Traditional advertising was almost impossible for small businesses. Until Facebook changed the game, there are more businesses growing online in Nigeria.
Are you considering online advertising or how to advertise your business on Facebook in Nigeria?
Facebook advertising can give your business a very strong online presence.
There are over 40 million Facebook monthly active users in Nigeria which are expected to reach 69.4 million come 2026, see the image below from Statista.
This ever increasing user base can be leveraged to find and engage the best customers you have ever wanted.
In fact, using Facebook to advertise a business in Nigeria has a lot of benefits you need to know.
The best part of it is that no matter what you sell or offer as a service, there are people willing to buy and you can use Facebook to reach out to them.
Consumers, nowadays, make their purchase decisions based on what they see on social media.
You really need to tap into this fast growing network to promote your business, gain new potential audiences, and convert them to leads and sales.
So, the use of Facebook advertising is a major factor in determining consumer behavior.
Facebook offers invaluable tools that range from business manager, audience insights, Facebook pixels, stories, business page, group to paid ads.
Any of these tools can be used to effectively communicate what your brand represents and build strong connections with your customers.
Nevertheless, there are different ways to start Facebook advertising in Nigeria and this post will walk you through each of the methods.
What is Facebook advertising and how does it work?
Facebook advertising is simply the strategic business practice of using Facebook to create and share content that can help a brand discover and engage with a potential customer.
Facebook is concerned about the relevance of whatever content you share on the platform, thereby making the content only visible to users who might find value in your business.
This means, it is not everyone on Facebook that will see your posts, but only those that the content matters to.
So, in order to boost your coverage, visibility, and engagement with customers, your campaigns must conform to the best standards required to advertise your business on Facebook.
This is important because Facebook is concerned about helping audiences find brands or businesses that offer relevant solutions which are based on their interests.
You can take advantage of the system to begin advertising your business on Facebook in Nigeria.
Only by maintaining the standards can Facebook help advertisers promote their content and offer great user experience to the audience.
Advertising your business on Facebook in Nigeria, however, can take place in different places on the platform.
You may decide to advertise your business using a Facebook timeline, story, page, group, ads manager, and so on.
With all these tools and features, your ads can come in a textual, image, or video format. Other advanced ad formats are carousels, instant experiences, and collections.
Your Facebook ad can also include links that point to relevant pages on your website if you want to boost your traffic.
With a clear objective, you can make the best choice among the tools.
Most Popular types of Facebook ads
Facebook advertising in Nigeria could be made in different forms, which include:
- Image ads: This form of Facebook ads just requires you to have a visually appealing image and some text telling viewers something about your business.
- Video ads: Recently people prefer to watch video orientated content when considering buying a product. They want more information about a product that isn’t readily available in simple image or text based ads.
- Slideshow ads: A slideshow ad features multiple images, text or video clips. Using this type of ad allows you to compile various forms of ads.
- Poll ads: This type of ad is mobile optimized. Meaning only people that use their smartphones to access Facebook can see it. This form of ad allows your audiences to give their opinions about an issue.
- Messenger ads: A lot of people use messenger to reply to Facebook messages and if you want a different audience for your ads you can use messenger as the platform where you want your ads to be seen.
- Stories ads: Using story ads can give your ad more views and position your business as the ‘in’ thing in social media.
Other types of Facebook ads include carousel ads, dynamic ads, etc.
How to advertise your business on Facebook in Nigeria
You can advertise a business on Facebook in Nigeria using the following steps or techniques and attract your audience’s attention.
1. Get a Facebook page
You can get started with Facebook advertising in Nigeria with your Facebook page.
Read this comprehensive guide to create a Facebook page for any kind of business you want to advertise.
It does not matter if you have an existing page, you may still need to use the guide to optimize your Facebook page and ensure it works perfectly okay for you.
As a professional, posting on your timeline may not be enough to grow your business.
However, you need a Facebook business page to leverage Facebook ads manager and make your campaigns about your brand or business go a long way in converting your audiences.
