How to advertise on Social Networks: A complete beginner’s guide from 0 to 100

Social networks offer something that traditional media never could: the ability to reach exactly the people who might be interested in what you offer, with personalized messages and at a fraction of the cost thanks to targeting. But this precision comes with a technical complexity that can be overwhelming for those new to digital advertising.

At Magnetic, as an agency specializing in 360 marketing, we’ve seen how many businesses waste their advertising budget because they don’t know the basics of social media advertising.

That’s why we have created this comprehensive guide on how to advertise on social networks to take you step by step from the basics to advanced strategies that will allow you to maximize the return on your advertising investment.

1. Define Clear Objectives

Starting an advertising campaign without clear objectives is like setting sail without a destination: you could navigate indefinitely without getting anywhere.

Objectives not only determine the direction of your strategy, but they establish how you’ll measure the success of your efforts.

Social media platforms offer various advertising objectives, each designed for different stages of the conversion funnel. Some of the most common include:

• Brand awareness seeks to increase visibility among potential customers who don’t yet know your business, which is great for new brands or those that have recently rebranded.
• Reach, which maximizes the number of people who see your ad, prioritizing exposure over deep interaction, ideal for brands that have already made their mark in their sector and want to announce a new product or service.
• Traffic, which directs users to a specific destination, whether it’s your website, online store, or application. This objective is particularly useful for businesses with valuable content on their site, such as blogs, e-commerce stores, or landing pages optimized for conversion, like a travel blog, for example.
• Engagement, on the other hand, seeks to promote interaction with your content: comments, shares, likes, or any action that indicates interest. Brands that base their strategy on building community, like yoga studios or book clubs, can greatly benefit from this objective by fostering conversations and connections among their followers.
• Conversions, meanwhile, focus on specific and valuable actions: purchases, registrations, downloads, or subscriptions. This is generally the ultimate goal of many digital marketing strategies. An online clothing store could set up conversion ads targeting people who already visited specific products but didn’t complete the purchase, incentivizing them with limited offers.

The key to selecting the right objective lies in understanding what stage of the sales funnel your target audience is in.

It doesn’t make sense to seek immediate conversions if your brand is unknown, just as it would be inefficient to focus solely on awareness if you already have an established customer base that’s ready to convert.

Additionally, it’s fundamental that your advertising objectives align with your business’s general objectives.

If your business goal is to increase sales by 20% this quarter, you should probably prioritize conversion or consideration campaigns, but if you’re launching a new product line, perhaps the initial focus should be awareness and reach.

Ultimately, dedicating time to defining clear objectives isn’t just a theoretical exercise, but the foundation upon which you’ll build your entire advertising strategy. These objectives will influence critical decisions like which platform to use, what budget to allocate, and what type of content to create.

2. Know Your Audience

Once you’ve established your objectives, the next crucial step is to precisely define who you’re trying to reach.

The era of mass, indiscriminate advertising is behind us; today, the power of social media lies precisely in its ability to segment audiences with a level of detail never seen before.

Knowing your audience goes far beyond basic demographic classifications like age and location.

It’s about deeply understanding their needs, desires, behaviors, frustrations, and aspirations, as this understanding will allow you to create messages that resonate emotionally and offer relevant solutions to real problems.

The first step to knowing your audience is analyzing the data you already have available.

If you already have a social media presence or website, tools like Facebook Audience Insights, Instagram Insights, or Google Analytics provide valuable information about who the people are that already interact with your brand. You’ll not only see demographic data, but interests, purchasing behaviors, and usage patterns.

For example, through Facebook Audience Insights you can discover that your current followers not only share interest in your industry, but also in seemingly unrelated categories, like certain music genres or leisure activities.

This information can be pure gold when it comes to expanding your reach to new similar audiences.

Meta’s Pixel, a code snippet you install on your website, allows you to track user behavior after clicking on your ads.

This tool helps you measure conversions and builds detailed profiles of your customers based on their interactions with your content. Over time, this data will allow you to refine your targeting to reach people with a higher likelihood of converting.

You can also use traditional channels like the always reliable surveys.

