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Deciding how, where, and when to advertise your business online can be a daunting task. With Google AdWords offering prominent, effective, and profitable search ad campaigns, many businesses neglect to consider the value of other advertising channels. Step forward Facebook advertising.
In this post I want to give you five great reasons why the vast majority of businesses absolutely must be advertising on Facebook.
The minimum spend on Facebook advertising in the UK is just £1 a day. Even with this small budget, you can reach thousands of people that meet incredibly specific targeting criteria. You would be lucky to get one-click a day in Google Ads for that sort of spend.
With multiple optimisation types available, you can choose the most appropriate optimisation structure for your campaign objectives. Your optimization choice will influence the people who see your ads. Currently, there are eighteen optimisation types from which to choose depending on the objective selected. However, we will discuss the most commonly used:
Facebook will deliver your ads to as many times as possible. You will pay per thousand impressions making this one of the cheapest ways to reach your audience. Increase exposure and brand awareness with this optimisation, helping more people see your ad and potentially go on to engage with your brand.
This optimisation will deliver your ads to your audience up to once a day. This is great if you want to keep ad frequency low, however, you will still be charged per thousand impressions. This is another great optimisation for brand awareness or early-stage marketing of your brand.
If you’re more interested in getting users to actively click on your ad through to your page or site, you can choose link clicks. This will deliver your ad to people who are most likely to click on them. It’s worth noting that if a user clicked through to your website but did not wait for your site to load, you will still be charged for the click.
Use Landing Page Views if you want users to load and view your site. This optimisation is a little bit further down the funnel than Link Clicks; however, I would recommend Landing Page Views over Link Clicks as you will target an audience that is most likely to load and view your page.
If conversions are your final goal, it’s best to set your optimisation to this. You’re less likely to obtain a CPA result of £1, so we would recommend choosing one of the above options if you’re on a tight budget of £1 a day. However, if you do have more wiggle room with your budget then set this as your optimisation type as it will show your ad to people most likely to convert.
Once you have started to obtain conversions and you are seeing a steady return of ad spend, it’s a good idea to look at Value. The value will show your ads to people to maximize the total purchase value generated and get the highest return on ad spend (ROAS). Again, if you are working with a tight budget, it is better to choose the top four options as they will maximise the audience you can reach.
With so many options for bidding, budget, and optimisation, it’s important that you choose the most appropriate options for your advertising goals to get the most out of your campaign.
Unlike Google Ads, Facebook ads are targeted to the users’ demographic, behaviour, and interests, not what they’re searching for. Because of this, the refinement available to you when you set up the audience targeting for your ads is impressive. Here are a few great examples of how precisely you can target your ads:
With so many targeting options and combinations available, you can ensure that your budget is only spent on the most relevant audience, meaning you can get value out of even the smallest spend. Narrow or exclude your audience to reach the perfect demographic match.
Facebook claims to have 2.6 billion active monthly users so you can all but guarantee that whatever business you run and in whatever industry or niche, a good percentage of your target audience will be on Facebook.
With the sophisticated targeting options available, you can make sure your ads are seen by your specific target audience when they are in a fairly unique relaxed mind-set. Particularly if you operate in a B2B industry, it can be difficult to get your message through in conventional work hours as people are always too busy to be sold to. But when on Facebook, individuals can be subtly advertised too, without the pressure and time constraints of a work environment.
Whatever you spend on Facebook advertising, the most important thing is that you know exactly what you’re getting out of it. Even though social media is a cheap, powerful and essential business channel, it can typically be difficult to measure ROI for the time and resource invested into maintaining a strong profile and community. However, with Facebook advertising, you can clearly see what you have spent and what results it has provided, but also you can check other data to help you optimise your ads for improved results.
From within Facebook Adverts Manager, you can track a huge range of performance metrics to help you gauge performance and measure ROI. The information you are provided with includes:
Make sure you spend some time analysing your advertising performance and try out different ads and targeting to see what works best and gives you the biggest ROI.
As powerful as Facebook’s advertising platform is, it’s surprising how many businesses are still not using it, or at least not properly. As a result, if your competitors aren’t advertising, you gain a fantastic advantage and an opportunity to win business you might have otherwise lost out on. To check whether your competitor is advertising or to take a peek at their ads, visit their page and click on page transparency. This will show you all the ads that page is promoting, giving you an edge if you want to improve on what they have created. Keep in mind that your competitor will be able to do this with your ads too so stay on top of your creatives and keep your ads fresh and rotate between them on a regular basis.
By getting people’s attention, increasing awareness and engaging with your audience, you can get new leads and customers who become invested in your brand who may have gone to your competitor instead.
Although setting up and maintaining Facebook ads takes time and requires an experienced ad manager to get the best results, the rewards are well worth the investment.
For more information on getting the most out of Facebook and its powerful advertising platform, please do not hesitate to get in touch. You can also find out more about our Facebook advertising services on our blog.