The Facebook page has tools that can help you build a strong business profile so people can be aware of your business and connect with your brand easily.
Such connections are very important for your business to succeed online.
Meanwhile, having your page set up does not guarantee 100% advertising success. Rather, it is just a part of the process.
There are other efforts you need to put in place and these include:
- Publishing relevant posts
- Being consistent with your schedules and styles
- Boosting your posts
Posting content that is aimed at solving relevant problems will get your target audience attracted to your page.
People do not feel comfortable patronizing brands they are not familiar with or buying products that are not popular in the market.
So, that makes constantly putting out useful content on your page a strategy to draw attention to your brand.
Doing this may not be easy because you will not see major progress just by putting out a few posts.
You need to plan your page activities and create a schedule for publishing your posts. Check out our guide on the best time to post on Facebook to schedule your posts.
Each time you publish a post, Facebook may ask you to boost the post to reach more people. That will cost you some dollars, which is worth trying.
2. Create a Facebook Business Manager account
Once your business page is set up, the second step to Facebook advertising in Nigeria is creating an account on Facebook business manager.
This is to synchronize your business page with your ads manager and organize all your business activities on Facebook in one place.
For example, all your campaigns, ad sets, ads, pages, analytics, and so on can be accessed in your business manager account with ease.
- Go to Facebook Business Manager.
- Login with your existing Facebook credentials.
- Click Create to set up your business manager account.
- Follow other steps as the system prompts you.
Finding it difficult to do, read our guide on how to setup a Facebook Business Manager account with PHOTOS.
It must also be noted that during the course of creating your business manager account, you will be required to set up your ads manager. Your ads manager contains all your ad campaigns.
By the time you are done creating your first Facebook advertising campaign, you can monitor your ad performance from your ads manager.
3. Choose a campaign objective
Your campaign objective is definitely what you want to achieve with your ad.
Facebook makes this step very simple by having the 11 basic objectives all advertisers can aim at listed out on the platform.
- Go to Ads manager,
- Click Campaign or Create
- The list of all the objectives will pop up. Go through them and select the one that is most suitable for your campaign.
According to the list, Facebook ad objectives are:
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App installs
- Video views
- Leads generation
- Conversion
- catalog sales
- Store traffic
No matter what business you do and you want to advertise with Facebook, your objective must fit in with any of the above.
Each Facebook campaign objective is tailored to your business needs, target audience, placements, and brand safety.
For someone advertising for conversion, Facebook will send him an audience willing to buy his products or services.
Which means, if you choose traffic as your campaign objective, your ad settings will go in that direction. Hence the audience Facebook will send to you will be someone that will visit your site and boost your traffic.
You must take your time to think and be sure about your ad objective before choosing one, so your ad won’t end up working against you.
4. Set your ad budget and schedule
Facebook advertising needs a budget to fly. You need to set the amount of money you want to spend on advertising your business on Facebook and specify the period of running the ad.
You can set the budget to be daily or lifetime. The daily budget means your ad will pause after reaching a certain daily budget while the lifetime budget is a nonstop ad budget.
For beginners, it is advisable to choose a daily budget to avoid wasting your ad spending.
Meanwhile, the best way to avoid running your ad when your audience is not available is to schedule it. This is possible only when you are using a lifetime budget.
Scheduling your ads is important because running your ad when your audience is not likely to be available to view it will cost you more with no better results.
So, to use the advanced ad schedule feature, you need to know and follow the best time to post on Facebook.
Both your ad budget and schedule make Facebook advertising a lot more flexible.
With this you can determine the number of people to see your ad, the number of days your ad will be on, and whether you want the ad to go live immediately or in the future.
At least, with a huge budget, your coverage will be very high compared to an ad ran on a low budget. For this reason, you need to invest money into your ad to reap a high ROI.
5. Define your target audience
Your target audience is the set of people your ad is meant for. With over 26 million people using Facebook in Nigeria, your ad cannot be meant for all and sundry.
