Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms. With its large user base, businesses in any niche can use it to connect with their target audience.
If you want to use Facebook as a marketing platform to reach more customers, you must understand how it works.
In this Facebook marketing guide for beginners, I will explain the basics of Facebook marketing so you can use it to grow your business.
What Is Facebook Marketing and How Does It Work?
Facebook marketing is the process of using the Facebook platform to showcase your business to potential buyers. It can consist of a mix of both paid and organic marketing.
With organic Facebook marketing, you regularly post content to grow your following and keep your audience engaged.
With paid Facebook marketing, you set up various advertising campaigns to drive people to your site and eventually convert them into customers.
Benefits of Facebook Marketing For Businesses
There are many advantages to using Facebook to market your business. Below are a few of the most significant benefits:
Large audience: Facebook has billions of users worldwide, many of whom use the platform multiple times daily. By marketing on Facebook, your business has the potential to reach your target customers at scale.
Variety of ads: Facebook supports a wide range of advertising formats. You can create videos, images, carousels, and other types of ads to engage users in the most effective manner.
Advanced targeting: Facebook lets you get very precise with who you target with your ads. You can target users based on demographics, interests, past behavior, and other characteristics. The platform also makes it easy to remarket to previous customers.
How to Create a Facebook Marketing Strategy
- Setup a Facebook Business Page
- Create a Facebook Content Calendar
- Promote Your Business Page to Get Followers and Likes
- Learn About the Different Types of Facebook Ads
- Set Your Marketing Goals
- Identify Your Facebook Audience
- Setup Facebook Pixel and Conversion Tracking
- Create Your First Facebook Paid Campaign
- Monitor Campaign Performance
- Start a Facebook Retargeting Campaign
1. Setup a Facebook Business Page
The first step to getting started with Facebook business marketing is to create a Facebook business page.
This page is your business's public-facing profile, where you can connect with customers, post content and updates, and share contact information.
Setting up a Facebook business page is straightforward, but you should ensure you configure it to take advantage of its many features.
Here is a quick overview of the steps needed to create a Facebook Business page.
Start by going to facebook.com/pages/create.
In the left-hand panel, you can enter a name and description for your business and select a category for your page. As you do, the preview page will update so you can see what it looks like.
After you enter the core page information, add a profile picture and a cover photo.
You also want to add contact information so that people know how to get in touch with your business.
For more details, read our guide on setting up a Facebook page for your business.
2. Create a Facebook Content Calendar
A well-planned content calendar is essential for staying consistent and organized with your posts. Instead of looking for ideas each day, a content calendar helps you plan, schedule, and execute your content efficiently.
Setting up a calendar allows you to batch-create content, ensure a balanced mix of posts, and avoid last-minute stress.
Here’s what to consider when building your content calendar:
What to Post
Your content should be valuable, engaging, and relevant to your audience. Whether it’s educational, entertaining, or promotional, every post should serve a purpose.
Some ideas include:
- Educational posts – How-to guides, industry tips, and FAQs.
- Engaging content – Polls, questions, and behind-the-scenes looks at your business.
- Promotional posts – New products, special offers, or customer testimonials.
- Trending topics – Content related to current events, industry trends, or viral moments.
Your goal is to create high-quality content that grabs attention and encourages interaction.
When to Post
Timing is everything. Posting when your audience is most active increases visibility and engagement. While optimal posting times vary by industry, general research suggests that weekdays in the morning and early evening tend to work best.
Check Facebook Insights to see when your audience is online and adjust your schedule accordingly.
How Often to Post
Consistency matters more than frequency. Posting too little can make you forgettable, while posting too much can overwhelm your audience.
A good rule of thumb:
- At least 3-5 posts per week for steady engagement.
- Daily posts if you have enough high-quality content to share.
Test different frequencies and monitor engagement to find what works best for your brand.
3. Promote Your Business Page to Get Followers and Likes
With your content calendar ready, it’s time to focus on growing your Facebook audience. The more people following and liking your page, the greater your reach and engagement.
Why does this matter?
- More followers = more visibility. Your posts will appear in more users’ feeds.
- Social proof builds credibility. A high follower count signals trust and popularity, encouraging new visitors to take your business seriously.
- Greater organic reach. Pages with more engagement have a better chance of appearing in Facebook’s algorithm.
Here are some effective ways to increase your followers:
Share High-Quality, Relevant Content: The best way to attract new followers is to post valuable, engaging content consistently. People are likelier to like and follow a page that provides useful information, entertainment, or exclusive offers.
Run Contests and Giveaways: Encourage engagement by offering an incentive. For example, you can run a “Like & Share” contest, where users must like your page and share a post for a chance to win a prize.
Leverage Your Existing Audience: Invite friends, customers, and email subscribers to like your page. Share your Facebook page link on your website, email signature, and other social media platforms.
