Facebook Marketing
Health & Fitness
Social Media
How To Create Facebook Ads For Health and Fitness Pros
In this article I will show you how to create Facebook adverts for your health and fitness business and you will learn how just one Facebook ad campaign can help you get more leads and increase your business’ revenue. 96% of social media marketers consider Facebook to be the most effective social media advertising platform according to eMarketer.
It’s relatively easy process to create a Facebook ad and it can be done very quickly. However you need to make sure you select the right choices if you are to avoid a campaign that leads to poor results.
I will discuss what options are available to you and how your health and fitness business can benefit from these resources. Facebook is a powerful online advertising platform and I will share with you how you can use it to grow your business. Here is your guide taking you from ‘zero to hero’ in no time!

| What are Facebook Ads? |
Facebook is still the planet’s leading social network according to SmartInsights. It has over 1,000,000,000 active users everyday, worldwide.
Facebook adverts let you target specific demographics. You can advertise to potential leads in targeted areas, with relevant interests and at specific times. For example, you could create an advert targeted at local people interested in strength training and then create another ad to the individuals who engaged in your first ad.
Facebook advertising is cheap in comparison to traditional print ads however you need to manage your campaigns carefully. Health and fitness professionals need to know how to correctly target their ads to return a good return on investment. Otherwise, it becomes an expensive waste of your valuable time and money.
It takes a little time to learn how the platform works but it will be time well invested if you really do want to generate more leads. You could also outsource this task to an expert an allow them to run your Facebook ad campaigns for you. Take a look at www.thewebgym.com for advice.
| Facebook Advertising Structure |
Your Facebook ad campaign needs 3 elements to work; campaigns, ad sets and ads. Understanding how these elements work together will help you reach the right people and create successful adverts. Here’s an explanation of the structure:
Facebook Campigns
An ad campign has an overriding advertising objective in which you determine the end goal for your ads such as driving more traffic to your website, lead generation, brand awareness, summer beach body goals or even just likes to your Facebook page.
Facebook Ad Sets
Ad sets allow you to define your marketing strategy like selecting specific segments, defining your budget and schedule. For example one ad set might target your summer fitness promotions and another might be dedicated to lead generation and conversions.
Facebook Ads
Each advert can contain text, images, pictures or even video that drives the target audience towards your campaigns objective. Each ad set can have, and should, contain several adverts.
“Don’t have time to create your own Facebook ad campaign?” Let me do it for you!
| Identifying Your Campaign Objective |
When you create a new Facebook ad campaign you’ll be asked to select an objective to determine the marketing goal of your adverts.
The objective you choose depends on the approach to take with marketing your health and fitness services. There are 2 paths to choose from.

| Interruptive or Outbound Marketing |
You pay to have your ads displayed in front of an audience who don’t know you. The idea is that if you advertise to the masses someone will eventually respond to your message. However, if you target your audience with care, provide an offer that people want and serves their needs you will get new clients. This is the equivalent to traditional methods such as cold calling and cold emails or SPAM.
| Permissive or Inbound Marketing|
This is a more thoughtful, considered and long term approach. However, the long term gains can be worth the wait and return on you investment. Your goal is to be a supportive expert by writing and contributing authoritative content to blogs and answering questions (I can recommend Quora). Once engaged, you can funnel those who have an interest in you and are ready to use your services towards the relevant pages.
As of October 2017 Facebook has ten separate objectives available:
| Awareness Objectives |
This first set of objectives are associated with the ‘awareness stage’ of your customer journey. This is the first touch point where your aim is to reach new prospects to build your brand awareness. There are two campaign objectives to choose from.
- Brand Awareness. The brand awareness objective focuses on reaching people who are going to be interested in your ads. This is achieved by optimizing your campaign to target people who are most likely to spend time looking at and engaging with your ads. If your primary goal is to increase the awareness of your brand then this is a good objective to choose.
