Using Facebook Ads
The Benefits of using Facebook Ads
Facebook is one of the most popular websites on the entire planet. While many people know Facebook for its plethora of selfies and silly posts about what users just had to eat, marketers know that Facebook is a powerful advertising tool that no serious business can ignore. Basically, if you’re not on Facebook and you’re a business owner, you’re losing out on great online marketing opportunities. Maybe you’ve logged onto Facebook at some point and noticed all those ads. You are probably thinking to yourself, do they actually work? The reality is that they do…in a big way! That’s why a lot of businesses are using Facebook ads for their marketing purposes. After all, doing so gives them a huge audience on one of the largest and most heavily trafficked websites. It’s a marketer’s dream come true. If you know how to use them properly, Facebook ads can be extremely helpful to your marketing endeavors. We take a look at all you need to know about this potentially lucrative pursuit of social media marketing.
What Are Facebook Ads?
Simply put, Facebook ads are a brilliant and effective way to reach a massive global audience of potential customers. That’s because Facebook boasts more than 1 billion—yes, that’s 1 billion—users that are active on a monthly basis. To fail to tap into this vast potential of social media possibilities is just self-defeating. The beauty of using ads on Facebook is that they can be targeted to a specific audience. In other words, they can be used to target the demographic that’s your primary customer. The company’s self-service marketing option allows all sorts of refined targeting options to make sure that your target audience can’t miss your business ads. Facebook basically places your ads in front of your target audience when it’s logged into and using the social networking site. Let’s say that your primary audience is men between the ages of 40 and 55. The company offers a multitude of targeting options to place your business ads in front of these users when they’re using Facebook.
Digital marketing comes in all shapes and sizes, but often the runt of the litter in 2014 is email-marketing campaigns. This doesn’t have to be the case. Today, right now, many businesses are utilizing effective email marketing to build their business and expand their bottom line. Isn’t it time your business ran an effective email campaign? Marketing and Facebook go together wonderfully well because of the user behavior on the site. According to Inside Facebook, the social networking site is incredibly “sticky,” which is a cute term to signify that user engagement is quite high, way higher than other, competing social networking sites. The majority of Facebook users spend about 23 minutes on the site each and every day. Compare that to Google Plus, where users only spend an average of just four minutes a day. Needless to say, Facebook is a marketer’s dream because your business ads will be seen by your returning target audience. It’s pretty much guaranteed. You have three unique kinds of Facebook ads that you can place: • A normal text ad • A display ad that features both text and an image • A Facebook engagement ad, which you can only order via a Facebook ad sales representative (be prepared to drop, at the very least, $30,000 on the ad)
How Much Do They Cost?
There are different price points for Facebook ads, all depending on your needs and what fits best for your business. As such, there is no definite, set price for Facebook ads, per se. The cost per ad all depends on your competition. If there are lots of other marketers who are trying to target the same audience as you, then your prices go up. If you’re the only marketer targeting a specific demographic, then your rates will be quite cheap. For instance, if you’re selling video games to the young male demographic of 21 to 30-year-olds, then your prices will be pretty high since that’s a coveted demographic for video game companies. On the other hand, if you’re targeting 60 to 65-year-old women who are interested in collecting stamps…then you probably don’t have that many other marketers against whom you’re competing. There are two distinct ad models: cost per click or CPC and cost per thousand impressions or CPM (M for the Roman numeral for 1000). CPC means that you’ll pay if somebody clicks on your ad, but CPM means that you’ll pay for every 1000 folks who’ve seen your ad. Both ad models, however, utilize the same bidding system, which involves prices being set according to what your fellow marketers want to pay for advertisements to the same demographic. The rule of thumb is that CPC provides marketers with a better click-through rate while CPM provides cheaper, yet fewer clicks.
What’s the Strategy Behind a Facebook Ad Campaign?
Every Facebook ad campaign will be centered on the outrageously vast user data of its members. Because of the sheer size of Facebook’s member data, it makes it more efficient for marketers to precisely target the specific demographic they have in mind. Facebook understands exactly how lucrative selling ads on its website is, which is why it makes it easy for marketers to identify and target their specific audience—down to almost granular exactness. For instance, in your online marketing campaign, you can reach your audience broadly, based on exact geographic location and even down to specific user interests. Here’s how: Target by Location: Facebook lets marketers target business audiences based on their profile data as well as the IP addresses of the computers they use to log in to the site. You can even get that much more sophisticated by expanding the targeting to a radius of 10, 25 and 50 miles from your specific target site. This type of targeting works best if you’re a marketer living in the U.S., Canada or the UK.
Target by Likes and Interests: Facebook uses the data of its members in such a way that marketers are able to target both the likes and interests of members down to the specific keyword. In addition, topics that Facebook users are really excited about—such as entertainment interests, political and religious views, and musical preferences—can be exploited to micro-target Facebook users even more. Target by Connections: It’s also possible to target demographics based on whether or not they’re already connected to your business’ Facebook page or another page affiliated with your business. It’s also possible to target your ads only to those who are not yet connected to your page. In such a case, your current fans or “likes” won’t ever be exposed to your targeted ads. There’s also an option to target those Facebook users who are merely the friends of people connected to your business page.
Why Facebook Ads Can Boost Your Business
When you use Facebook for marketing and business purposes—and get away from more of its absurd activities like the obsession with selfies among some users—you can really give a revenue lift to your business. The cost of Facebook ads is a wise and beneficial investment that brings with it a nice return on investment. That’s why Facebook ads are popular with businesses and marketers, and observers are predicting that small businesses hold the key to Facebook ad revenue. With an active, monthly user base that numbers more than 1 billion people across the planet, it makes a world of sense for small and medium businesses to advertise on this social networking site. Not only do you have a monstrous audience, but you also have the ability to refine your ad targeting to the point where your ads will be appearing to users that make up your primary business demographics. While advertising on Facebook can be costly depending on how many other marketers you’re competing against, remember that the return on investment is generally good. This makes buying ads on Facebook a very worthy pursuit that can drive increased traffic, additional leads and greater conversions to your business site.
