You’ve decided on an objective, or call to action, for your Facebook advertisement. Now it’s time to actually set up the advertisement.

Who are you targeting? What are are you trying to reach? How long will the advertisement run? Oh, and the big question: how much will it cost?

This blog post is going to take you through setting up the rest of the ad. As you’ve probably already noticed, Facebook makes the steps relatively easy and self-explanatory, trying to guide you along the way. The purpose of my posts are to make sure you understand why you’re selecting the things you want for the ad.

For the purpose of this post, we’re going to assume that I am in the process of creating an advertisement that is going to promote my business page.

Your “ad account” deals with the money and brains behind the campaign; whoever is going to be in charge of running the ad should have his or her information as the primary info. You’ll need to determine where your business is located — this might not translate from where you set the location of your business page — for your ad account info. This is also how Facebook will be able to track the cost and time of the campaign, which you’ll be setting up in the next few steps.

Now it’s time to define your audience.

Think of your target audience not just for your business or brand, but specifically for your advertisement. Where do they live? How old are they? Are they in college? This is one of the best features of creating an ad with Facebook, in my opinion, because you can actually see just how specific you’re able to be with reaching an audience. You’ll even notice a meter to the right that shows you, based on your selections, how specific your ad will be toward that audience.

You’ll notice that by just using some basic settings, I’ve defined an audience that is broad and will cost more money. To narrow down the scope, I’ll need to add some more characteristics about my audience. The United States is a huge location to cover, as well as the age range of 18-65+.

Suggestions are provided for you under the “More Demographics,” “Interests” and “Behaviors” areas. This allows you to reach specific people who match the demographics, interests and behaviors you’ve selected.

For the AV industry, it is going to be tricky to actually determine exactly who you want to target and where you want the ad to reach. It may take a few test runs before you know exactly which campaign works best for you. Ideally, integrators will want the selected choices to narrow down the target audience to around 1,000-1,500 people. Again, a few different campaigns and objectives may be necessary, however, to figure out how Facebook can best help them promote their idea/brand/product.

Yes, I’m aware that this will cost money to test these campaigns out! However, in the long run, you’ll be glad you did; Facebook advertising is simple enough to create, manage and execute — it can, and will, help you reach more people in an extremely convenient, affordable way.

Play around with the settings under this section of your advertising setup. Defining your audience is key to ensuring the execution of an effective Facebook advertisement. Next we’ll cover budgeting and pricing.