The Power of Facebook’s Advertising Capabilities
Facebook offers businesses a wide range of advertising capabilities that can help them reach their target audience effectively. With Facebook’s powerful targeting tools, businesses can narrow down their audience based on location, age, gender, interests, and more. Facebook also offers a range of ad formats, including video ads, carousel ads, and sponsored posts, which can help businesses tailor their message to their target audience.
According to a survey conducted by Hootsuite, 94% of businesses use Facebook for marketing purposes, and 78% of marketers say that Facebook is their most effective social media platform for advertising. This demonstrates the power of Facebook’s advertising capabilities and how businesses can leverage them to reach their target audience effectively.
Unlocking the Potential with Facebook Ads
Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide as of August 2020, with over 2.7 Billion daily users, that’s almost twice the population of China.
The daily time spent on Social Media is rising year after year, in 2020 an average user spends over 2 hours 20 mins on social media. Meaning, there has never been a better time to get your content in front of potential customers.
The ‘Population’ of Facebook is certainly massive I’m sure you already know, and many business flock to Facebook to take advantage of this.
Popularity aside, how effective is Facebook advertising when a whopping 63% of business feel their ads are failing. When every marketing pound matters, this is a question you should be asking.
Every business will see their Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) ultimately differ based on investment, industry, ad quality and other variables. The only surefire way to know the exact Return on Investment (ROI) that Facebook advertising will generate for your business, is to undertake and calculate the supporting results.
Facebook marketing requires a steep learning curve and a significant amount of skill to successfully run an efficient ad camping, without haemorrhaging money. More over, Facebook seems to take advantage of smaller businesses that do not have the capital at hand to employ marketing agencies to run their ad campaigns. Facebook offers businesses a “Boost” button, but this is certainly different from using the Facebook business manager.
Facebook’s Audience Insights Tool
One of Facebook’s most powerful tools for businesses is the Audience Insights tool. This tool provides businesses with valuable information about their target audience, including their demographics, interests, behaviours, and more. By understanding their target audience better, businesses can create more targeted and effective ads that resonate with their audience.
For example, if a business sells fitness products, they can use the Audience Insights tool to identify the interests and behaviours of their target audience. They may discover that their target audience is interested in fitness, nutrition, and wellness, and uses fitness apps to track their progress. Armed with this information, the business can create ads that speak directly to their target audience’s interests and behaviours, resulting in a more effective ad campaign.
The Reach of Facebook’s Ad Network
Facebook’s ad network extends beyond its own platform, giving businesses the opportunity to reach even more potential customers. Through Facebook’s Audience Network, businesses can extend their ads to a network of third-party apps and websites, reaching an even broader audience. According to Facebook, the Audience Network has over 1 billion monthly active users across 190 countries, providing businesses with a massive reach.
Additionally, Facebook’s ad network also includes Instagram, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. Businesses can use the same targeting and ad formats on Instagram as they do on Facebook, allowing them to extend their reach and target their audience across multiple platforms.
How can I get the most out of Facebook Advertising?
Understand how Facebook Ads work
Take the time to read Facebook’s literature on business advertising. Their content is always the best place to start.
For example when an ad is first launched it will be in the “Learning Phase“. Meaning each time an ad is shown, Facebook’s ads delivery system dynamically learns more about the best people and places to show the ad. The more an ad is shown, the better the delivery system becomes at optimising the ad’s performance.
Test, test, test, then test a little more.
The only way to truly know whether your ad campaign is performing its peak efficiency is by testing multiple iterations of the same ad. Also known as split testing, this method of analysis involves testing audiences, creatives, placements and more in order to find out what works. The act of testing can be tedious at times, especially if you’re unfamiliar with Facebook Ads. Additionally, you can quickly spend a substantial amount of money only to yield poor results if you don’t look setup auto-kill-ads, which are ads that get disabled if a certain threshold isn’t reached.
Track properly.
The most important place to start Facebook marketing is with a Facebook Pixel. The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. By installing a snippet of code on your website, it allows you to specifically target visitors to your site based on their engagement with your brand.
For example, if you want to target someone who has been on your product page, pricing page, or even filled out a contact form on your website with Facebook ads, you can. But be cautious, while this seems simple to implement the proper installation of the Facebook Pixel alludes many and must be done by professionals.
Build ads around your goals.
Facebook’s advertising platform lets you create ad campaigns optimised by any of 12 specific objectives, each of which is categorised by stages in a very basic marketing funnel—Awareness, Consideration and Conversion. Knowing which is your priority will not only let you optimise and build your ads to the best possible effect, but this will allow you to accurately gauge your ROI.
Target audiences specifically and accurately.
Facebook allows you to target consumers with remarkable precision, by creating custom audiences defined by metrics like age, gender, location, interests, occupation, income and many more. But it goes so much further than that, your business can target based on behaviours. For example, hotels can target people travelling to their area, who have used travel apps within the last 30 days. No matter what you’re promoting or selling, you can create a custom audience or audiences that will deliver your ads directly to the people you need to see them. Asides that, Facebook Ads is highly affordable. Facebook also offers users to set and control their advertising budget so as not to exceed the set-aside budget.
Creativity
Be creative. Facebook users are bombarded by advertisements 24/7, and not just on social media. Unlike Google where people are actively search for things [to buy], therefore it is important to remember that people aren’t on Facebook to be sold to; they’re on seeing what there friends are up to, to watch videos of stupid animals and maybe to see how an ex is getting on.
So, in order to effectively standout you must be creative, delivering great content that genuinely appeals to your audience, rather than trying to force sell customers. This can be done through having a succinct copy, striking visuals and engaging video content are key and relevant to the customers.
What has been your biggest challenge with Facebook Ads?