For this reason, only a specific group of people will be interested in your business and you need to clearly set your ad to target them.
So how do you determine your audience and target them?
To determine your audience, try validating your business niche. A niche has its specific types of audience different from others.
While affiliate companies target advertisers, eCommerce stores target end-users. Both two niches have to target their most relevant audiences to realize their goals.
So, having identified the kind of people your business is suitable for, consider their locations, interests and demographics and apply them when you are defining your target audience in the cause of setting up your Facebook ads.
This is to ensure your ad reaches only those who need your business so you can maximize conversion.
6. Choose placements, devices, and OS for your ad
Since Facebook synchronizes all its social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, an ad you run on Facebook can appear on other platforms concurrently.
You can also set your ad to appear on desktop, mobile devices or both and on Android, iOS, windows, or all.
As you have the option to select placements, devices and operating systems, you can choose to place your ad where it is likely going to perform better.
7. Create your Facebook ad
Advertising your business on Facebook is creating your ad copy which has three basic parts:
- Text – The heading or short description of the ad.
- Image or video – Graphical representation of the ad.
- Link (optional) – A website URL you want your audience to click and land on a page on your site and generate leads for your business.
A good ad copy must be engaging to capture the attention of your audiences. Whatever image or video you want to use must be highly quality.
Facebook requires an image of 1200×62 pixels and for the video aspect if needed, read tips to create a quality video for marketing.
8. Review and publish your ad
Before publishing your ad, go through it very carefully – check the text, graphics and link contained thereof and make sure all the elements connect and present the value you want the audience to see in your business.
Once everything is set, press Publish.
If your ad does not go live immediately, there is no cause for alarm.
Facebook uses a bidding system to check your ad quality in terms of relevance before approval. Once your ad is approved, you will receive a notification immediately. Hence you can begin tracking your ad.
Free forms of Facebook advertising
You can still promote your business without running a paid advertising service on Facebook. Facebook offers other free advertising features that you can use to complement your paid ads which include:
Facebook timeline
Facebook advertising emerged from the common practice among users to post about their businesses on their walls and boost their brand awareness.
The Facebook wall metamorphosed into the Facebook timeline powered with advertising algorithms to determine user interests and fetch relevant posts.
This was in the bid to make businesses effectively advertise their businesses on their timelines.
Though Facebook was mainly created to help users foster their social relationships with friends and family.
Meanwhile, the journey of Facebook from social to marketing gradually took place and the platform can now be used as a full advertising tool for businesses.
Most people started advertising their businesses on their timelines until Facebook added more features.
To advertise your business on your timeline is as simple as posting relevant information about your business on your timeline and encouraging viewers to engage with the post.
Facebook news feed
The news feed contains the first set of posts users see when they login to their Facebook accounts but yet most advertisers do not use it.
If you are very active on Facebook, the news feed can really help you promote your business. As you post on your timeline, do not forget your friends will see your posts on their news feeds.
Informing your friends about your business on Facebook via status and news feed can be very useful because you are sure that people will definitely see your posts.
And you can keep posting about your business everyday so more people will know about It.
Ensure your posts are visually attractive by adding nice graphic images or videos so people can remember you for it.
Facebook Marketplace
Facebook marketplace is a place where you can sell and buy products. It specifically aims at people that have actual products to sell and it is easy to set up.
You can use either a personal account or a business page to set up your marketplace on Facebook.
As a business owner, you can create a shop for yourself, post photos of your product, and state the price you want to sell it on the marketplace.
People who use the Facebook marketplace search for products based on category. So when you are adding your products, ensure you list them in the rights categories.
Conclusion How to Advertise Businesses on Facebook
If you have ever wondered how to advertise your business on Facebook in Nigeria, following this guide will help you achieve whatever objective you wish to attain for your business.
Your advertising objective may be to boost your brand awareness, engagement or conversion, this guide is detailed enough to walk you through the whole process.
If you have any questions about how to do Facebook ads in Nigeria, share it in the comment section below.
RELATED ARTICLES