5 Reasons to Advertise Your Small Business on Facebook

In This Article, We’ll Look Why You Should Advertise Your Small Business on Facebook

There is so much on the plate for marketers to do! Email marketing, blogging, guest blogging, cold calling – it is endless!

But the bottom line is that you cannot do it all. We have to zero down on a few platforms and give our heart and soul into them to reap the best results.

The real problem comes when you have to decide how will you advertise online or which channel to hit the most?

While Google Adwords offers “safe” results (effective and prominent), many small businesses often forget about other advertising channels. That being said, you cannot deny the fact that social media is one of the dominating forces in digital marketing today.

If you are like me, you likely go through your Facebook news feed, Twitter posts and Instagram pictures several times in a day. Well, your users do this too!

Small businesses are mostly apprehensive about spending or rather, exhausting their marketing budget over all these platforms. Yet, Facebook is one advertising social media channel which no small business marketer should ever ignore?

Reason? I’m going to give not one, but 5 reasons!

Facebook ads are getting real, effective and valuable results. Not only do they generate awareness and increase your likes but also, contribute towards getting your small business lead generations and ultimately conversions.

Let’s get started on why should you, as a small business, invest in Facebook Marketing.

Reasons Why To Advertise Your Small Business on Facebook:

#1. It’s Easy to Set Up

Advertise Your Small Business on Facebook

Cutting to the main point: Facebook ads are easy!

You don’t have to be an advertising or marketing guru to crack the process of creating basic ads for facebook. This is especially useful for small business owners who are usually overwhelmed while engaging with the traditional ad platforms.

Facebook has done a great job in simplifying this process for their users.

All you have to do is choose your targeted audience on the basis of Country/City or simply by interests, choose the budget and set your schedule.

#2. Huge Audience

Huge Audience

Facebook offers the largest opportunities for ad clicks. It has a user base greater than the entire population of China! With over 1.59 billion active users and 800 million users logging in daily, you can find a good percentage of your targeted audience on Facebook.

With elaborate targeting options, you can direct your ads towards a specific audience. It’s a little difficult to reach out to people in the “conventional working hours”. But with Facebook, you can choose to advertise to individuals subtly without the time constraints of the working environment.

#3. Economical Cost and Effective Results

Facebook ads definitely do not burn your pocket. In fact, they literally cost a fraction of what other online marketing channels would cost. As a small business, you might be budget-strapped. By targeting the right keywords and audience, you can boost your conversion rates as high as 40%.

You can start with a budget as low as 1$ and still get great results.

Facebook offers four types of bids which you could choose from depending on your campaigning objectives:

  • Cost Per Mille (CPM)

Here you bid per thousand impressions. This can help you increase your brand exposure and awareness. Thus, potentially increasing the brand engagement of your business

  • Cost Per Click (CPC)

Here you bid per each click. Bidding through CPC can get your users to actively click on your ad and visit your website.

  • Optimized cost per mille (oCPM)

You can use this option to direct your ads to people who you think are most likely to act on your ads.

  • Cost Per Actions (CPA)

This is the safest option for small business marketers. You pay only when users do a specific action, for example, when they like your page.

With all these options for bidding, it is critical that you choose the most appropriate plan for your ad campaign according to your budget.

#4. Targeting Options are Huge

Targeting Options are Huge

Targeting the right audience with your ads is the key to getting maximum efficiency out of any ad campaign. If we look at other advertising channels, they offer nearly 50% accuracy in targeting users. But Facebook offers an exceptional 90% accuracy.

It lets you segment your audience based on their location, age, gender, interests, education level. The level of granularity offered while selecting the target audience simply impresses me.

Here are some examples:

  1. Selling jewellery? You can target women between the age group 25-50 who are interested in “jewellery”, “fashion” and other related interests.
  2. Providing services for home improvement? Target Fans of companies like Home Depot and Ace Hardware.
  3. Have an online dating website? Go for singles, use relevant ads for different genders.
  4. Selling shoes/clothes/bags for ladies online? Target females whose interests are “shopping” or “fashion”. Select an appropriate range as per your product.

