Home > Blog > Why you should be using Facebook Advertising right now!

Why you should be using Facebook Advertising right now!

Shares: 
0

You’ve probably noticed ads in your Facebook newsfeed by now and you might have considered diversifying your marketing strategy and incorporating advertising on Facebook. Or maybe you’ve already dabbled in Facebook advertising because you were curious about whether it might work for you. It’s a question that almost any small business owner asks themselves at one point, no matter in what industry they are. Luckily for you, the answer is: yes, Facebook advertising works incredibly well.

Social media, and especially Facebook, is dominating society right now. Your potential clients are clicking on Facebook ads every day and if you are not advertising on the platform you are missing out on a huge opportunity to reach customers at a place where they go to specifically get updates on everything from friends, to events, to even services and products. The great thing about Facebook ads is the detail of customer behaviour and demographic you can target. You can target ads to a level that is not available in other paid channels such as paid search on Google AdWords. In Adwords you are targeting only keywords that people are typing in the search when looking for specific products.

How Does Facebook Advertising Work?

The first thing you need to differentiate between is ‘paid search’ and ‘paid social’. Paid search is something like Google AdWords where users will type a keyword on Google and when they get a page with search results, they will see a few ads above the regular search results. Paid search basically helps customers find your business, while paid social (such as Facebook ads) helps your business find prospective customers. The power of Facebook lies in its amazing ability to target a very specific audience that is the most likely to be interested in your services and products. Facebook has developed its targeting arsenal from all the years of users sharing their details, preferences, likes, interests and data, as well as getting data about users from 3rd party partners. This kind of targeting is not available anywhere else and that’s what makes Facebook stand out.

Facebook Ads

The Facebook Auction System

Facebook uses an auction system (like Bing and Google AdWords) to determine which ads will be shown and to which user. Facebook also uses something called a competitive value, which is basically how much each advertiser is willing to pay for a user to take a specific action like click on the ad or add a product to the cart. Facebook also takes into the account how much engagement the ad is getting, so the number of likes, shares, and comments on the ad is also part of the calculation that Facebook uses to determine how much you will pay.

Organic Reach On Facebook Is Declining

In the last couple of years, Facebook has started to lower the organic reach of posts on Facebook pages in order to force everyone to invest more money into ads if they want their posts to be seen by their fans and other people. The effect of it was very clear between late 2013 and early 2014 where Facebook pages saw a dramatic reduction in their organic reach (the reach of their posts to people who liked their page), just take a look at the picture below:

Organic Reach

Basically, if you are relying on posting content and promotions on your Facebook pages to bring in more customers to your business, then you are in a bad place because almost no one will see your post in their newsfeed. That doesn’t mean that posting content on a Facebook page is a bad thing, on the contrary. But the graph clearly shows that if you want to make anything out of your social media efforts on Facebook, then you need to start advertising on its platform.

Easily Track Performance and ROI (Return on Investment)

When you spend money on advertising, the most important thing is to know what you are getting out of it. Even though general social media is a great and cheap business channel, it can be very difficult (if not impossible) to track return on investment for the time and resources you invested into maintaining them. On the other hand, with Facebook advertising, you can see exactly how much you’ve spent and what results it has provided.

Facebook ads manager lets you track a large number of performance metrics that will help you gauge performance and measure your return on investment. Here’s just a small fraction of data that is available to you for each of your campaigns:

  • The number of clicks on your ads
  • The number of times your ad was shown
  • The number of likes, shares, and comments
  • How much you are paying per click
  • How much you paid for each conversion (e.g. lead or a sale)

This is amazing and you can easily see how much money you are making off your investment so you’re not simply throwing money at it and hoping that it produced some results for you. Compare that with something like flyers or radio ad where you have no clue did someone come to you because they’ve heard the ad on radio or did they bumped into you accidentally. If you know exactly how much you are profiting on each dollar spent, then you can sleep easily knowing that your money is well spent.

Target Your Ideal Customer

Right now, the Facebook user base is over the 2 billion mark. No other social media platform is a match for Facebook! This growth is very important to advertisers as it’ll allow them to find more potential customers. The emphasis of paid social is on finding the right people, not just finding as many people as possible which is something that advertising on TV and radio does (and that’s the reason why it’s so ineffective these days). It’s hard to believe that a lot of small businesses still rely on outdated methods of advertising such as radio and flyers when there’s the laser-targeted method available to find the exact person who would buy your product or service. You no longer need to pay and blast out generalized messages to people and hope that it would appeal to some of them.

