Consider just how many and how often people use the website. Facebook ads should become an attractive proposition for many businesses.
The online social networking service, Facebook, has undeniably taken the world by storm. 1.44 billion users are active every month, checking their news feeds multiple times per day—14 times according to an IDF study. Adverts on Facebook have increased visibility.
There are a variety of options for Facebook adverts. From apps to original content, an advertisement can be made for both mobile and desktop browsing. Advertising Facebook posts, pages, events, and actions such as likes, can help your business become an authentic benefit to people’s lives, increasing customer loyalty and brand awareness.
On the other hand, reaching the perfect customer profile with product and service advertisements can ensure sales and a positive ROI. Facebook’s flexible advertisements let businesses decide what they want to achieve with their advertising spend.
Facebook Ads Focus In
The sheer breadth of Facebook’s reach is not what businesses should focus on. Instead, attention should be directed towards the gargantuan amount of demographic data Facebook accumulates. From the information you enter in your profile to website visits to Likes, Facebook is constantly gathering demographic data.
Facebook is ahead of all of its competitors in terms of demographic data, and advertisers can take advantage of this data to create laser-targeted advertisements.
For example, a business that sells yoga clothing may have a particular demographic that makes the most purchases. In this case, we imagine that demographic to be a combination of the various settings Facebook offers: Location, Age, Language, Education, Generation, Interests, and Connections; or Vancouver, 25-55, English, University Graduate, Generation X, Yoga, and has a friend that likes your page.
We’d like to continue to stress the laser-targeted targeting of Facebook, but there are other neat features as well:
Promoting and Boosting Content
There are two different ways to pay for increased content traffic, boosting and promoting. These methods effectively turn your social content into advertisements.
Boosting content is the fast-track method. Any post you make on your business page can be boosted with the simple click of a button on the lower right corner of the post. Once clicked, you can select your target audiences and determine your budget.
We recommend boosting content that is helpful to your target audience. Generally, this should be content that links back to your website. Boosting is less about clicks and more about increasing the reach of the post.
A boost can get a good piece of content extra exposure, strengthening your brand’s presence on Facebook.
The second method is promoting your content. This involves using the Facebook Ads manager to pay to have your post appear in targeted news feeds. Promoted posts have more access to targeting, pricing, and bidding options. Promoting a post is a more structured way of increasing your content’s exposure on Facebook, and is better for long term strategies.
There is also a “dark post” feature which allows a business to create promoted posts out of content that isn’t actually on a business’s Facebook page. This is handy for testing as you won’t have to barrage your fans with variations of the same content, but can still have promoted posts running against each other. They’re also helpful for fixing mistakes in past posts that you don’t want to delete and repost just for promotion.
Right Column Ads:
These are the advertisements that appear in the right column of the Facebook desktop browser. Advertisements here use compelling images and videos to encourage target audiences to engage, and text grabs the interest of anyone who wants more info about what is being advertised.
Video Advertisements:
These are rich media advertisements that take advantage of video to draw target audiences’ attention. Often accompanied by text for those who want more information, these video ads are supported on the right column and in mobile and desktop newsfeeds.
Custom Audiences:
Like AdWords remarketing lists, custom audiences on Facebook allow businesses to build audience lists of people that have previously visited their website. A business’s Facebook page must have the website URL, and a pixel must be installed on the business’s website in order for the tracking to work correctly.
These audience lists enable advertisers to build highly targeted segments for different products and services on their website. The customization of these audiences is limitless, there’s net worth, living arrangements, marital status, parental status, interests, location, and more.
There is also an option that allows businesses to automatically build audiences based on past activity history on their website.
Lookalike Audiences:
These are audiences that Facebook generates by taking your previous custom audiences and matching them to other Facebook profiles that fit your business’s targeting criteria. These audiences, when used for targeting, can expand an advertisements reach while still maintaining relevancy.
Multi Product Ads:
Multi-product ads enable businesses to showcase three products within a single ad unit, on desktop or mobile. Each product highlighted will have its own image, description and click target. These ads can even make use of the aforementioned custom audiences to create portfolios of what a website visitor has already looked at, increasing the chance that they will click and convert on Facebook.
Dynamic Product Ads:
Similar to remarketing campaigns, dynamic product ads serve advertisements to past browsers of a business’s products. There are a couple additions for these ads. First of all, they’re automated, pulling data directly from the corresponding website product and placing it in the advertisement. Secondly, they show additional products that might be of interest to the Facebook user. These ads can also take advantage of the aforementioned lookalike audiences, improving the reach of products on Facebook.
Is Facebook Right for You?
Facebook Ads are not just for B2C marketers. While the various targeting options can delve into the personal, they can also delve into the professional, e.g., using employer, job title, or industry demographic options to hone targeting. The work and financial categories of targeting can help businesses targeting fellow business owners and working professionals. Advertising on Facebook keeps a B2B brand top of mind just as much as it does a B2C brand, making Facebook Ads another place to find inbound leads and sales.
It’s important that Facebook ads are kept fresh. People are checking their Facebook for news and social updates, not for evergreen content. This means that your ads should regularly switch up their style and messaging or they will bore users.
On the other hand, ads are great for building brand awareness or sending a certain message because users are likely to spend a lot of their time on Facebook. This is similar to the Google Display Network, where a business may not expect as many direct conversions as AdWords, or search results ads. Just make sure that Facebook ads lifetimes aren’t prolonged into irrelevance.
Facebook users will generally be higher in the purchasing funnel when compared to searchers entering terms on a search engine. This contributes to the lower expected conversions for Facebook users.
However, Facebook is a fantastic platform for remarketing. Because there is so much information available on Facebook, a business can create extremely customized and relevant advertisements for past visitors of their website. The features mentioned above aid in the creation of these ads, and lookalike audiences can even help combat the lower conversion values as a business uses known-to-convert target audiences to create lookalikes.
Open a New Chapter With Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads can offer businesses a chance to connect and breed loyalty with the most important customer personas. We recommend Facebook Ads as an addition to your PPC strategy. We never recommend giving up AdWords over Facebook Ads, but, as an addition, it can help improve ROI and find the customers that are worth the most. As with most additions to strategies, more work is involved.
If your Facebook Ads are underperforming, or you’re having trouble expanding into the world of Facebook ads, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free PPC consultation.
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community(74)