Add a Facebook widget to your website so visitors can like your page with one click.
Use Facebook Ads to Boost Visibility: One of the easiest ways to get more likes is through Facebook Ads. The simplest option is to boost an existing post so that people who don’t follow your page will see it.
These ads are generally inexpensive and a great way to get more fans for your page.
4. Learn About the Different Types of Facebook Ads
Growing an organic Facebook following has many benefits, but there are limits to how much exposure you can gain.
Over the years, Facebook has modified its platform to emphasize paid ads more.
As such, Facebook Ads are generally the most impactful way to grow your business using the platform.
Our Facebook Marketing Course will teach you everything you need to do about running paid campaigns on Facebook.
Before you set up ad campaigns, you should know how the advertising platform works. Facebook offers a wide range of ad formats.
Some of the most popular ones include:
Image ads: These ads are simple and include a picture, descriptive text, and a call to action button. They are easy to set up as an effective part of your first Facebook strategy.
Video ads: These ads let you use short-form videos to capture and engage your audience. They are great for showing your products in action.
Carousel ads: These ads let you show images or videos. They are a great way to show off multiple products or show the same product from multiple angles. Each image can have its own link to send visitors to the appropriate page.
Dynamic product ads - These ads let you highlight different items from your eCommerce store. Facebook can automate the targeting for these ads to show specific products to users based on their interests.
Ad placements
Ad placements determine where on Facebook you want your ads to appear. Below are some of the available placements:
- Facebook Feed
- Facebook Right Column
- Facebook Instant Articles
- Facebook In-Stream Video
- Facebook Marketplace
- Facebook Stories
- Instagram Stories
- Instagram Feeds
Each placement only supports certain types of ads. You will need to review these when setting up your campaigns.
Facebook Marketplace
In addition to Facebook Ads, you should also understand Facebook Marketplace.
This peer-to-peer market is built into the Facebook platform. It allows users to sell most types of items.
Facebook Marketplace focuses on connecting local buyers and sellers, but you can still sell your items to people nationwide.
There are no fees to use the marketplace unless you ship the products to the customer, in which case there is a 5% fee.
Adding your items to the market is a great way to get organic exposure for your business. Facebook also makes it easy to run ad campaigns for your marketplace listings.
5. Set Your Marketing Goals
Now that you know how Facebook advertising works, setting your marketing goals is the next step in building a Facebook marketing strategy.
Setting a clear target will help you plan better. It will also give you a way to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
You can set all sorts of goals for your Facebook marketing. The most appropriate will depend on your business's goals.
Here are some of the common goals companies set when building their strategy:
Drive website traffic: Facebook lets you get people to your website to learn more about your products or services.
Generate leads: You can use Facebook to direct people to your site to give you their contact information or sign up for your email newsletter.
Drive sales and revenue: The most obvious use of Facebook marketing is to turn interested parties into customers for your business.
Increase brand awareness: Facebook is highly effective for getting your brand in front of your target audience for the first time. Once they are aware of your business, you can market to them using a variety of channels.
Re-engage past customers: Facebook’s targeting options make it easy to remarket to people who have previously bought from your business.
No matter what goals you set for your Facebook strategy, you need to set specific, measurable objectives. Otherwise, you will not know if your campaigns are successful.
Facebook includes numerous performance metrics in its reporting dashboard. We will discuss how to use these to measure your marketing success further below.
6. Identify Your Facebook Audience
Facebook’s audience options are one of its biggest benefits.
Audiences are the groups of people that you target when running an advertisement campaign on Facebook.
They allow you to select a particular group of users for your marketing campaigns. This ensures that your ads reach the people most relevant to your business.
Some of the aspects you can use when building your audience are:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Work
- Financial
- Life Events
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Connections
Facebook also offers more powerful audience targeting in the form of custom and lookalike audiences.
Custom audiences allow you to build an audience based on your data. This data can be collected from offline customers or from online interactions on your site or Facebook profile by the Facebook pixel.
Lookalike audiences consist of people who have never interacted with your business. You can create these audiences based on your custom or previous site visitors.
With a lookalike audience, Facebook will look for people similar to those you use as the source audience.
The idea behind lookalike audiences is that if your business works well with a certain kind of user, it will also work well with similar people.
These can be highly effective in growing your customer base after you identify the specific interests of your users.
7. Setup Facebook Pixel and Conversion Tracking
The next step of your Facebook business marketing strategy is to add the Facebook pixel to your website.
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of tracking code that collects data. It enables the creation of custom audiences and retargeting campaigns.
The pixel works by placing cookies on your site that allow Facebook to track the various actions people take such as completing a purchase.