- Reach. This objective focuses on reaching the largest audience with your available budget and allows you to control how frequently your ads are shown. By maximizing the impressions (users who click on your ad) your ad receives this allows you to quickly show your ad to as many of your target audience as possible. If your goal is to increase your impressions then this is the objective to choose.
| Consideration Objectives |
The second set of objectives serve the ‘consideration stage’ of your customer journey. This is increasing the interest of prospects who are already aware of your brand. These objectives could also be used to support your first ad campaigns.
- Traffic. The traffic objective focuses on driving people to your website. This is done by optimizing your advert to be shown to people most likely to click the link back to your website. Your ad will provide a link back to your website alongside a call to action button. If your main goal is to direct visitors to your website to engage with services, event and class information, contact and lead forms or landing pages then this objective is a good choice.
- Engagement. As the name suggests this objective focuses on increasing engagement with your Facebook page. This is done by promoting a Facebook Page post to drive engagement, advertising your Facebook Page to increase ‘Likes’ or promoting a Facebook Event to get more responses. In each case Facebook will optimise your ad for the people most likely to take your chosen action. If your goal is to increase engagement within your Facebook Page then choose this objective.
- App Installs. The app installs objective aims to get visitors to install your mobile app. This objective is of course only available on mobile platforms and optimises your ad to reach people most likely to install your app. Your ad will link to the relevant app store where visitors will be able to download your app.
- Video Views. The video views objective reaches out to people who will view your video campaign which should tell a story about your brand through an Instagram or Facebook video. You can measure what people are viewing as a percentage, number of seconds and as the average time and percentage of your video watched.
- Lead Generation.The lead generation objective provides the opportunity to create ads which encourage people to submit their information to you through Facebook. This campaign needs you to have a lead magnet and an existing target audience that trusts your authority in order to leave their information with you. It will be effective with people that are already aware of your brand.
Your advert will link to a lead form within Facebook where visitors can fill in their details and submit it to your health and fitness business. The campaign will be optimised towards those most likely to submit their information to you.
| Conversion Objectives |
The last set of Facebook campaign objectives focus on ‘Conversion’. Once your target audience has been introduced to your brand and services and increased engagement with your content the next focus of the customer journey is to encourage them to complete their purchase and buy your services.
- Conversions. The Facebook conversion objective aims to reach people who will take a specific action which will be your own defined conversion on your website. These campaigns will need you to install the Facebook Pixel on your website so you can measure conversions. Once installed you can choose which conversion to optimize for. This could include Facebook conversions such as or even your own custom conversions. Facebook optimisesthe ad by finding people that are most likely to complete this conversion. For this campaign to be effective each one of your ads really needs to be achieving 15-25 of these conversions per week.
- Product Catalog Sales. The product catalog objective allows you to create dynamic ads that pull in products from your website. In order to do this you need to set up a catalog feed on Facebook. Using a product catalog enables your Facebook ads to be kept up to date with the latest product images, pricing and text from your own website. The ad will also retarget the audience depending on what website pages and products have been viewed. This objective should be used if you are running promotions for a large-scale ecommerce business.
- Store Visits. The store visits objective is similar to the reach objective. The difference is that you associate the campaign with one of your Facebook Pages and then create ads that target people within a defined distance of your business. This objective only works if you have chosen and selected an up to date location on your Facebook Page. This is a useful if you’re looking to reach as many people as possible within a certain distance of your business.
You must define your health and fitness marketing goal before you start and have a clear objective in mind. This will guide you to the most appropriate Facebook ad campaign type.
“Need help with your Facebook campaign?” Book Your Free Consultation.
| Target Your Audience |
It can be challenging to determine who your target audience is. You would like everyone to use your services but not everyone will be interested. However, an effective Facebook ad campaign must reach those most likely to need your specific services or have in an interest in you! It may be that you have more than one target audience. For example, you may only want to target the over 40s with a specific lifestyle.
Facebook makes it fairly easy to choose the demographics of your target market. You can create a new audience or used a previously saved custom audience.
The audience definition gauge shows your potential reach. You can change the limits limits of your choices to reach a broader or more specific group. Or you might wish to target a different audience entirely.