It’s easy to find new leads through Facebook Advertising.

Once you have a target audience that can easily convert, Facebook will help you find new leads with similar interests. The feature is called “Lookalike audience”. Here you select your custom audience and then facebook will reach out to more people who have similar interests.

These lookalike audiences can be built on the basis of conversion pixels (from paid search results),  data from mobile apps or just from your fans on Facebook. Also, you can choose the size and targeting options to make sure that the lookalike audience is a replica to your potential buyers.

#5. You can Easily Analyze Your Spend and Performance

You can Easily Analyze Your Spend and Performance

On other social media channels, it is relatively difficult to track the exact ROI for the time and resources you have invested in advertising campaigns.

The best part of Facebook Advertising is that you can find out exactly how your ads are performing and what you’re getting out of them.

Facebook Adverts Manager offers a huge range of metrics to help you analyze and measure your performance. Here is the information they provide:

  1. Total number of times when your ad was displayed. This includes the impressions, number and type of people who viewed your ad (reach) and the average number of times they saw it (frequency).
  2. The actions people took after seeing your ad. It might include likes, comments, engagement and shares.
  3. Information about the cost – average Cost per like, cost per click and cost per conversion.

It is important to analyze your ad performance from time to time to understand what works for you. To track your conversions, use the utm_campaign parameter.

I hope by now you’ve understood that investing your time and resources in Facebook advertising is worthwhile.

Having talked about the reasons to advertise on Facebook, now I am going to give you a quick primer to get you started with Facebook Advertising.

How does Facebook Advertising work?

Facebook ads offer a variety of options. You can customize the ad to promote your page, your posts, your website or other actions that your users take. Though the main objective of Facebook remains to keep traffic on their site, you can still succeed at sending users to your website, if you choose the right targeting options.

How would you target Facebook ads?

Targeting the wrong audience is the #1 mistake done by marketers.

The targeting options Facebook offers are unparalleled. You can target users on Facebook on the following basis:

  • Location
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Interests
  • Languages they speak
  • Education
  • Relationship status
  • Workplaces
  • Connections

While all these options can be useful depending on the type of audience, I’d suggest you to mainly focus on Location, Age, Gender and Interests.

Location: Through this, you can target users in the country, state or city where your business operates.

Age and Gender: This depends on your existing customer base. If you sell cosmetics, women between 23-45 are your probable targeted customers. Start by targeting this group. If the campaign gives you great results, you can then go ahead and expand your target audience.

Interests: This is the most effective, but misused feature of Facebook ads. Targeting interests offers two options: Broad Category targeting and Precise Category targeting

  • Broad Category targeting: This includes categories like Consumer, Electronics, Expecting Parents, Birthday in 1 month, Horror movies and so on. You can reach a large range of audiences through this category, but its results do not justify the costs. I’d suggest you to avoid this category and focus more on Precise Category targeting.
  • Precise Interest Targeting: This targets users on the basis of their profile information. Likes, apps they prefer, timeline content are some examples. Choosing this category appropriately gives the best ROI.

Facebook offers a variety of interests from Harry Potter to Yoga, but choosing the right one is a task!

When you’re targeting these interests, Facebook offers the size of the audience and other suggested interests. Once you’ve selected the interests for your ad, Facebook will suggest an aggregated bid.

One quick suggestion here would be to not go with the largest group possible (as these are more expensive and less targeted). Rather than going with these broad terms, research a little on specific interests (for example, which groups they follow, which magazines they read, and likewise).

This way you’ll reach people who are interested in your business and are willing to spend money on your product/service.

Have you ever tried Facebook advertising? Did it work for you?

Share with us in the comments below!

Note: All Image credits to pixabay.com

Aman Jha
This author is verified on BloggersIdeas.com

Aman Jha is a digital marketing author, passionate writer, and consultant. He is a sucker for fine words and blogs about digital marketing and startups at maxzob.com.

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