3. Select the Right Platforms

Once you’ve defined your objectives and audience, the next critical step is selecting where you’ll publish your ads.

With so many platforms available, each with its own characteristics, formats, and user types, this decision can make the difference between the success and failure of your campaign.

The perfect platform for a B2B business could be completely inadequate for a youth fashion brand.

Among the most frequent options you have:

1. Facebook

Facebook remains the social media giant, with approximately 2.9 billion monthly active users and surprisingly diverse demographics.

While initially dominated by younger users, today Facebook has a strong presence across all age groups, especially among adults aged 25 to 55.

Its extremely sophisticated advertising system allows for incredibly detailed targeting and offers varied formats, from simple image ads to immersive videos and interactive experiences.

The platform is particularly effective for B2C businesses selling products or services that require some consideration before purchase, as it allows for more elaborate storytelling.

A furniture manufacturer, for example, could use Facebook to show how their pieces transform real spaces, including detailed testimonials from satisfied customers.

2. Instagram:

Instagram, owned by Meta, has over one billion users and is characterized by its visual focus.

Its demographics tend to be younger than Facebook’s, with a strong presence of millennials and Generation Z. The aspirational nature of the platform makes it the ideal space for fashion, beauty, travel, gastronomy, design, and lifestyle brands.

Instagram’s advertising formats include feed posts, Stories, Reels, and Explore ads, all with a strong visual component.

The platform’s nature favors authentic and aesthetically pleasing content that naturally integrates into the user’s feed. A cosmetics brand, for example, could have great success showing brief tutorials with impactful results through sponsored Reels.

3. TikTok

TikTok has experienced explosive growth, reaching over one billion monthly active users with an extraordinarily high average usage time.

Its audience is predominantly young, with a strong concentration of users under 25, although it’s rapidly diversifying.

The platform stands out for its highly effective algorithm for keeping users engaged and its ability to turn content into viral trends.

Ads on TikTok must adapt to the platform’s authentic, creative, and entertaining nature, as overly polished content or content that looks like traditional advertising usually performs poorly.

An energy drink brand could succeed by sponsoring a dance challenge involving their product, generating millions of organic views in addition to paid ones, for example.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn, the great underestimated of social media, with over 830 million users, dominates the professional and B2B space.

Its audience includes professionals at all levels, business decision-makers, and people seeking professional development and, additionally, the platform offers unique targeting based on professional criteria like position, industry, company size, and specific skills.

This network is ideal for professional services, B2B software, higher education, human resources, and business solutions. Advertising formats include sponsored content, direct messages, text ads, and video.

An HR consultancy, for example, could promote a free report on salary trends targeted specifically at HR directors in companies with more than 500 employees. The same goes for other types of consultants.

On the other hand, you should know it’s also one of the most expensive, although its results are very good.

5. Twitter (X)

Twitter, now called X, with approximately 330 million monthly active users, is distinguished by its conversational and real-time nature.

Its audience tends to be more informed about current events, politics, and trends, with an average age higher than TikTok but lower than LinkedIn, and is particularly effective for generating conversation around current topics, launches, and live events.

Ads on Twitter include promoted tweets, promoted trends, and sponsored moments.

This platform works well for media, entertainment, technology, and brands with messages linked to current events.

6. YouTube

YouTube, as the second-largest search platform after Google and with over 2.5 billion monthly active users, offers a unique space for video content of any duration.

Its audience is extremely diverse, covering practically all demographic groups and imaginable interest niches.

Advertising formats include pre-roll, mid-roll, bumper, and masthead ads, among others, being ideal for educational content, product demonstrations, testimonials, and longer narratives.

Here, manufacturers from all types of sectors could succeed by showing detailed tutorials of DIY projects where their products are the perfect solution.

The Importance of Knowing How to Choose

When selecting platforms, it’s fundamental to consider not only where your audience is, but also what type of content you can produce consistently. Each platform requires specific formats and different publication frequencies. If your team doesn’t have the capacity to create short, dynamic vertical videos regularly, perhaps TikTok isn’t the best initial option, even if part of your audience is there.

