Do you have an innovative or useful product or service? Would you like reach out to a specific target audience who will benefit from it? Then you should definitely consider adding Facebook advertising to your marketing plan. Here is a list of ways in which you can use Facebook Ads for your business growth.
Why Facebook Advertising?
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Because it works:
Advertising on Facebook works for businesses of any size. And the steady (and strong) growth of Facebook’s ad revenue over the years is the proof that it works. In the first quarter of 2016, Facebook reported that its advertising revenue jumped 57% from $3.3 Billion to $5.2 Billion. In the last one year, Facebook’s active user base has grown from 1.44 Billion to 1.65 Billion, making its ‘advertising-revenue-per-user’ go from $2.50 to $3.32. Clearly, businesses are seeing the benefits of spending money on advertising in the platform. As an agency, over the last 3+ years, we ourselves have seen good results with high ROI (Return-on-Investment) for various clients and we are convinced of its effectiveness. We now strongly recommend Facebook advertising as part of the overall marketing strategy for our clients. As a platform, Facebook is poised to grow in the coming years, and investing in advertising on a growing platform is a good strategy for any business.
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Because it gives you precise targeting options:
With Facebook, you have advanced options to create a focussed target audience for your campaigns. For example, you can create an audience using the email addresses that you already have, phone numbers and even Facebook user IDs (from mobile apps only). You can also use ‘Location Targeting’ options to target users from one single location – drilling down from country & city level to districts, zip codes and even a specific radius around a town or a city. There are other targeting options like Demographics, Interests, Behaviours and Connections that helps you get the most out of your ad-spend by displaying your ads to the right audience.
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Because it gives you control:
Facebook gives you full control of your campaigns by allowing you to change key parameters like ad-budget, spending limit on your account, duration of campaigns, ad placements, and look & feel of the campaign, anytime. You can modify any of the parameters with a simple click in the dashboard – you can turn the ads or ad-sets on and off, you can track the performance and decide to reduce or increase the duration of the campaign, and you can change the targeting options based on performance.
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Because you can start small:
You can start advertising on Facebook for a minimum daily ad-budget of just $1 per ad set! As a small business, non-profit or startup, you can experiment with a smaller budget and see which tactics work for you. But note that very small budgets and low campaign durations may not return enough statistics for you to make a quality business decision. So when you are experimenting, try not to make the budgets too small or the duration too short, keep them at an optimum level.
Now let us look at the different ways in which you can use this powerful tool.
How to use Facebook Advertising for your Business Growth
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Help your customers realise the need for your product:
There are 2 scenarios where online advertising helps – Need Fulfilment and Need Realisation
- Need Fulfilment – This is a scenario where a user knows that they want and they go looking for it online. Here they use certain keywords to look for what they want. This is where ‘search advertising’ (like Google Adwords) works well. For example: When you know you need a smartphone-cover, you go looking for it by searching on Google or Bing, you see an ad on top of the search result and click on it to buy.
- Need Realisation – This is a scenario where there is an innovative new product or service that could potentially help a customer, but they do not realize the need for it, simply because they are not yet aware of it. For example: Did you know that the new Samsung Family Hub refrigerator has 3 built-in cameras that can take a photo every time the door closes and send it to your smartphone, so that you always know what you have inside your fridge and what you need to buy? Now, that is a need most of us may not have realised, but it sure sounds very useful once you hear about it (and once you are ready to spend $5000 on a fridge!) When customers see a Facebook Ad of this feature, they will ‘realise’ the need and may want to invest in a product like this.
Facebook ads are not designed to work around ‘keywords’, but they are designed to work around ‘target audience’ and their interests. Billions of users are in the platform and you simply have to select who might be interested in your product or service, and display the ad to them, to create the need or a demand for your product or service.
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Build your brand:
We, as human beings, hang around things and people that relate to or resonate with our interest areas and lifestyle. For example: If you like cars, then you follow car brand Facebook pages, you start ’Like’ing car-related posts, you post car-related videos and talk about car models in your comments. Now, if there is an automobile brand that wants to connect with you – the right audience, there is no better place for them than Facebook to find you. In other advertising mediums, brands would be wasting precious ad-dollars by being visible to audience who may not care about their product line (think about ads you have seen on TV or movies or websites that you do not relate to). But with Facebook, businesses have a good chance of getting the ‘eye-balls’ and ‘mind-space’ of the exact target audience who will be interested in staying connected with their brand (which might eventually lead to a sale). So Facebook Advertising is a great tool to build your brand in the long-term.
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Reconnect with your audience:
Sometimes, as a business we lose touch with our online audience. They visit your website, read about you, check out a product on your website, download an app and then they move on. You can now use Facebook ads to reconnect with them. By using ‘Custom Audience’ and ‘Pixels’ you can trace your customer’s journey (in a non-stalking, but a value-adding way) and help them with special offers and promotions when they get back on Facebook after visiting your website. For example: Let us assume your customer visits your website’s product page where you sell Custom Printed T-shirts. But they do not make the purchase. Later when they open their Facebook page, you can show them a specific ad that gives them a 50% discount on their next purchase of a custom printed t-shirt. How helpful would that be to your customer?
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Generate leads and collect email ids:
Many businesses think of Facebook ads only in terms of sales, but it can be a great tool to generate leads and build an email list. There are billions of people on Facebook, and among them is your specific customer base who will be excited to know about your product or services, buy them, talk about them and even recommend them to their network. Facebook ads can help you connect with those brand enthusiasts. For example: If you are a Gym or a Fitness brand, you can have an ad-campaign that is targeted only at fitness enthusiasts between the age group of 25 and 40, in one particular city, with interest in a specific technique (like Yoga or Crossfit Training), then you could lead them to a landing page where they can sign up for your email newsletter, subscribe to your podcast or blog. This will help you build a very targeted audience and stay connected with them to build your business in the long run.
As an agency, we use Facebook ads for many other business growth strategies like validating a business or product idea with a specific target group, promoting online or offline events, getting attendance for webinars, getting people to volunteer for a cause, getting online PR visibility by targeting PR professionals and much more. You can also do the same with Facebook advertising. Get innovative and start using Facebook ads for your business growth.
If you have any other use-cases or experience using Facebook ads for business, do let us know using the comments section. Thank you.
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