, we have a special mobile discount to promote.

2 - Then we add an appealing image that represents our promotion: lattes and pastries. Choosing an image that compels a viewer to seek out more information is important. We also reviewed Facebook’s restrictions for ads before uploading our image, so that we could avoid any issues with the approval process that later on.

Since Facebook favors images that do not include any text, and will actually reject ads that contain too much text, we will use an appealing image that does not include any text. (Learn more on Facebook’s help section.)

Good to know: If you need a free stock image, try using a tool like Pexels or Unsplash. If you need help resizing your ad image to the ideal size (1,200 x 628 px), try an online design tool such as Canva, BannerSnack, or Bannerwise.

3 - The URL for our page is added so that traffic can be driven to our shop’s site - this is the key to our ad’s success.

4 - We’ll choose the “Show Menu” call to action button for our Roaster’s Coffee ad.

5 - Let’s customize our link’s page title and preview text to support the details of our promotion and make the ad feel more personal.

Good to know: Once the ad is saved in this step, you will be able to preview it exactly as it will appear on Facebook! We can click the Preview button at the top of the page, or from any other step in the process by hovering our mouse’s cursor over the Content step.

Audience

Select who should see your ad on Facebook. You can choose one or both options:

People who are already in your SendinBlue contact list(s)
Facebook users who are similar to the people in your SendinBlue contact list(s)

Continuing our example for Roaster’s Coffee, we can select a specific set of contacts in our account (at least 20), as well as reach out to Facebook users who visit and like similar pages to a sample of our contacts. If we choose the second option, we’ll need to include at least 500 contacts so that Facebook can identify similar contacts.

Good to know: When only targeting a “similar” audience, Facebook will not display your ad to the sample contacts you select.

Budget & Dates

In this step, you will set the display dates for your ad and set the maximum amount to spend for the entire campaign.

When scheduling our ad for Roaster’s Coffee, we see there is a daily minimum spend required. This means, if we want to run our ad for 7 days, the total budget must be at least 7 x the minimum daily spend.

Good to know: Facebook will optimize the way your campaign budget is spent to maximize your results and keep your cost per click as low as possible. While the daily budget may vary, the total spend will not exceed your total budget set. If there is unspent budget, it will be credited back to your SendinBlue account balance after the campaign is completed.

Launch your campaign

Confirmation

Before finalizing and submitting your campaign, you will be shown a Confirmation where you can review all elements of your Facebook Ads campaign.

Remember to verify that your content is spelled correctly and that you are pleased with the selected audience, dates, and budget.

Click the Content drop-down menu to preview how the ad will appear in all formats (Desktop news feed, Mobile news feed, etc.).

To revise any element of your ad, simply click the Return to this step link next to “Setup”, “Content”, “Audience” or “Budget”. After saving your updates, you can return to this Confirmation.

Submit & Pay

When satisfied with your ad, click the green “Submit and pay” button in the top-right corner of the screen. This click confirms you approve the ad’s content, audience, schedule and budget, and that your payment method on file may be charged for the total budget.

Ad Review

Facebook’s advertising team reviews all ads before they are displayed. When your ad is approved, it will be displayed during the dates you selected in the “Budget” step.

If the ad is declined by Facebook, SendinBlue will notify you so that you may understand the reason(s) and make the appropriate changes before re-submitting your ad.

What’s Next

Congrats on creating your first Facebook Ads campaign!

We recommend reviewing this guide to understanding your campaign report.

If you encounter any issues or have questions about Facebook Ads, please reach out to our customer care team and we’ll be glad to help you.