Additionally, consider the customer journey. Different platforms can serve different stages of the conversion funnel. You could use Instagram to generate brand awareness with visually attractive content, Facebook for consideration with detailed testimonials, and Google to capture purchase intent with search ads.

Finally, remember that you don’t need to be on all platforms simultaneously. It’s preferable to do an excellent job on two or three social networks aligned with your objectives and resources, than to scatter efforts trying to cover all available options. As your strategy matures and your resources increase, you can expand to other platforms strategically.

4. Establish a Budget

Unlike traditional media, where costs are clearly defined in advance, digital advertising operates with bidding systems that can make costs vary significantly according to various factors, making this the most complex point to master and manage.

The first step to establishing an effective budget is understanding the different payment models available:

• Cost per Click (CPC) means you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. This model is ideal when you’re seeking concrete actions, like visits to your website or to a specific product page. CPC varies enormously by industry, audience, and platform, and can range from a few cents to several euros per click.
• Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) involves paying for every thousand times your ad is shown, regardless of whether it generates clicks or not. This model is appropriate for brand awareness campaigns where exposure is the main objective. CPMs also vary according to factors similar to CPC, but tend to be more predictable.
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA) means you pay only when a defined conversion occurs (a sale, registration, download). This model represents lower risk, but usually has a higher unit cost, as the platform assumes part of the risk that the ad won’t convert.

Approaches to Choosing Budget

To determine your initial budget, several approaches can be useful:

The objective-based approach starts from your commercial goals. For example, if you know you need 100 new customers monthly and your visit-to-sale conversion rate is 2%, you’ll need 5,000 visits. If your average CPC is €0.50, your minimum budget would be €2,500 monthly.

The experimental approach consists of starting with a modest budget, generally between €300 and €1,000 monthly (depending on your business size), distributed among different audiences and creatives. This approach allows you to collect data on which combinations work best before making larger investments.

The competitive approach involves researching how much your competitors invest and adjusting your budget to maintain comparable presence. Tools like SemRush or SpyFu can provide estimates of specific competitors’ advertising spend.

Additional Tips and Considerations When Choosing Budget:

Regardless of the chosen approach, it’s crucial to remember some fundamental budgetary considerations:

Budget should be strategically distributed among platforms, considering where your audience is and which platforms have shown better performance for your type of business. It’s neither necessary nor recommended to divide budget equally among all platforms.

Seasonality can significantly affect advertising costs. During high-demand periods, like Christmas or Black Friday, cost per click or per thousand impressions usually increase due to greater competition for advertising space. Plan to reserve more budget for these periods if they’re relevant to your business.

Algorithm learning time must be taken into account.

Social media platforms use machine learning to optimize ad delivery, and this process requires sufficient data to function effectively.

Meta recommends keeping campaigns active for at least one week before evaluating their performance, which implies allocating sufficient budget for this learning period.

Budget allocation between conversion funnel phases also deserves careful consideration. A common mistake is dedicating all budget to conversion ads without investing enough in creating awareness and consideration. As a general rule, new businesses or those with low awareness should dedicate a higher percentage to awareness campaigns, while established brands can focus more on conversion.

How to Optimize a Social Media Campaign Budget?

To optimize your investment, consider these proven strategies:

1. Start with a daily budget rather than per result to keep your spending predictable during the initial learning and testing phase. Once you’ve identified the ads and audiences with the best performance, you can consider switching to result-based budgets.
2. Implement a gradual scaling strategy: start with a modest budget and increase it progressively for those audience and ad combinations that show good results. Increases of 20-50% every few days usually allow the algorithm to adjust without losing efficiency.
3. Diversify your investment among different advertising objectives to cover different stages of the sales funnel. Don’t put all your resources into one type of campaign.
4. Constantly monitor performance using metrics relevant to your objectives. For awareness campaigns, CPM and reach are fundamental; for traffic, CPC and CTR; for conversions, CPA and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
5. Establish clear limits for acceptable CPA or ROAS for your business. For example, if your product has a 40% margin, your CPA shouldn’t exceed this percentage of the product value to maintain profitability.

