Guide: Facebook & Instagram ads for giveaways

Do you need a paid advertising strategy to promote your giveaway?

Viral Loops is a marketing-oriented company. I like to believe that our marketing team is steadily becoming a world-class force in the field.

Marketing is a competitive sport, and the players (a.k.a. marketers) do whatever it takes to win. That includes subtle lies, as well.

One of the biggest misconceptions spread by- mostly millennial, marketers is that you barely need any paid advertising to promote your work.

I, personally, have spread that kind of, partial, lie in the past.

The truth is that if you want to make money, you have to be able to invest money.

That being said, it’s only natural that you have to spend some money to promote your giveaway. In this article, we laid down a step-by-step guide on how to set up your Facebook and Instagram ads.

It’s a tedious task sometimes, so why not take some weight from your shoulders?

Enjoy!

The advantages of spending money to promote your giveaway.

Before we get into the meat & potatoes of our Facebook ads structure and implementation for our giveaways, I would, first of all, like to discuss which are the main advantages that one receives when choosing to run a monetized giveaway for his business/brand.

1. Massive reach.

If you’re running a big giveaway, not only it’s going to increase your business/brand loyalty, but it will also allow you to get in front of a lot of new eyeballs that you would never reach before.

Besides that, when people who are already taking part in your giveaway are inviting their friends, their friends will see your giveaway/brand as something trust-worthy, since a personal connection of theirs has asked them to join the giveaway and will eventually start following your brand’s activities daily.

2. You are building an active audience.

Once you do this crazy giveaway using Viral Loops, what’s going to happen is that people who took part in it, are now going to start watching your page and be more engaged with almost every activity that you do on social media (both on Facebook and Instagram platform).

You can check out one of our recent case studies, on how a small e-commerce business generated 4K leads in only five days with the use of one single messenger giveaway using Viral Loops.

3. Brand loyalty.

In addition to the above advantages mentioned, when someone enters your giveaway is not only going to start engaging with your social media and content but is also going to start being nurtured regarding your brand’s culture and strong points (by consuming your content).

Moreover, after the giveaway is over, you now own a valuable asset for your brand/business.Can you guess which one is that?You guessed it right!

The messenger and email lists you’ve collected from the giveaway. You can now start blasting, emailing, communicating, and collecting feedback regarding the new products/services you are willing to release shortly and adjust them to be more appealing for your perfect customers.

By implementing such actions, your following and active messenger subscribers, are going to fully appreciate the fact that you are building a solid communication bridge between them and your brand and as a result, your brand loyalty will then skyrocket!

How to setup Facebook & Instagram paid advertising for your giveaway

Whatever you read further down the article, applies to both regular giveaways or giveaways via Facebook Messenger.

No matter how you choose to run your giveaway, you’ll need a Facebook post to boost it to your target audience.

⚡Pro Tip:
If you decide to run a giveaway via Facebook Messenger, make sure to utilize Manychat‘s “Comment to Message” Growth tool.

Here’s how you can set it up:

What now? 

Now we’re going to boost the post you have created to generate more “buzz” around it, collect engagement (for social proof reasons) and the most important part, get as many people to join and invite their personal friends to our giveaway.

First of all, we need to open up our Facebook business manager and head over to our Ads Manager.

Then, we are going to select the green “Create” button to create a new campaign.

From the menu that pops up, we’re going to select and create a new Facebook Engagement campaign.

The reason we are selecting the Engagement campaign is that our KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is the engagements that we are willing to collect (likes, shares, comments).

To continue, we’re going to select the “post engagement” option as the main objective of our campaign.

We’re also going to give our campaign a name here (note that you’re the only one who is going to to see the specific title, so it’s up to you how you’re going to name your campaign for convenience purposes).

Make sure to turn on the “Campaign budget optimization” slider and set the daily budget you are feeling comfortable to spend daily while your campaign is up & running. 

*I would suggest keeping the bare minimum of 15€ / day.

After all the above are set up correctly, click continue.

We have now transitioned to our AdSet set-up. 

To better understand our whole campaign structure, think about it like this: 

It’s now time to start filling up the essential information about our campaign, meaning, our desired targeting. 

Our targeting includes a lot of useful information that we can use to target our perfect customers (Age, Locations, Language, Gender, Detail Targeting, Placements).

Let’s start by choosing our locations.

In this part, I strongly suggest targeting only the countries that your business can ship goods/provide services or operate.

For our example, we’re only going to target people who

1. Live in the United States
2. Their age range is between 18 – 55
3. Their language is English (All)
4. Genders: Men & Women (All)

We can now move on to the “Detailed Targeting” section which can be characterized as a core section of our paid advertisement campaigns since this is where we choose specific demographics, interests, and behaviors to target our perfect customers on Facebook & Instagram platforms.

So, for us to target the customers, we are willing to attract, we have to start typing related demographics, interests, and behaviors with our brand/niche.

