If you’re looking for new ways to market your business, get new traffic to your website, and ultimately gain new leads and sales, then Facebook ads are one of the cheapest, most effective ways to go for many business types. With nearly 2.5 billion users actively surfing Facebook’s platform, your target audience is most definitely right at your fingertips.
It might sound like a passing trend when you hear about social media advertising, but it’s an advertising method that’s not going anywhere. Unlike other methods of advertising, Facebook offers many benefits that you can never get from mailers, billboards, and even Google ads. A few of the benefits of using Facebook ads include very low cost per lead, the ability to target your ads to the exact right people, ease of use, and full tracking that lets you see in nearly real-time how your advertisements are performing.
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Here four basic reasons your business should use Facebook ads as part of your marketing strategy.
Facebook Ads Are Cost-Effective
Facebook ads are cheap! Billboards claim they can reach approximately 100,000 people at around $2,134 per board, but do they really? Sure, your billboard might get a few thousand eyes, but you’ll have no way of knowing if anyone noticed your ad or cared because you can’t track it. Not only that, but you’re also spending quite a bit of money on something that’s shown to thousands of people who aren’t included in your target audience.
With Facebook ads, however, you’re able to spend that same amount of money and reach millions of people, only showing your ad to the demographic that makes sense to your business. Even when it comes to local TV or radio commercials, you might have thousands of eyes and ears, but you’re sending your message to the wrong people—people you can’t even track!
Facebook ads, however, provides you with a way to get your message to the right people in the right areas at a much lower cost. If you’re working with a talented Facebook ad professional, you’ll see your costs as low as $0.10 to $0.25 per lead from your ads with a reach of millions of people that match your buyer personas.
Other advertisement avenues are not so easily trackable when it comes to CPC, but with Facebook ads, you can see how much you’re paying and exactly who’s converting to your ads, giving you new information about your audience that you can grow on.
Facebook Ads Have Amazing Reach
With 2.45 billion active monthly users, your customers are definitely on Facebook. That’s about 1/3 of the people on our planet logging into their Facebook account at least once per month. And with such a large pool of people, Facebook allows you to target extremely specific audiences, making sure that your product or business is seen by the people most likely to convert.
What do we mean by targeting? Well, unlike commercials, billboards, and mailers that are blanket served to thousands of people who might not ever care about your brand, Facebook allows you to target your audience based on your previous track record. If you already have information about your current customers, clients, and website traffic, you’re able to create audiences similar to those and serve them ads. You can also serve ads to all your website or business Facebook page traffic that didn’t convert, giving them another opportunity to see your brand and make a decision.
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If you’re a new business that doesn’t know much about your audience yet, you can use Facebook ads to learn about your audience. Using Facebook’s Audience Insights, you can determine what kind of people are interested in similar brands as yours, then create an audience based on that. If you know that your audience is most likely to be men ages 40 to 55 who like Rolex watches, you can literally target those exact people. Now, tell us what billboard can do that?
From age, gender, location, political affiliation, marital status, and more, your targeting options with Facebook ads is both broad and specific. If you’re planning on throwing money down the drain with old school advertising, please think about Facebook ads instead for this reason alone!
You Can Track Your Successes and Failures with Facebook Ads
Facebook allows you to analyze how your ad campaigns are received and how successful specific ads are compared to others. This means that if you try out different ads, you can easily see what works best and zero in on new audiences based on what is performing well. You can test various audience types and ad types to see what resonates best with your audience, then shut down what’s not working with the click of a button.
You can also use Facebook’s event tracking to monitor what actions your ads traffic is taking on your website such as pushing buttons, viewing content, filling out forms, etc. With that information, you’re able to set up a remarketing campaign that triggers after people leave your website without acting, giving them another chance to choose you over another brand. Unlike Google which doesn’t allow you to serve remarketing ads until you’ve collected a certain number of people in your audience, Facebook allows you to create your remarketing campaign and run it regardless, and it will serve ads as soon as it collects enough event data to fire off.
Facebook Ads Allow a Wide Array of Ad Content
Facebook ads can be as simple as an image with text and a link, or as complicated as a short promotional video (which really isn’t complicated at all). There are so many inexpensive online programs that help you generate promotional videos, animated ads, or slideshows quickly and easily if you don’t have the budget to pay a professional.
If something isn’t working well as an ad, you’re able to turn it off, change the image or copy, and then turn it back on again. This is a luxury you simply don’t have with old school advertising because it’s an untraceable guessing game that remains a mystery even after launch.
Deadset on a commercial? Well, Facebook video ads have the highest views of any other advertising medium on the platform, which is huge in itself. Getting more views leads to more clicks for your business, which makes video ads a superior form of advertising. People are more likely to watch a quick, well-made, professional-looking video than read through an advertisement linked to a still image.
If you’re hoping to use animated ads with Google remarketing, you can’t do so until you’ve spent a certain amount with Google first. Facebook, on the other hand, allows you to use whatever ad style you prefer straight out of the gate!
Facebook videos are available and easy to watch on desktop and on mobile, positioning your content everywhere it’s seen most. Unlike traditional commercials that charge you based on air time and that are seen across thousands of people who might not ever convert, you can choose to show your Facebook video ads to a specific group of people and you only pay when people actually view it. You truly can’t beat that!
Summary
There’s no debating that Facebook ads are one of the cheapest, most effective, most content diverse marketing tools out there. Stop blowing your marketing budget on tactics you can’t trace, that serve people you know nothing about. You’re advertising strategy should be fully traceable and provide valuable insights your business can truly grow on.
Now, we’ve talked a lot about how easy it is to create Facebook ads and set them up, but the platform can seem quite daunting to beginners. Not only that, even for those who have learned how to use the platform, but it can also be a challenge to get your ads to perform well if you haven’t done the right research or used the right creatives.
If you’re looking to start a new ad campaign for your business, or you want help improving an existing campaign, we’re here to help. Drop us a line via our contact form. We’re happy to answer any of your questions!
Good luck out there!
