Social media platforms provide businesses with a lot of amazing opportunities to promote themselves, but none can compete with Facebook.
Facebook is the global leader in terms of social media platforms, with around 2.7 billion monthly active users, not to mention celebrities, brands, organisations, and even governmental institutions.
If you’re on the fence about creating a Facebook page and promoting your product or services through it, here are some really compelling reasons for why this platform is beneficial to a business’s marketing efforts.
You might also be interested in DOES FACEBOOK MARKETING WORK?
How Facebook Can Help Your Business
There are two methods of marketing on Facebook: organically, and through Facebook ads.
Organic efforts mean you use the page to its full potential, but you don’t pay to boost any results. You create a Facebook page, fill in all the information, and start posting and trying to grow your number of followers.
With Facebook ads, you get faster results, and to tap into a very accurate targeting system (more on this later). First, let’s consider some of the major benefits of organic marketing on Facebook:
Your target audience May Already Be There
A golden rule in marketing is that you have to go where your target audience is, and these days, that place may be Facebook.
More than half of people in Australia have an active Facebook account, so a lot of your potential customers, even local customers, could be scrolling through their news feed right now. Based on numbers, Facebook is only second to Google!
The audience on Facebook isn’t just large, but Facebook users are extremely diverse, spanning across many different demographics. Regardless of who is in your target audience, you will be able to find potential customers on this platform.
It Can Support Other Marketing Efforts
There is no shortage of methods a business will promote its products or services, and the best-case scenario is when these efforts support each other. A Facebook marketing strategy can be easily integrated into your wider marketing efforts.
For example, if you want to run a content marketing strategy, you can use Facebook and promote posts to increase the visibility of your content, and bring extra traffic to your site. The same goes for a larger SEO strategy. If you’re trying to improve your position in the SERP, Facebook can help you increase website traffic and add fuel to your link profile.
It Helps Build an Engaged Audience
One of the most powerful ways Facebook can be used to impact a business is its ability to create a more meaningful connection with their target audience.
The platform isn’t just good for helping you post a few updates on your business and links to your site. With it, you can directly interact with your customers, build trust, and form relationships with them that strengthen your connection.
Consumers will comment, share, and even direct message a brand or company, and they highly appreciate it when that brand gets back to them.
It Can Help You Increase Your Audience
Building a following on Facebook is done a lot faster through ads campaigns, but you can do it organically as well. And it’s your existing followers that help make it happen.
If you offer your audience members good content, they can share it on their personal profiles, where people in their circle can come across it, and even engage with it. There’s already a spark of trust there because people tend to trust friend recommendations, so your page may gain some extra followers.
Additionally, Facebook has some decent search functions, which means some Facebook users could look for products or services similar to yours, and discover your page this way.
The Main Benefits of Advertising on Facebook
There is, however, a big drawback with organic promotion on Facebook, and it’s not always that it takes time. It’s the Facebook algorithm. Simply put, the social media platform doesn’t necessarily want to turn the new feed into an ad feed, so it tries its best to offer its users all kinds of posts, such as the ones from friends, news pieces, and particular types of content the user interacts with more, such as videos.
Facebook takes into consideration a person’s interests and history of using the platform to decide what goes on the news feed, and if a user hasn’t interacted at all with your content in a while, they may not see your posts any time soon.
The good news is that Facebook ads guarantee you make it to the news feed of both your existing audience and potential clients. Let’s look at what benefits Facebook ads can bring to a business:
Specific Targeting Options
Facebook users provide the platform with a lot of information:
- Age
- Gender
- Marital status
- Location
- Education
- Interests, likes
- Even the device the prefer to use
And all of this information is tapped into when you advertise on Facebook to run ads. The system allows you to specifically describe your audience in such a way that you are taking your ads to the right people every time.
Not only that, but there are also the custom audiences options that allow you to upload an existing list of customers on Facebook. With a custom audience, you can:
- Reach your existing customers with ads containing new offers just for them;
- Or create a lookalike audience to target new audience members that share the same characteristics as your existing customers.
Clear Ad Objectives
Facebook lets you choose different goals for your ads, which are known as objectives:
- Awareness: brand awareness, increasing page reach;
- Consideration: boosting traffic, engagement rates, video views, app installs, etc.
- Conversions: store sales, catalogue sales, or other specific actions.
Facebook knows how its users behave on the platform, whether they are using an app or the desktop version. For instance, if you want to run ads campaigns to boost traffic to your site, Facebook will only deliver the ads to the user most likely to click on external links.
Choosing the right objective becomes, therefore, essential to the success of your campaigns. Each objective can also accommodate the different calls to action you may want to promote, such as “buy now,” “apply now,” or even “call now.”
Many Ad Formats to Choose from
Facebook ads are diverse, and you can choose from:
- Image
- Video
- Carousel (which shows up to 10 different images or videos into a single ad)
- Instant experience (for mobile only)
- Collection (for showing multiple products at the same time)
Different ad formats can serve different purposes. For instance, if you want to promote multiple products at the same time, but don’t have the funds yet to spend on ad sets to accommodate it, a Carousel ad allows you to promote up to 10 products at the same time, in just one ad.
Choosing the right ad format also sometimes comes down to the type of resources you have. You may not be able to create high-quality videos, for example, but a stunning image to attract attention is something a lot more companies can manage.
Great Tracking Options
In general, a Facebook Business page unlocks a lot of information about your target audience, but the tracking options in Facebook ads are quite advanced.
Facebook lets you see exactly how your ad sets or campaigns are performing in almost real time (there may be some lags here and there). When you create an ad, it’s important to keep a close look on these metrics to answer this key question:
‘Is it working?’
Facebook gives you the tools you need to promote your brand, but success isn’t guaranteed. It’s all a matter of choosing the right target, type of content, or even landing page to redirect Facebook users to, and sometimes you simply won’t know what works until the campaign is already online.
The great news is that if you’re not happy with the ad performance, you can quickly modify the ad in the Ad Manager, from changing the copy to choosing a different bidding option, or even pausing the ad entirely!
Improve Your Facebook Advertising with Us
Facebook can be a powerful tool for all business, no matter their size or the industry they come from. However, to make sure all these benefits become reality, it’s important to have a good Facebook marketing strategy that’s designed to help you reach your business goals.
Australian Internet Advertising is Sydney’s top Facebook Marketing Agency, and our social media team is ready to help your business see true success through Facebook advertising. If you want to improve your Facebook marketing efforts, get in touch with us online now, or call our office at 1300 304 640 to find out more about how we can help.