For our example, we are going to target people who have a particular interest in cosmetics and start building our stack of interests from there.

As you can see, I just typed “Cosmetics” on the search bar, and the specific interest has appeared for me. I can now select it as one of my many targeting criteria (or target only this single interest). 

I can now type more related interests to my brand/business/niche up until I feel confident with them. 

Let’s now say you’ve stuck and no great ideas are crossing your mind (regarding your detailed targeting).

You can click the suggestions button, and Facebook will process the current interests you’ve already chosen and will provide more useful ideas for you.

As you can see, some significant Interests have shown up for me right now, and I can select some of them to include them in my detailed user targeting just by clicking on them.

Take your time; there are a wide variety of demographics, interests, and behaviors that you can choose from (make sure not to overdo it, a great rule of thumb you can stick with, is to select around 6-11 substantial related interests for your business/brand/niche)

After you’ve completed your detailed targeting, it’s now time to move on the “Placements” section.

As you can imagine, in this section, we’re going to select the placements that our giveaway ad is going to show. 

Since we’re using the Comment Growth Tool that we have already created and installed adequately via ManyChat, we are only going to stick with the Feeds placements.

This is why we’re going to uncheck the “Automatic Placements” that are pre-checked from Facebook and select the “Edit Placements” option.

We’re also going to keep the “Devices” choice as it is and deselect everything except “Feeds” placements as shown below:

⚡Bonus placements tip:  

ManyChat’s Comment Growth Tool works only on Facebook.

So, if you don’t want to run your giveaways ads (only for awareness purposes) on Instagram or you don’t own an Instagram account for your business, feel free to uncheck the “Instagram” placement and only show your giveaway ads on Facebook feeds. 

To continue, leave “Optimisation for ad delivery” field as it is (optimized for Post Engagement objective).

It’s also time to select your ad schedule. 

You can choose the desired days that your giveaway will run on the “Schedule section.”

So, now that we’ve filled up all our AdSets details, it’s time to give it a name just like we did with our primary campaign name.

I always purposely leave the “AdSet Name” field unedited until I manage to fill every little detail of my AdSet. 

I always use names that help me identify what is included on each adset, so I can then, later on, review my adsets performance more easily (without entering on their specific details), and see which adset is performing better for me and my goal. 

I suggest you follow the same path, but it’s totally up to you regarding your personal convenience preferences.

After giving your AdSet a name, click “Next.”

It’s now time to move on the last part of our campaign. 

The actual ad that everybody is going to see.

This part is the most simple throughout our whole process since we have already published our Facebook giveaway post and already correctly linked it with the comment growth tool.

To complete your campaign set up, make sure to follow the actions below:

1. Select the “Use Existing Post” option
2. Select the Facebook page you are going to run your ads from
3. If you’ve chosen to also add the Instagram feeds placement, you also have to select the Instagram page that has already been linked with your Facebook business account and that you’re going to use to also run the ads from on Instagram platform (You can use this step by step guide here). 

On the “Creative” field, you should click on the “Select Post” option, navigate to your “Facebook Page” tab and select your already published giveaway post.

Once you have selected your giveaway post, click the blue “Continue” button.

*Optional: Don’t forget to turn on the “Conversion Tracking” switcher in case you already own a Facebook Pixel, so all your engagement data will also be recorded on your pixel as “post engagement” events/data.

You can now give a name to your ad, following the same technique as before (AdSet naming process).

The only thing that is left now is to click the green “Publish” button located on the right bottom section of the page.

In the next 30mins to 2 hours you should receive a notification from Facebook that will inform you that your ad has been approved and the boosting process has begun!

📌 Important notice regarding your ad copy.

The copy of your Facebook post should include:

• The announcement of your Messenger referral campaign
• A prompt so users are incentivized to comment on the Facebook post so they can receive a message in their Messenger inbox (this should be explicitly explained on the post). This way, you basically give your audience the exclusivity feeling they need to invite friends so they can get more chances to win the rewards.
• Explain that the more people they invite, the more prizes (milestones) they’ll get.
• Ask them to comment the answer to a question or complete a phrase that you are mentioning on the post.

“Roses are red, violets are..?” (so people can comment “BLUE”)

The copy of your Facebook post should NOT include:

• Prompts such as “Comment below”, “Tag a friend”, “Like this post”, etc.
• Explicit/offending wording

Important notices.
*It’s important to refrain from using prompts like the ones mentioned in the above section, as it will have a negative impact on the reach of your post according to Facebook policy (that basically means that less eyeballs will see your post).

**In case you are willing to boost/promote your post to a larger audience using Facebook ads, we suggest triple-checking your ad copy and making sure you don’t violate any Facebook advertising policy or rule from the above mentioned.

Before you go.

Now you know how to set up the Facebook and Instagram ads for boosting your giveaway.

Pay attention to your targeting and your ad sets, and you’re good to go.

What would you do to boost your giveaways? Let me know in the comment section below.