There is no doubt that Facebook is one of the most popular marketing platforms on the planet. It has over 2 billion active users and continues to grow. businesses of all sizes are using Facebook to reach new customers and grow their sales. Social media giant Facebook now has more than 2.7 billion active users and has expanded its advertising network to accommodate a wide range of businesses.
There are obvious benefits to advertising on Facebook, but it can be complex. Before you can see how Facebook might help you reach new audiences, it is important to understand what Facebook offers businesses and how its paid ad network is built to offer a bunch of advertising options.
The following blog has been written to help you understand the advantages of Facebook advertising so that you can take advantage of them.
Facebook is one of the largest advertising platforms, with a market share of 20%. Only Google has a larger market share. Due to the 2020 corona virus pandemic, digital advertising has experienced some unexpected swings. Facebook’s Q2 revenue has increased by 11% and is now well over $18 billion. Ad costs are lower than last year. As online traffic increases and brick-and-mortar results decrease, it may be beneficial to consider Facebook advertising for your business. The advantages of Facebook advertising make it a good option for businesses that are set to become online-first companies and eCommerce businesses.
Facebook’s advertising model is based on the “pay-per-click” model, which is the most common form of internet advertising. The benefits of Facebook advertising are also the benefits of PPC: it’s affordable, effective, and fast.
1. Micro-target your exact audiences
Most social media platforms allow advertisers to target their ads towards specific audiences using data from users. Facebook is no different. This means that when you create an ad on Facebook, you can target it to a very specific audience One of the main benefits of advertising on Facebook is the ability to target a very specific audience. You can target small groups of people that would be most beneficial for your company.
Facebook is known for allowing advertisers to target very specific demographics for their ads. Businesses can create ads to narrow down their target audiences for segments under:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Spoken languages
- Interests (expressed interests, likes, and hobbies from their Facebook profile)
- Education level or history
- Job title
- Income
- Political affiliation
- Interests
- Behaviors and recent purchases
- Major life events
Facebook’s ads allow for extremely precisely targeted options. You can setup Facebook advertising campaigns for different audiences that you have defined based on the above categories. Another great benefit of advertising on Facebook for your business is that you can target people who have already interacted with your brand.
The platforms ad network uses data on how people interact with your brand page, as well as data on how they interact on the rest of Facebook, to create “Audience Insights.” Marketeers can use the custom audiences function in Audience Insights to create targeted ads on Facebook.
The ability to see this level of detail is one of the advantages that Facebook ads have over classic search PPC. Ad networks such as Google and Bing can’t target demographics as specifically as they would like because of how search engines work.
2. It has the highest retail ROAS for any social platform
Do Facebook ads work? They do.
According to Wolfgang Digital’s 2020 KPI report, Facebook’s user feed ads are the best performing ad type for eCommerce. Despite the fact that other social media platforms exist, Facebook is the most popular and advantageous for advertisers. The three main types of Facebook ads, Facebook Feed, Messenger, and Marketplace, are the most successful in terms of engagement and ROI. A majority of surveyed marketers claimed that Facebook gave them the best ROAS, putting it ahead of other popular social media sites for marketing.
This puts it ahead of even Google Shopping.
Facebook is a more effective social media site for advertisements than other similar sites because users are more likely to click on ads they see in their Facebook feed. Therefore, it is a wise investment to allocate your advertising budget to Facebook. Almost all social media referrals to eCommerce sites in the U.S. will come from Facebook by 2020, and it will make up 40% of digital display ad revenue, even more than Google PPC.
3. Better ad types for your business needs
Another one of the advantages of Facebook advertising is that it offers a wide range of ad types – some not available in other paid channels.
There are multiple types of ads to choose from for Facebook business advertising:
- Photo – These are static single images, plus a caption.
- Video – Video ads range in terms of length and can be set to appear in-stream, in user feeds, or in Stories.
- Stories – Stories are customizable ads that take up the whole screen. They can be videos or static images and tapping on Stories ads brings the user to your site (or whatever page you set).
- Messenger – These ads appear between conversations on the Facebook Messenger App.
- Carousel – Carousel ads are comprised of up to ten static images that the user can scroll through.
- Slideshow – These ads show short video-like clips made with motion, sound, and text.
- Collection – Collection ads showcase multiple products in a single ad, all of which can be individually interacted with by a
4. They can be affordable and low cost (you set your own budget)
Facebook Ads are available to all businesses for free, as well as the Ads Manager tool. The only cost is the cost of supplying a budget and running ads.
Many small business advertisers find this to be one of the most appealing benefits of Facebook advertising.
The amount of money that you will spend on Facebook Ads will depend on many different factors (such as how much you are willing to spend, what type of ad you want to run, and what industry you are in) but in general, people should expect to pay a few cents to a couple of dollars per click.