Facebook refers to these actions as events. In total, there are 17 standard events that the pixel tracks:
- Purchase
- Lead
- Complete registration
- Add payment info
- Add to cart
- Add to wishlist
- Initiate checkout
- Search
- View content
- Contact
- Customize product
- Donate
- Find location
- Schedule
- Start trial
- Submit application
- Subscribe
Along with the Facebook pixel, it is important to enable conversion tracking.
Doing so will ensure that you capture all conversions so that you can accurately monitor your campaign performance.
8. Create Your First Facebook Paid Campaign
You can create your first Facebook campaign once you get the pixel and conversion tracking enabled.
Here are the components you will need to configure:
Choose an objective
Each Facebook campaign needs to have an objective. This tells Facebook what you want to achieve with the campaign so that they can help you set it up for success.
Facebook Ads can have one of the following objectives:
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Website Traffic
- Engagement
- App installs
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Messages
- Conversions
- Catalog sales
- Store traffic
Select an audience
Next, you need to select your target audience. For your first campaign, you can define the targeting manually or use a custom audience if you’ve already gathered visitor data from the pixel.
Determine the budget
The budget is the amount that you want to spend on the campaign. Facebook lets you set either a lifetime or a daily budget.
With a daily budget, Facebook will pace your ad spend according to the amount you set per day. The daily spend will not always be exactly on the mark, but over time, the daily average will be the amount you set.
With a lifetime budget, you select a time period during which you want the campaign to remain active. You then choose a total amount to spend over that period, and Facebook will serve your ads accordingly.
Schedule
The scheduling feature lets you determine what time of the day you want your ads to run. You can also set specific start and end dates for the campaign.
Delivery
There are two types of delivery: standard and accelerated.
Standard delivery shows your ads consistently throughout the day. With accelerated delivery, Facebook will try to spend your budget as quickly as possible.
Create your ad
After you configure these settings, you can create your ad. Facebook will suggest which format to use based on the campaign objective you set.
After choosing an ad format, you can upload your creative assets. The format you select will determine the design requirements for the assets, such as the resolution and ratio of the images and the number of characters in the text.
9. Monitor Campaign Performance
Once your campaign is up and running, it is essential to monitor its ongoing performance.
The reason for this is simple. You won’t know if your campaigns are achieving their objectives if you do not check to see how they are doing.
Some of the most important metrics to track include:
- Impressions: The number of times your ads appear on the screen.
- Cost per click (CPC): The average amount spent for each person who clicks your ad.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people that click your ads after seeing them.
- Reach: The number of people who saw your ads at least once.
- Results: The total number of conversions. What counts as a conversion is determined by your campaign settings.
- Cost per result: The average amount spent per result.
If your campaigns are not performing as intended, you can make changes to boost their performance.
For example, if you notice that your campaigns have a high number of impressions but a low CTR, it is a sign that your ads are not engaging or that you’re targeting the wrong people.
If your ads generate a good amount of clicks but do not result in any sales, it could be a sign that you need to optimize your website.
10. Start a Facebook Retargeting Campaign
The final step in your Facebook strategy is setting up a retargeting campaign.
These campaigns specifically target the people that have already visited or bought from your site.
Previous visitors will be more receptive to your marketing because they already know your business.
Additionally, past buyers are more likely to buy from you again, and you can build brand loyalty by continually engaging these people.
It is a good practice to have an active remarketing campaign. This ensures that you do not miss out on interested traffic.
If you let too much time go between messaging visitors, they can easily forget about your business.
To run a retargeting campaign, you must install the Facebook Pixel on your site. This will allow Facebook to track and tag your site visitors to serve ads from your retargeting campaign.
Another approach is to create a retargeting campaign using a list. With this method, you upload a list of targets (usually their email addresses), and Facebook will show them ads from your campaign.
Pixel-based retargeting is typically more effective and efficient as Facebook automatically determines who to target.
How to Learn Facebook Marketing
The steps above outline the basics of Facebook marketing. To maximize your effectiveness as a Facebook marketer, you should gain a complete and thorough understanding of how the platform works.
Fortunately, there are plenty of resources to help you do so.
One of the best options is dedicated Facebook marketing courses.
Facebook Ads courses compile everything you need to know about using Facebook for marketing into a single, easy-to-follow resource.
The best are taught by experienced instructors who can offer unique experiences and insights into using the platform successfully.
In addition to educational courses, Facebook Blueprint offers several professional certifications.
These are some of the most respected digital marketing certifications in the digital marketing space.
Earning one of the certifications requires you to pass a knowledge exam.
Facebook Ads specialists are expected to know the ins and outs of Facebook marketing, and earning one (or multiple) of the certifications proves your competency.
Conclusion
New social media platforms emerge, but Facebook isn’t going anywhere soon.
Knowing how to create a Facebook strategy for your business will allow you to capitalize on the platform's full potential.
Use the steps in this guide as a starting point and explore the extra resources we’ve included to begin mastering the art of Facebook marketing.
