What is Facebook advertising?
Facebook advertising serves ads, images, and posts to a targeted audience through the Facebook platform and ad network. If you want to get your message in front of the people who matter, Facebook advertising is the way to go.
Facebook ads allow text, images, videos, slideshows, and a variety of other creative options to be displayed on your advertisement for maximum audience engagement. You’re able to target your audience based on:
- People who have visited your website
- Purchase behavior
- Digital activities
- Interests
- Demographics
- Geography
- Third-party information like spending habits and consumer profiles
You may also determine how much you want to pay per click or pay per mille (cost per 1000 impressions).
If you choose to advertise on Facebook, you will have the option to place your ads in seven areas across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger. Placements depend on your chosen objective and include:
- Feeds
- Stories
- In-stream
- Search
- Messages
- In-article
- Apps
Advantages of Facebook Advertising
Wide Customer Reach
Facebook continues to be the number one social network when it comes to reach, with over 2.6 billion monthly active users, and with no sign of slowing down. If you’re looking to reach the masses with your messaging, then Facebook is the best place to do this, especially with its diversity of ages and demographics.
Ads Manager also allows you to remarket to users who have visited your website, by installing Facebook Pixel code to your website. There is also a range of Custom Audiences for you to take advantage of, allowing you to reach users who are already familiar with your brand.
A/B Testing (Split Testing)
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to split test your ads to different custom audiences, locations, age segments and many more, all within a single campaign. Not only does this provide valuable data as to what creative works best, but you can also narrow this down to what creative works best for each of your target demographics.
Lead Generation
Lead ads on Facebook make it much simpler for potential customers to submit information to you, no matter what their device. Customers can request information about products or services, or even schedule appointments, through a lead ad form that appears natively in your feed. The most effective part of this tool is the fact that customers do not have to leave Facebook to submit the form.
Creativity
Immersive ad-sets like Facebook’s instant experience ads mean that users can be instantly transported to an app-like brand experience. The full-screen interactive concept allows brands to tell a story that delivers on engagement, whilst providing an opportunity to showcase content marketing pieces that may otherwise be lost on a website.
Conversion Measurement
Creating a Facebook pixel allows you to track actions users take after viewing your ads across multiple devices. Adding a Facebook Pixel to the pages on your site where conversions occur will let you see who converts on your website as a result of viewing your Facebook ads.
To implement a pixel, simply navigate to the Facebook Pixel tab in Ads Manager and click “Create a Pixel”. Follow the instructions on screen, then add the Facebook Pixel base code to every page on your website, send instructions directly to your development team, or integrate the process with Google Tag Manager.
Visibility
A reassuring feature of Facebook advertising is that you have complete visibility and control of your Facebook ads and budget. Monitor your success on Facebook, so you know exactly how much you’re spending and the results you have gained from your campaigns.
You can also use the data provided in Facebook Insights to analyse your performance of your paid posts against your organic posts, in order for you to make strategic targeting decisions for future ads.
How Effective is Facebook Advertising?
Social media advertising has been something that has presented itself as very efficient and the biggest bang for the buck. Small businesses would use it without paying for promotion and in their local community would get the attention that brought high chances for national or even international customers to interact.
However, over the past years, there has been a high increase in the number of users which has made it more difficult to find suitable consumers for a particular product or service offered by a startup business. In this article, I will discuss the efficiency of Facebook advertising as well as give some insight into my own experience using Facebook as an advertising platform.
Facebook advertising can be very efficient. However, there are two major factors to the possibility of this efficiency.
Geographical Location
Facebook is more used in certain countries and states, therefore, having a business that will operate locally or within the country and not having any international plans may mean you need to look for different ways of advertising.
A good example is Eastern European countries. They still use Facebook on a noticeable level, therefore, there is a chance that more potential customers will see your product and therefore also a higher chance of having the promotion shared onward, creating the desired butterfly effect.
When promoting with Facebook it will allow you to choose the countries or states in which you would like to promote that certain post. After the desired country is chosen they will give you an approximation on how many views your post can get in the country chosen.
From my own experience, I can say that the approximation will be accurate 70% of the time. However, it depends very much on how large the potential customer base of your product is, as well as the quality of the post itself. On average, based on international globalization, $10 will get you around 5,000 potential views.
It is important that you remember that what Facebook is selling you and what you are purchasing is potential views, and therefore potential customers.
If you do end up paying $10 for 5,000 viewers, it does not mean you will receive even half of that number. It is only an assumption made by the system based on the algorithms of previous users of their advertising services. Therefore you may want to do some research to see what percentage of the population in your country or desired country use Facebook.
Type of Business
The type of business is a major factor also because maybe the niche or customer base you want to attract is not on Facebook. As any startup business or a business that is simply new to social media marketing and advertising, a lot of research is required in order to invest in the most efficient way of advertising.
A good practice is to look at other businesses selling a similar product or service to yours and see how well they are doing. It is true that you will not know how much they have invested. However, considering the size and performance of the business you will be able to make an educated estimate.
