How to Incorporate Facebook Ads Into Your Business Marketing Strategy
If Facebook Ads are not a part of your business marketing strategy, then they should be. Here is a quick introduction to Facebook advertising.
Read a business marketing strategy article circa 2012-2018, and you'll see many success stories from businesses using cheap Facebook ads to transform their fortunes almost overnight.
While it's evident that we're no longer in the gold rush era of Facebook advertising, that doesn't mean they are no longer the best way to advertise.
On the contrary, advertising is highly competitive. Many businesses still see huge returns on their ads, even as it gets increasingly expensive.
There's an old Chinese proverb:
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now”.
That's certainly true for Facebook ads.
Now is the perfect time to jump on board and embrace this platform. In this guide, we'll outline everything you need to know about Facebook advertising.
Facebook Advertising: The Benefits
Perhaps you are still on the fence when it comes to Facebook ads. If so, here are some of the most surprising benefits:
You Don't Need a Big Budget
Since Facebook offers the pay-per-click (PPC) model, you only pay for the ads that get displayed. Even a small budget of $5 a day will allow you to get your brand in front of relevant people.
Facebook Offers Unrivalled Targeting
Facebook has years of intelligence on its users, including people's interests, browsing habits, and demographics. That data intelligence is transformative when finding the perfect audience for your advertising.
Are you trying to advertise to left-handed lego enthusiasts from Southampton with a degree in biochemistry? Facebook is your answer.
A Vast and Engaged User Base
Facebook has almost three billion active users on its platform each month – and many of its users head to Facebook daily. That's enormous potential for any business wishing to start advertising.
How to Get Started
Whether you try the DIY route to ads or hire our team, it's worth knowing a bit about how Facebook advertising work. Here's how to get started:
Creating a Strategy
Before creating your first Facebook ad campaign, you must establish your goal and use that as your starting point for your advertising strategy.
For example, do you want to get more traffic to a blog post? Are you trying to boost sales on a particular product? Are you a startup looking to launch your business this year and want people to discover your brand?
Answer those questions first, and use your answers to create your advertising plan. Make it measurable. That will help you see how effective your campaign is, and it will also help our team make sure we are hitting your goals.
So if your high-level goal is more product sales, put a measurable number to that. Perhaps you want to double product sales in the next three months.
Once you have that goal, you can work backwards to figure out what advertising you need to help you achieve it.
The Creatives
Nowadays, ad creatives aren't the same as they were pre-internet when weeks or maybe months went into the perfect slogan or photo (remember Mad Men?).
With the vast wealth of data to hand, creatives are now something to fine-tune in parallel to your campaign.
You can take the time at the start to think of some great headings and produce high-quality product images. A good Facebook expert will test several creatives side by side to see which one gets the best response from your audience.
Setting Up Your Campaign
Once you are ready to set up a campaign, you'll need to choose from several options on the Facebook platform. Here are a few valuable pointers:
Type of Advertising
You can pay Facebook to boost an existing post or promote your page. That is called an awareness campaign on Facebook, and you can think of it as a method for increasing brand awareness.
Alternatively, you can do something that Facebook calls “consideration”.
You can think of these as direct actions that align with your business goals. You can run a campaign to improve attendance at an upcoming event or download an app to their phone.
Lastly, Facebook offers a category of advertising called conversions.
In digital marketing terms, conversion is the number of people who take action after seeing your promotional campaign. You can use Facebook ads to improve this conversion rate.
Examples of conversion ads include getting more people to sign up for a discount voucher or getting high conversions on a product sales page.
Audience
The other notable feature of the Facebook ad platform is defining your audience.
You can establish a known “warm” audience on Facebook and advertise solely to this group. A relevant example of a warm audience is people who visited your website in the past 30 days.
Alternatively, you can use something Facebook refers to as a “lookalike” audience.
In this scenario, you set up an audience you think are likely to buy from you. Maybe that's all the people who have liked your Facebook page. Next, you tell Facebook to go and find similar people to this audience.
Testing
We've already alluded to the importance of testing your creatives when advertising on Facebook – but testing doesn't stop there.
You can test creatives using A/B testing, where Facebook sends half the audience to one ad and the other half to a different ad. It will then give you data to tell you which ad performed the best.
You can also test different audiences. Perhaps you want to set up an ad campaign for a warm audience, such as previous customers, and another for a colder, lookalike audience.
Facebook has a wealth of data and reporting to help you fine-tune and optimise ads. Being able to interpret this information and optimise your campaign will be critical to your success.
That's why many small businesses like to outsource their ad campaigns to our specialist team and tap into our experience setting up and running successful Facebook ads.
Make Facebook Central to Your Business Marketing Strategy
Facebook ads are a powerful tool at your disposal when putting together your business marketing strategy.
Success doesn't always happen overnight. But once a campaign is optimised, it will give you peace of mind that you are getting regular monthly leads, sales or traffic. Your broader business goals remain on target.
Your first step to launching an ad campaign is simple. Schedule a free call with one of our specialists, and we'll be able to guide you on the perfect Facebook ad solution for your business.