So far, Facebook has been very savvy when it comes to adapting to the newest trends such as mobile devices. Around half of Facebook’s users access it only through their mobile device and never from a desktop computer.

This means that you can tap into one of the biggest pools of mobile users! Also, engagement is a big deal on Facebook and over 70% of Facebook users from U.S. access the site daily which is far more than any other social network in the West.

Facebook Stats

Facebook is at the forefront when it comes to targeting capabilities and it’ll allow you to target your exact buyer persona and show them the most relevant ads. Facebook’s targeting is very granular and it also allows you to layer targeting options upon each other so you can target people who would be your ideal customer.

Unlike Google AdWords, Facebook ads are targeted to user’s interests and demographics, and not what they are searching for. So, if you provide business or consulting services, then you can target users with interests in businesses and those over 30 since they might be in a position of authority at work, or target small business owners specifically. If you offer services in a narrow geographical area, then you can target your ads to a specific city, town, postal code, or a specific number of miles around your business address.

Just to give you an idea, here are a few random examples of how deep you can get with your targeting:

  • English speaking men, between ages of 30 and 55 who are located 10 miles around Melbourne, and are working as a retail manager and have teenage kids
  • Females, between ages 40 and 65, located in Melbourne downtown, who have a doctorate degree, likes to go to theater and is married
  • All people from Sydney, between ages 30 and 60, who live in a condo built after 2011, have anniversary within 30 days, who have college degree from specific universities, and who frequently travel internationally
Location Targeting

Facebook Ads Are Very Affordable

Cost an important factor when doing any kind of advertising. Fortunately for you, Facebook is one of the most cost-effective ad platforms out there. Facebook allows you to set the exact daily budget that you want to spend which ensures that you won’t blow through lots of money by accident. It’s not just how much something costs, but how far your money will go. The cost of your ads will depend on multiple factors such as placement, ad type, and the targeting but overall, the cost is significantly lower than other advertising channels.

Check out the image below to see a comparison of how much it would cost you to reach a thousand people on Facebook compared to other advertising channels:

Cost

Find Leads For Your Business On Facebook

Facebook is not only powerful but very flexible. No matter in what industry you are, Facebook has enough marketing options that you can tailor your marketing campaigns to fit your business and budget. Facebook is growing at a rapid pace, and every day it becomes a more indispensable part of any marketing strategy.

Facebook allows you to keep your ad targeting narrow so you will avoid wasted impressions and budget. With demographic targeting, you can layer any number of targeting options like location, gender, age group, interests, and behaviours. Together, these targeting features will allow you to run the most targeted and relevant message with specific people in mind, so in the end, your ads are the most likely to convert.

If you already have a list of client’s emails or phone numbers, you can import it into Facebook and create a custom audience. This is a list of people that you can serve ads to while they are on Facebook. This is an amazing targeting option that allows you to put your ads only in front of your leads and customers.

Custom Audience

Another option that Facebook gives us is something called lookalike audience. This is where you take your custom audience of your website visitors, leads, or customers and then you create a lookalike audience out of it where Facebook will see what characteristics define those people and then create a new audience of users with similar characteristics and traits. This is like cloning your best leads and letting Facebook search for other people who are very similar to them and then you can run ads to those people as well.

Retargeting is also available on Facebook, and it allows you to target an audience that has already visited your website, bought your product, or subscribed to your list. Targeting the same people again usually yields much better results since they’ve shown interest in your products or services, so it’s much easier to sell to them again. Plus, retargeting ads are usually even cheaper than regular Facebook ads! Imagine that you run an e-commerce store and you have people adding your product to cart but not purchasing. With retargeting, you can immediately start showing your ad to those exact people and try to entice them with something to come back and finish the purchase.

CONCLUSION

If you haven’t already, then you should definitely try Facebook advertising. Start generating leads and sales for your business through it because it’s very likely that some of your competitors are already getting more business out of it. As we have described in this article, Facebook is a versatile, powerful, and effective advertising platform.

If you are in a common industry, then there are going to be some competitors on the platform. Good news is that majority of them have no idea what they are doing when it comes to using Facebook advertising properly and you can use this to your advantage.