Facebook And Instagram Ads: Guide For Food Brands

So, you've poured your heart and soul into creating a truly unique Food or Beverage product to disrupt the market!

You know how competitive the food industry is, and how low the margins can be. You need to sell in high volumes, and you need to build a loyal audience around your new brand. You know social media is the place to do this.

The food industry in particular works so well on visual platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where it just takes a captivating video or picture to get your target customers hungry and heading to your website!

In short, Facebook and Instagram are the places to be, with over 2 billion (yes billion!) people spending time on these social media platforms daily.

But maybe you're new to Facebook and Instagram advertising. You don't know your dynamic creative ads from your static ads. You don't know if you should use a single image or create carousel ads, and you don't know how to structure your campaigns.

Well, today's your lucky day! I’m a co-founder over at Snowball Creations Ad agency, and In this article, I go over all the basics for getting started with Facebook ads, so that you can start reaping the huge potential rewards from paid advertising on social media, and scale your F&B brand.

There's a reason most food companies are running ads on Facebook and Instagram. Below I'm going to show you exactly how you can too.

1. Get Prepared

Set up a Facebook page and Instagram account

The first step is setting up your Facebook page and your Instagram account. Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Facebook and are, in effect, the same advertising platform. You can run adverts to both of them when working from the Facebook Business Manager.

You can see a guide from Facebook themselves here to set these up correctly.

Then do the same for Instagram, go ahead and create your profile. It's pretty straightforward, and here’s a guide on how.

You can technically skip Instagram if you just want to promote on Facebook but Instagram is the lion’s share of the network’s engaged users now and is especially great for the F&B industry with its big focus on people’s lives that often involves enjoying food and drink!

Next, you’ll need to switch from a personal account to a business account. Finally, you need to connect your Instagram account to your Facebook page.

Now you're all set up for Instagram advertising!

Set Up A ‘Business Manager’

Now you need to set up a business manager account on Facebook. This is sometimes referred to as Facebook Ads Manager.

To create your ad manager account, follow this guide.

Once this is done, you also have to create an ad account, add your payment details to your account and possibly add your colleagues as other users.

(Note: When adding new users, make sure to also give them all access to manage the various different assets of the business manager account like the Facebook page, Instagram page and your 'pixel' plugin, as without that Facebook will restrict what actions they can do)

Set Up And Connect Your Facebook Pixel

If you’re focused on just getting views on a video or simply looking to generate maximum traffic, and aren’t bothered about following what happens to users after they leave the Facebook platform, then you can ignore this step. But, for pretty much any business, it’s an invaluable source of data with many uses in my opinion.

Within the business manager settings, you can create a Facebook pixel. This is essentially how you are able to follow what Facebook or Instagram users do once they leave to visit your landing page.

If you're an e-commerce brand, integrations with Shopify stores are available that make this process very straightforward. The easiest path is to head to Shopify and go to the sales channels section, from there you can connect your store to FB. See Shopify’s guides for this here.

Outside of this, or if you are a B2B business then you’ll likely want to set up the pixel within Facebook ads manager itself. Here’s a guide for that.

Verify Your Domain

Don't forget this step! It's one we often see our clients miss, and it's a really easy fix. Here’s a guide that shows you how.

2. Create Your Facebook Ads Campaign

Now let's get into the nitty-gritty...

The structure I'm going to suggest is assuming you have one primary piece of content and around a $1,000 budget to invest in your Facebook Ads. If your budget is tighter, I’d recommend decreasing the number of ad variations in total. If you have more to spend, you could look to add additional copy options or audiences to what I've laid out below.

Ultimately it does vary on whether images or video work best for food brands. A great way to see great examples of ads for others in the niche is with Facebook Ad Library.

You can look up the biggest brands to see how they take advantage of Facebook like say Beyond Meat, Oatly or Itsu. Or just try putting in each of your more direct competitors.

Here is what we’ll be looking to build:

This strategy is designed to test 3 different variations of text (copy), and 3 different audiences within your Facebook or Instagram ads.

Copy For Facebook ads

Each ad copy variation will have a different headline and primary text to go with your image(s) or video. Here are three versions to test:

Direct selling – The focus is on the clear benefits and values of your food or drink product.

Reviews – Sharing a positive review/comment from a satisfied customer.

Humorous – You can try to stand out from your competition and write an ad with more personality or that is funny that can catch your target audience off guard. It's all about making a positive brand impression on your target audience

Remember the copy is key alongside your content and usually is where you’ll have the call to action that drives conversions. You want to spend a good amount of time getting it right, and constantly be testing to improve it.

Which is best for your food brand really varies a lot and ultimately just focus on representing what’s unique about your particular offering. For example light hearted humour can go a long way for brands like Oatly with a ‘fighting against the status quo’ type message. Though if you’re a brand more focused on the premium end of the market then comedy might not be so fitting.

Choosing Your Audiences

Next, you need to try and identify your target audience within the Facebook ads network. One simple way to approach ad targeting is by segmenting by 'interests'.

For example, let’s say you’re a dairy-free chocolate brand with some eye-catching new branding to try and improve your brand awareness and boost sales. You might try creating a Facebook audience of people that have shown an interest in dairy-free food, or dark chocolate.

Another option could be combining Facebook users who have shown an interest in chocolate and veganism, as there's likely to be an overlap and this helps you to further narrow down who sees your Facebook ad. They aren't just users who like chocolate, but they are also likely vegan or have an interest in dairy-free products.