Facebook ads are low cost.
5. Test Using Less Expensive Top of Funnel Targeting Options
Choose your objectives carefully to ensure that you are able to complete them.
The goal of a marketing campaign may not always be to convert a customer right away. This may not be practical or possible depending on the customer’s journey.
If you have a piece of content that is only accessible by gates, it may still be a good way to generate leads at the top of the funnel. However, it may not be the most cost effective way to capture that engagement.
Lead ads can be a cheaper alternative to Ads that serve the same purpose. You can also remarket lead form engagement.
If the goal is to drive traffic to resources on your site, sometimes less expensive objectives can be more effective.
6. Layer Interests or Demographic Targets to Zero In
Facebook allows you to target multiple audiences at the same time.
The “Narrow Audience” feature allows you to specify that prospects must fall into all of the interest or demographic targets in order to see your ad. This is useful if you have multiple interests and want to make sure that your ad is only seen by those who are interested in all of the topics.
You can combine different demographics and interests together, or you can target specific demographics and/or interests.
For example, you could use a broader lookalike audience and then refine it with certain interests to ensure that more of your ads are relevant to their interests.
If you were targeting a 3-5% lookalike audience of all backpack sales, you could target ads to people with a hiking interest, and use images or videos of people on trails in those ads.
You can also use exclusions to refine your audience.
You would likely want to exclude from your ads people who already hold certain degrees if you were running ads for a college.
7. Get Creative with Audiences
Audiences provide you with an opportunity to be more creative with your marketing than just targeting all site visitors.
You can target people who have looked at specific products through dynamic remarketing.
You can target people who have taken specific actions to convert them into customers and keep them moving forward in their journey.
You could improve your chances of making a sale by targeting people who took an action that indicates they are interested in what you’re selling but didn’t go all the way through with a purchase or request more information.
You can also set up audiences by recency.
Somebody who has recently looked at a product is more likely to come back and purchase than someone who looked at the same product a month ago.
8. Remarket Engagement
There are a lot of different ways to do remarketing on Facebook, and they can all be really useful.
There are many options on Facebook and it is known for being an inexpensive platform to reach people again.
Remarketing engagement is one of the most cost-efficient ways to reach your target audience.
This method is cheap and also allows you to get back in front of prospects that may never have visited your site, meaning that this could be your only opportunity for re-engaging them.
There are many ways to this, including remarketing to people who have viewed your videos and lead form abandonment.
There are many things you can do to try and increase engagement on your social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook. You can also create Instant Experiences to try and grab people’s attention.
To find more ideas on how to use engagement as a marketing tool on Facebook, read Tim Jensen’s recent post on Facebook targeting options.
9. Get Creative with Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences are people who are similar to your current customers. Facebook’s lookalike audience tool allows you to target these people.
Facebook is very good at creating lookalike audiences and these audiences usually perform very well when my clients use them to prospect.
I highly recommend segmenting out different lookalike audiences.
For instance, instead of doing a lookalike audience based upon all leads, consider breaking out:
- Lookalikes of your repeat customers.
- Lookalikes of big spenders.
- Lookalikes of your highest value customers.
- Lookalikes of all sales.
- Lookalikes of qualified leads that didn’t close.
- And so on.
Get creative! The goal is to identify which lists of customers or prospects are most valuable to your business and use those to create similar lists.
I usually start with a small group of people who are similar to my target audience, using an audience size of 1%. Audiences in selected locations can range from 1%-10% of the population.
This means that your audience consists of the 1% of people most similar to your lookalike source within your chosen geography.
Increasing the percentage creates a bigger, broader audience.
If your best performing lookalikes have unlimited budgets, you may want to use a higher percentage to expand your list.
10. Customize Ads for Different Placements
Facebook’s ad platform allows advertisers to target ads to users on Instagram.
There are many different ad formats on Facebook and Instagram, including the newsfeed, Facebook stories, Instagram stories, and Messenger.
Unless you specify otherwise, Facebook will include you in all placements.
Although Facebook will create ads using the content provided by the user, it doesn’t guarantee that the ads will be effective.
I see a lot of advertisers making the same mistake; they create an ad that’s meant to be seen in a newsfeed, but then they let it run on other platforms automatically.
This means that if you have done this, it will be easy to see that the ads for different placements are not good.
To ensure that your ads are effective in all situations, customize them to fit the different placements.
11. Customize Ads for Different Personas, Audiences & Interests
You can target your audience very specifically, using both push and pull mechanisms, which gives you a great opportunity to be highly relevant to them.
If you want to target potential customers at the top of the sales funnel, you can easily create content that is relevant to their interests.
You can make your content relevant to lower funnel audiences by tailoring it to topics they have already shown an interest in.
