How to Use Facebook Ads to Promote Your Event

It is a fact: Your target event attendees are active on social media. They are also likely to spend more of their social time on Facebook than anywhere else.

According to Pew Research Center, Facebook has the highest share of typical social media platform usage. (YouTube is not a “typical” channel because it lacks instant messaging). About 68% of all online adults actively use Facebook.

That number has likely risen in 2019, since Facebook now has over 2.27 billion monthly users.

What you can expect from advertising an event on Facebook

By promoting your event on Facebook, you get the following:

1. Better exposure

More targeted people are likely to see and interact with your event via Facebook ads. Facebook users spend about 20 minutes daily on the platform.

2. Better segmenting

You can use Facebook Insights and tools to find and segment your event attendees.

3. Better targeting options

Expect to target users by location, gender, age, income level, education, interests, behaviour, and more.

4. Better value for money

Facebook ads are 7 times cheaper than Twitter ads. A Facebook event ad can cost as little as $1 per day. (But it can reach as many as 4,000 potential attendees, according to Hootsuite’s Adespresso.)

5. Better tracking

You can track your event ads’ performance at all times.

6. Better sense of ownership

You can create a dedicated Facebook Page to form a landing page for your event ads. So you can measure interest and sell event tickets via a ticketing site like Billetto or directly on Facebook.

7. Better cross-promotion

People spend almost an hour a day on Facebook-owned social networks: Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

8. Better conversions

Facebook event ads can help you quickly advance potential attendees through your marketing and sales funnels.

9. Better community engagement

Unlike Google Ads, Facebook advertising lets you more simply leverage your event’s social community. It also gives you better insights into how they behave on social media.

10. Better transparency

Since December 2018, Facebook made advertising more transparent.

Sold? Good!

Now, how do you actually promote your event using Facebook ads?

We’ve already shown you how to create an event using a Facebook page.

In this quick guide, we focus on how to promote events with Facebook’s paid ads.

1. How to choose the right type of Facebook ads for your event

Before creating a Facebook event ad, you’ll first need to create the event itself. You’ll have to be a page editor, admin, or co-host to the event to advertise it on Facebook.

Event ads can help boost awareness, ticket sales, and RSVPs for your upcoming event. You can use an event ad to retarget people who’ve shown interest in previous events. (Or target new people who may be interested in an upcoming one.)

Expect three types of Facebook ads here. These are based on campaign goals: awareness, consideration, or conversion. Those are the prominent items you’ll notice in the Facebook Ads Manager.

Then it’s time to create your event ad. To begin, choose an objective.

Indicate what you want to achieve: awareness, consideration, or conversion.

For example, choosing “Traffic” under “Consideration” gives you this:

Choosing “Conversion” objectives allows you to use either “Interested” or “Get Tickets” as your event ad call to action.

Next: Set up your ad account.

The following pages let you set up Facebook ad sets. The ad set you get will depend on the objective you chose. Using our “Traffic” objective, we’ll get six-piece ad set consisting of:

• Traffic: Choose where to direct those clicks.
• Dynamic Creative: A combination of dynamic images and headlines.
• Offer: One that potential attendees can save and get reminders about.
• Audience: Define your ideal attendee. Follow the prompts to target attendees using factors such as location, age, gender, connections, interests, behaviour, and languages.
  • Custom audience: People that already interacted with your event.
  • Lookalike audience: People just learning about your event but are similar to your most valuable target attendees.
• Placements: Either automatic or manual.
  • Automatic: Facebook’s delivery system chooses where your event ads are likely to perform best.
  • Manual: You decide where in the Facebook network your ads will appear.

  

• Budget and Schedule: Choose between daily and lifetime budgets. The lifetime option lets you schedule event ads for specific hours and days of the week. That means you can target attendees when they are most active online.

Next, it’s time to create the event ad itself.

2. How to create Facebook ads for your event

Next up: Choose the type of Facebook event ad format that’s best suited for your campaign. Ad format will affect how your event ads look.

There are 11 Facebook ad formats:

Learn more about Facebook’s specifications for each format.

The next thing you’ll need to do is add media files to your advert in the “Media” section:

Follow that up by adding a link to where you want attendees to take action:

Here’s how it would look with the event ad details:

This is the creative section.

It is the place to add your compelling copy, relevant event image, and other branding aspects. Again, be sure to check out Facebook’s guidelines concerning image, text, and video. That includes the best text-to-image ratio in a Facebook ad.

It used to be limited to 20% text, but Facebook has since made it an option for marketers to decide.

Tip: For more inspiration, check out this article about creating a winning Facebook Ad.

3. Placing your event ad order on Facebook

Once you’ve filled out your media and link sections, the ad is ready for review. After you confirm that everything looks as it should, you’re ready to submit the ad.

To do that, simply hit the “Place Order” button on your right. That will send the ad to Facebook for further review. You’ll receive a confirmation message to let you know your event ad is live.

Over to you

Creating an event ad on Facebook is not as tough as it may seem. Follow this quick guide to get your message out there in time for a successful event you’ll live to remember.