Overall, you should have a clear separation between each audience you create with a theory that you’re testing. So, for example, you might theorise that users who have liked your competitor's page will also be interested in trying your product.

In this structure, you're aiming to end up with 3 audience groups, one for each of the Facebook ad sets. These 3 audiences will be the same across all the campaigns.

Mistakes to avoid

I go over how to actually build the campaign within the Facebook ad manager further down in this article, but first let’s go over some of the important decisions to be made and some landmines that Facebook loves to leave for you to waste some more hard-earned money!

Selecting the Right campaign objective

You need to select an objective within Facebook ads based on what you're trying to achieve. If you’re looking to simply get in front of as many people in your selected audiences as possible, then choose 'traffic' or 'engagement. This will push your ads to as many people as possible across social media.

However, in most cases, I'd advise setting the goal to be as far down your funnel as you can. Something like optimising for eCommerce 'conversions' or maybe traffic specifically on your store page.

Are you trying to sell through supermarkets and so brand awareness is more your goal or are you direct to consumer and so conversions through an online store are what you’re after.

Set your budgets at the ad set level

When it comes to setting budgets for your ad spend, you should aim to split it evenly across each different ad set. You can also decide to set budgets at the campaign level instead, but this allows Facebook to spend your money where it sees fit. In my experience running ads for countless clients, Facebook often isn't the best at judging which ad set has won without a huge amount of data.

So I'd suggest avoiding using campaign budget optimization and setting a daily spend limit on each Facebook or Instagram ad set instead.

If you have say a $1,000 budget per month, you can then divide that by 30 days to have $33.33 a day. Then, you can divide this figure by the 9 different ad set variations, which gives you $3.70 per ad set per day.

Don't Use dynamic creative

Facebook has a feature called Dynamic Creative ads, that lets you add multiple options for each part of your ads, including the title, the call-to-action, or the image itself to name a few.

When using Dynamic ads, Facebook will automatically A/B test the different options you've provided and try to 'learn' what works best for your brand.

But, as I mentioned above, in my experience Facebook doesn't actually have a very good track record with judging these things.

It may for example choose ads that have a higher click-through rate and lower cost per click as the winners and spend all your money there. But while those metrics are important, you want to be focusing on optimising based on conversion data, not just clicks.

Don't Use The detailed targeting expansion

Within the settings when you're setting up an audience, there's a small checkbox labelled 'detailed targeting expansion', which is usually automatically turned on to start with.

Most of the time, this setting worsens the quality of your audience, because it allows Facebook to move away from the parameters you've set too quickly, and go where they think is best.

You're probably noticing a theme here...Don't listen to what Facebook suggest! It might sound strange, but honestly, most Facebook or Instagram ads experts will tell you that the automations they suggest aren't suitable for the majority of businesses starting out.

Select manual placements

Generally speaking, you want to have the audience placements left open to allow Facebook to push your ads where it likes across the platform. But 'audience network' in particular is a lower-quality option that doesn't convert as well in our experience. This usually leads to an overall reduction in the return on your investment.

I'd recommend switching to 'manual placement', and make sure you uncheck ‘Audience network’.

Building out Your campaigns

For a full, up-to-date, step-by-step tutorial walking through how to actually create the campaigns for Facebook or Instagram ads, here’s a great guide to follow that should make the process far less daunting for beginners.

3. We Have Launch!

So, your Facebook ads manager account is all set up. Your campaigns are built with a great starting matrix of different copies and audiences to be tested.

You've double-checked your budgets are input correctly and you're not spending more than you're able to commit to.

You're ready to hit go and get your ads running!! (wooo). 

Watch those Burgers, Beers, Bagels or whatever is your thing, go flying off the shelves!

Analyse The Data!

If you can, you should be checking your ad account daily. You of course don't want to be rash and make decisions too soon before you've had enough data flow through your tests, but it's important to check no glaring errors come up and Facebook isn't spending your money stupidly.

After roughly a week, there may be enough data for you to notice a loser or a winner among your ad copies, or audiences by looking at the one with the highest cost-per-click, or lowest click-through rate. Or maybe one ad set has produced zero conversions.

Maybe one of your audiences is clearly just better and delivering all the sales like your vegan / chocolate lover combo. In this case, you might decide you want to see an immediate jump in your ROAS and you turn off all the other audiences to focus on the winner.

Ultimately you’ll slowly whittle down the campaign to just the best performing options, which will leave you with the strongest possible return on investment.

4. Aaaand Relax...(sort of)

Your campaigns are running great. You're a Facebook and Instagram advertising pro! You're finally starting to build a customer base for your Foodie brand on social media. This easy guide to Facebook or Instagram ads has hit the nail on the head and you can sleep easier knowing your food product is being spread far and wide to potential customers...

The optimal ad campaign objective will vary if, for example, you're aiming for lead generation rather than online sales.

But in the eCommerce world, whether you're promoting carousel ads, video ads, Instagram stories, or app installs, this guide should get you well on the way to scaling your revenue from online sales!!

This is only a taster into how to manage your ads and reach your desired audience. To keep learning you can find some helpful and quick content on my YouTube. In particular, there’s a great video I released detailing a simple checklist of what you need before starting paid ads.

If you want to really snowball your growth and don't have time yourself, get in touch with my team at Snowball Creations for an initial chat.

Happy advertising!

Oliver Farmiloe
Co Founder and Head Of Growth
Snowball Creations