It’s getting harder and harder to reach your audience online these days. Emails are going unopened. Social media newsfeeds are getting more clogged, making it harder for your update to be seen. One proven channel for reaching your audience, however, is Facebook ads. Because there are many ways to engage your social media audience with Facebook, you can maximize your reach and find new customers. Here’s how.

1. Decide on a Goal

Don’t waste your valuable advertising dollars if you don’t have a goal in mind for your Facebook advertising campaign. What are you trying to achieve?

• Send traffic to your website or landing page to sign up for a webinar
• Get more likes on your Facebook page
• Get people to sign up for your newsletter
• Generate sales

Set a specific number for your goal (“we want 50 new visitors a day to our site from our Facebook ad.”) so you can measure against it.

2. Choose the Best Ad Format

Facebook keeps expanding its ad offerings, making it more and more appealing to businesses.

Video Ads: Did you know that over 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day? That makes video ads even more compelling.

Slideshow Ads: If you don’t have the desire to create videos, try slideshow ads. They’re great for highlighting your product line.

Canvas Ads: If you have a story to tell, use the multimedia ad format, Canvas. It’s great for engaging a mobile audience.

Photo Ads: Put one product front and center with photo ads. These appear on the right side of your news feed. Be mindful that only 20% of the ad can be text or it will be rejected by Facebook.

Boosted Posts: Amplify existing Facebook content with boosted posts to get it in front of your page’s fans as well as even more people.

Augmented Reality Ads: Here’s a very of-the-minute ad option: augmented reality (AR) ads. Users can, for example, try on a pair of glasses through the ad interface and their camera.

Likely, some of these options are a better fit for you than the others. Start with one and then try another to test out your campaign to see which is more impactful. You can start by spending $15 a day for 7 days for your test.

3. Create Your Offer

This offer will tie into the goal you established. If you want more Facebook fans on your business page, create an offer that will entice them to click Like on your page. Here are a few examples:

Click Like and get exclusive offers you won’t get anywhere else!

Like our page and see new products before anyone else.

Remember: use only one call to action per ad, otherwise you’ll confuse your audience, who won’t know what you want them to do. Use words like click, visit, save, like, combined with a sense of urgency: limited time, now, instant. You might also want to develop 3-5 ads to test which ones get the best response rate.

4. Set Your Target and Budget

Once you’re in the Facebook ad interface, it’s pretty easy to set up your ad. You’ll be asked who you want to reach with your ad. The more specific you are, the more successful your ad will be, so you’ll need to know who your target audience is. If you’re trying to reach women aged 30-40 who have children and live in the west, only Facebook users who fit that demographic will see your ad. If they’re the ones most likely to buy from you, you’ll see a decent conversion rate.

Facebook ads are usually pretty affordable. If you’re worried about spending too much, set a modest budget like $100 and carefully monitor results before you invest more.

5. Assess Results

FB has great monitoring tools. You naturally want your ad to do its job, so keep tabs on how many people did the thing you wanted them to (clicked to your site, liked your page). They may not have made a purchase, which makes assessing the return on investment a bit tricky, but if you can assign a value to each action, you’ll have a sense of whether the investment was worth it or not.

Let’s say you want people to like your Facebook page. You know that about 1% of your followers end up buying from you, spending on average $200. If you get 1,000 new Likes from your campaign, you can estimate that 1% of them (10) will end up being customers. Using that average sale of $200 and multiplying it by 10, you can estimate that you’d bring in $2,000 as a result! As long as you spend less than that on your ad, it’s well worth the investment.

You may not get the results you want. In that case, change one thing at a time, like the offer or the type of ad, or maybe even your demographic.

Facebook ads get you directly in front of the people you’re trying to sell to. They’re inexpensive and easy to modify as needed. Play around with them to see if they can help you increase revenues through a new channel.