There are many ways to target your advert’s audience on Facebook. These include location, age range and gender. Other options you can explore are education, work, and hobbies. You can also target people that ‘Like’ individual interests too.
You will need to dedicate some time finding your ideal audience so you do not waste precious time and money. You can save your audience settings for future campaigns. Initially, some experimentation will be required but as you measure the success of each campaign you can further refine and modify your audience choices.


| Set Up Your Facebook Campaign Budget |
The next step is to decide how much you wish to spend on your Facebook advertising campaign. There are many offers to choose from to suit all budget constraints.
The daily budget allows you to set a maximum daily limit. The lifetime budget can be used if you want to run an ad campaign for a predefined period.
How much should I spend? How long is a piece of string? What is your budget?, how long are you running the campaign?, is this your first ad or are you targeting an existing and already defined audience? A small daily amount of £5, will yield better results than you may think. It goes without saying though that the more you spend, the broader your reach and the better your results.
Facebook also allows you to to set a date and time schedule for your lifetime budget.
You can also optimise how your ads are displayed. You are bidding for Facebook ad placements as you would with Google ads. You can select whether to bid by objective, or impressions (clicks). The last one is the number of times your ad will be displayed.
I suggest allowing Facebook to auto set optimal bids for you within your budget constraints. It’s ideal for Facebook ad beginners and means you don’t have to keep adjusting your ad budget settings. You will also likely end up spending less on your Facebook ads over time.

| Creating Your Facebook Ad |
You are finally ready to create your first Facebook advert! Your ad should be relevant to your campaign and engage visitors so that they take the appropriate action to achieve your marketing goal. The way your ad will be displayed will depend on your Facebook objective.
There are some basic rules to help create conversions from your Facebook ads:
- Attention grabbing images are essential to getting your ad noticed. For example, if your target audience is business men over 40, an image of a female spin class is not engaging or relevant.
- Relevant ad images, copy and destination links are key to audience engagement.Content that is not relevant to your target audience will not achieve your ad goals, waste your time and eat into your budget. Facebook rates your ads and gives you a relevance score from 1 to 10 – 10 being the highest. The more relevant your ad image, ad copy, and link page is to your audience, the higher your score is and the more favorably Facebook will treat your ads.
- A value proposition communicates why visitor should click on your ad to find out more about your services or products. Why is your service better than the competition? Why should the visitor click on your Facebook ad to explore your website?
- A call to action button (CTA) tells visitors where to click. An engaging and relevant ad is useless without a CTA. How does your audience know what to do next otherwise. Add a sense of scarcity to your CTA button. For example, “Offer ends soon”. Your CTA should encourage people to click, ‘Buy today Get 15% off’.
You can run up to 50 Facebook ads per ad set. Creating a variety of ads with different text, different pictures and offers etc. As the ads run you can measure which ads are the most successful and refine the marketing strategy for your health and fitness business.
Here’s a great example of a Facebook ad by CrossFit.
The advert has a highly relevant, attention grabbing image, that tells you exactly what it’s about and who the target audience is. The ads copy is short and to the point. Be sensitive with your text and avoid phrases like ‘fat loss’, ‘weight loss’, or ‘Tired of being overweight?’. Do not make assumptions about the audience it can lead to your Facebook ad campaign being rejected.
Here’s another fine example of a Facebook ad by Half Moon Yoga.
This ad by Half Moon Yoga is selling a new yoga class. Faces always draw attention particularly when the eyes directly address you. Again the target audience is clear as are the services being offered. The largest text ‘Save 50%’ is a clear CTA for visitors. The smaller text ‘Offer Expires Soon!’ offers scarcity and a sense of urgency! A great example.
| Finally – Measuring Your Ads Success |
It’s essential to measure the performance of your Facebook ad campaign regularly. Doing so will provide valuable feedback that that will save time and money. The Facebook Ad Manager interface is easy to use and offers plenty of reporting tools to analyse your success.
You will find out which individual ads are performing well, which ones need refining further and even which ones to stop. You can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and monitor how much they have cost you so far.
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