Remember that the first months of advertising are usually the least efficient while you learn what works for your specific business. Over time, as you optimize audiences, messages, and bids, efficiency tends to improve significantly. Therefore, it’s recommended to view the initial budget as an investment in learning as much as in immediate results.

5. Design Ad Content

After establishing clear objectives, defining your audience, selecting the right platforms, and determining your budget, comes perhaps the most creative moment of the process: designing your ad content.

This is where marketing science meets the art of persuasive communication, and where many campaigns win or lose their effectiveness.

The content of an effective ad consists of several key elements that work in harmony to capture attention, spark interest, generate desire, and motivate action. Let’s look at each of these components:

Format

The visual element is the first thing your audience will notice when encountering your ad. In a digital environment saturated with information, you have approximately 1.7 seconds to capture attention before the user continues scrolling. Therefore, your images or videos must impact immediately, whether through color, movement, expressive human faces, or unexpected situations.

Keep in mind that the visual format must also adapt to the platform and objective.

For example, videos on Facebook tend to work better when they capture attention in the first 3 seconds, even without sound, while on YouTube you can develop longer narratives. Static images on Instagram must meet high aesthetic standards, while on LinkedIn they can be more informative and professional.

Technical Aspect

The technical aspect shouldn’t be neglected: adequate resolution, correct proportion for each platform, and compliance with each social network’s policies (for example, limiting the amount of text in images for Meta).

Copy

Copywriting or advertising writing is the art of using words to persuade. Good advertising copy must be concise, clear, benefit-oriented, and adapted to the language and tone that resonates with your specific audience.

Every word counts, especially on platforms with character limitations or in formats where text competes with visual elements for attention.

Effective headlines are usually direct, specific, and focused on the main benefit for the user. “Increase your sales 30% in 60 days” is more powerful than “Marketing solutions for businesses”.

Provocative questions (“Tired of wasting time with strategies that don’t work?”) and surprising statements backed by data also work well as headlines.

The body text should develop the headline’s promise, providing enough details to generate interest without overwhelming. It should anticipate and respond to potential buyer objections and use language that evokes emotions relevant to your product or service.

CTA (Call-To-Action)

The call to action (CTA) is crucial: it must be clear, direct, and create a sense of urgency or exclusivity when appropriate. Action verbs like “Discover,” “Try,” “Get,” “Book” usually work better than generalizations like “Click here.”

The CTA must align with the funnel stage your audience is in: for awareness, “Learn more” may be appropriate, while for conversion, “Buy now with 20% discount” may be more effective.

Brand consistency is another fundamental aspect that’s often overlooked. Your ads must be instantly recognizable as part of your brand, using colors, typography, tone of voice, and visual style consistent with the rest of your communications. This consistency not only reinforces brand recognition, but also builds trust through familiarity.

6. Adjust the Format

Different ad formats offer specific creative opportunities:

1. Single image ads must communicate your main message at a glance, with a powerful image and minimal but impactful text. They work well for simple, direct messages.
2. Carousel ads allow you to tell a sequential story or show multiple products/features. Each card must work independently and also as part of the general narrative. The first image must be the most impactful to encourage swiping.
3. Video ads require capturing attention in the first seconds, maintaining interest with appropriate pace, and closing with a clear call to action. Optimal duration varies by platform and objective, but the general trend favors shorter videos, especially for cold audiences.
4. Collection ads, available on platforms like Instagram, combine main video or image with related products.

They’re ideal for e-commerce, allowing fluid transitions from browsing to purchasing.

They work particularly well for visual products like fashion or decoration.

5. Lead generation ads incorporate native forms within the platform, eliminating the friction of having to visit an external site to leave data. They’re ideal for B2B businesses or services that require subsequent customer contact.

7. Launch and Monitor the Campaign

Once you’ve defined your objectives, know your audience, selected the right platforms, established your budget, and designed your creative content, it’s time to launch your campaign.

This process may seem intimidating for beginners, but following a structured approach, you can configure and manage your campaigns with confidence.