Research in 2018 has proven that business which advertises services rather than products are doing better on Facebook. A possible reason is because usually services are advertised or promoted within a video whereas products are usually just promoted in a photo. With time, this factor will not be as vital as it is now because we suppose that social media will become a bigger part of our lifestyle, therefore, social media will be in heavier use.
However, it has been proven that the more an advertising platform is used, the less efficient it becomes. This is why no matter what type of business you are pursuing, always promote on more than two platforms.
Why run Facebook marketing ads?
Social media is a tremendous way to increase exposure and traffic for your business, create loyal customers, and generate leads and sales.
Spoiler alert: Facebook remains King Social Network. It is the social-media platform of choice for the majority of marketers — and for good reason.
It’s never been cheaper to build your brand and create new demand for your products and services.
If you aren’t already advertising on Facebook, you’d be crazy not to. Especially if you want to grow like crazy.
Here are nine reasons Facebook ads will help make your business super successful, starting right now.
1. People Spend a Ridiculous Amount of Time on Social Media
Facebook is too huge for a business of any size to ignore.
Your business needs a Facebook page. You know this — and so do 40 million other businesses. Facebook is where your future customers hang out.
The average person spends 28 percent of his or her time online on social networks — or 1.72 hours per day.
The average American spends about 40 minutes just on Facebook — sharing and Liking content. Every minute, Facebook users Like more than 4.1 million posts, posting comments, status updates, and photos.
Facebook has a large, engaged user base that spends a ridiculous amount of time there every single day of every month.
Yet Facebook only has 2 million active advertisers? What?
Talk about an opportunity!
2. Over 1 Billion Users Served
So, Facebook is kind of a big deal, in case you haven’t heard.
According to the latest figures released by Facebook, 1.55 billion people log onto Facebook every month and 1.39 billion visit via mobile.
In August, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social network had passed a huge milestone — more than 1 billion users logged into Facebook in a single day.
You know what else? Half a billion people only access Facebook via a mobile device.
Within this massive pool of people are your future customers. Many of them visit Facebook every day. You need to connect with them.
Facebook ads will help you reach the right audience. Your audience.
3. Highly Scalable Content Promotion
If you’re consistently creating great content for your website, you want people to know about it. That’s why you share updates across your social networks.
But this isn’t enough.
Facebook Ads will amplify the reach of your content.
By using ads, you’ll actually end up getting more organic reach for your content.
How is this possible?
Well, when influencers share your Facebook Ads (yes, people DO share ads), your content will become exposed to an even larger audience.
Remember, engagement snowballs as you go on social media.
4. Targeting is Amazing
Facebook is much more targeted than you might realize.
Businesses can target users with Facebook Ads by location, demographics, age, gender, interests, behavior, and connections.
But Facebook can also help you get in front of specific, and often motivated, segments of your audience with some powerful ad targeting options you’ve probably never heard of. You can:
- Tap into recent purchase behavior.
- Get creative with life-event targeting.
- Use custom audiences to nurture leads and build loyalty.
- Create audiences that look like your own targets (“lookalike audiences”).
- Layer targeting options to get super granular with your targeting.
5. Re-marketing = Incredibly Powerful
I said earlier that you’d be crazy not to use Facebook ads. Well, you’d be even crazier to not use Facebook remarketing.
Not familiar with remarketing? Here’s how I explained it last week:
Essentially, remarketing is a type of technology that shows ads for your business to people after they have visited your website, used your mobile app, or given you their email address. People will see these ads when they visit or shop on other websites, use social media, watch videos, use other mobile apps, or search on Google.
6. Turn Visitors Into Leads and Customers
Your efforts with Facebook Ads will bring new traffic to your website. But you want more.
You want leads. Customers. Sales.
To achieve this, you’ll want to tag visitors who come to your site with a cookie. This will help build your remarketing audience.
Now you can start applying behavioral and demographic filters on your audience to target your Facebook Ads to a narrow group of people who are interested in your stuff (behavioral and interest targeting), who recently checked out your stuff (retargeting), and who can afford to buy your stuff (demographic targeting).
This = $$$.
Facebook Ads will help you more frequently capture qualified leads or make sales.
7. Call Buttons Are Game Changers
As mentioned earlier, Facebook has 1.39 billion mobile visitors every month and half a billion of its users only access the network via mobile. So capturing leads from mobile Facebook users is a huge opportunity.
Calls to businesses are way more valuable than clicks on websites. That’s why Facebook’s Call Buttons are game changers.
Think about mobile Facebook users. They see an ad, click on the Call Now button, and the lead is captured. Amazing.
Compare this to the old-school desktop search conversion funnel. A user sees an ad, clicks on it, visits a landing page, and (some) leads are captured.
8. Tools Make Managing Ads Super Easy
Many entrepreneurs and business owners I talk to still think Facebook Ads are “too complicated.”
If you’re one of them, maybe a little technology will help convince you otherwise.
Need some help with social media marketing?
Even though digital advertising offers immense opportunity, it’s not easy to launch and maintain a successful campaign. It’s time-consuming too. That’s why businesses partner with agencies that specialize in social media advertising, like Optimum DMA.
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