Taking Facebook Ads as an example, being one of the most complete and used platforms, the configuration process generally follows these steps:

1. Setting up the campaign

The first thing is accessing Meta’s Ads Manager, where you’ll find a control panel from which you’ll manage all your campaigns. You’ll need a Facebook page and, preferably, a Business Manager account to access all functionalities.

The ad structure in Meta (and similar on other platforms) is organized in three hierarchical levels:

• Campaign
• Ad Set
• Ads

At the campaign level, you’ll define your main advertising objective, like brand awareness, traffic, engagement, or conversions.

When creating an ad set, you’ll configure your budget (daily or lifetime), scheduling (start/end dates), bidding (automatic or manual), and, crucially, audience targeting.

Here you’ll apply everything you’ve learned about your target audience, using demographic criteria, interests, behaviors, or custom audiences like previous visitors to your website.

Finally, at the ad level, you’ll upload your creatives (images, videos, texts) and define where they’ll appear (feed, stories, marketplace, etc.). Meta will show you a preview of how your ads will look in different placements, allowing you to adjust them before launch.

Before activating your campaign, verify that Meta’s Pixel is correctly installed on your website to track conversions and post-click behaviors. If you use the Conversions API tool, make sure it’s also configured to maximize tracking accuracy in an environment with increasing privacy restrictions.

2. Monitoring the campaign:

Once your campaign is active, begins the crucial phase of monitoring and optimization. The first 72 hours are mainly for learning, where the algorithm is collecting data and adjusting delivery, so it’s recommended not to make significant changes during this period.

After this initial time, you should regularly analyze key metrics that will vary according to your objectives:

• For awareness campaigns, pay attention to reach (how many unique people saw your ad), frequency (how many times on average they saw it), and CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Excessive frequency (more than 3-4 times per person in short periods) can generate ad fatigue.
• For traffic campaigns, monitor CTR (click-through rate), CPC (cost per click), and on-site behavior metrics like time spent and bounce rate, visible in Google Analytics.
• For conversion campaigns, focus on CPA (cost per acquisition/conversion), conversion rate (percentage of visitors who complete the desired action), and ROAS (return on ad spend, calculated as revenue generated divided by ad cost).

Complementary tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or advanced attribution platforms can provide additional valuable information about how users interact with your site after clicking on your ads.

3. Managing campaign progress

The key to successful campaign management is adopting a continuous optimization mindset. This involves:

• Regularly reviewing the performance of different audience segments, creatives, and placements, identifying patterns that indicate where your investment is working best.
• Making incremental adjustments based on data, like reallocating budget toward ad sets with better performance, pausing low-performing creatives, or refining targeting to exclude groups that don’t respond well.
• Implementing formal A/B tests, testing one variable at a time (headline, image, CTA, audience) to identify which specific elements improve performance.

It’s also important to watch for signs of ad fatigue, like decreasing CTR or increasing CPC over time, which indicate that your creatives need renewal. As a general rule, even well-performing ads should be refreshed every 2-4 weeks to maintain audience interest.

Campaign monitoring isn’t just about direct performance metrics, but also about understanding the broader context.

For example, a sudden increase in costs could be due to increased seasonal competition or changes in the platform’s algorithm. Staying informed about platform updates and industry trends will help you correctly interpret data and make more accurate decisions.

4. Make decisions and improve

As you accumulate data, you’ll be able to identify patterns like what days and times generate better results for your specific audience, what type of messages resonate most with different segments, and what’s the optimal frequency point before effectiveness begins to decline.

These insights will not only allow you to optimize your current campaigns, but will build a strategic knowledge base for future initiatives.

Remember that initial results rarely represent a campaign’s maximum potential. With continuous data-based optimization, it’s common to see significant improvements in key metrics like CTR, CPA, or ROAS in the first weeks or months of a well-managed campaign. Patience, combined with strategic adjustments, is usually rewarded with growing efficiency in your advertising investment.

We hope these tips on how to create social media ads that we’ve learned over the years have helped you improve your approach and launch your first campaign. It’s normal to feel a bit overwhelmed at first, but if you have determination, you’ll succeed. You also have the option of having an allied team in this process, and for that don’t hesitate to contact the Magnetic team, your 360 marketing specialists.