Why Your Business Should Be Utilising Facebook Advertising

Facebook advertising is one of the most popular ways to generate leads and drive highly engaged traffic for businesses.

As a marketing tool, Facebook is an excellent way to reach your target audience and directly deliver your brand's message to turn users into customers.

In this blog post, we discuss how Facebook advertising works and provide some tips on how best to utilise the platform.

What is Facebook advertising and how does it work?

Facebook advertising falls under social media marketing but also holds methods based on pay-per-click advertising. It enables businesses to promote their products and services on Facebook by targeting specific audiences with tailored messages, from boosting posts that are already live on your Facebook page, to promoting wide-ranging adverts for the first time.

Why should you advertise on Facebook?

Data Touchpoints

There are several benefits to leveraging Facebook to advertise your business. One of the elements is the amount of control you have over your advertisements being seen by the right people - your core audience.

The highly targeted data touchpoints available when setting up and optimising your campaign allows you to choose the exact age, gender, and location of who you want to see your Facebook advert.

Additionally, you can target people based on other brands they engage with and their wider interests. As a business, you can utilise all the data available to you to reach people who are more likely to be interested in your product or services.

Custom and Lookalike audiences

Custom audiences are essentially lists of users you can import into the Facebook Ads platform This allows you to create an even more targeted list based on data you've collected yourself.

For example, this could be made up of customers who have bought something from you in the past or friends and family members that work at your company.

Facebook Lookalike Audiences also lets you target people who are most similar to your custom audience, based on Facebook's assessment of their interests, engagement, and demographic data.

What this means practically is you have the ability to leverage the data Facebook already has its users and instruct it to help you find customers who may be interested in your products or services. This is great because you don’t have to spend more time and money to find these people because Facebook does the groundwork for you.

How to set up an ad campaign on Facebook

OK, you may understand the theory, but how do you set up an ad campaign on Facebook?

• Choose your objective after deciding on what you want to achieve, for example, 'brand awareness', 'increase traffic', or 'sales conversions'.
• Decide on the campaign type: This will vary depending on your use case but once you decide on what you hope to achieve this will become easier for you to build an effective campaign. Here is a list of campaign types.
• Select how long you want your ad to run. You can choose anywhere from one day up to 30 days.
• Select your target audience: You can create custom audiences or choose an existing one.
• Consider where you want your audience to see your ad using the ad placements feature i.e., Facebook news feed, Facebook story
• Produce an eye-catching advertising creative and upload to the desired ad placements.
• You can now hit publish on your advertising campaign and wait for Facebook to review.

How do I know when to use Facebook advertising?

Facebook advertising is great for reaching the right people with specific interests and demographics. But it might not be your best option if you are looking to reach a broad audience because Facebook ads only show up in certain places like Facebook news feeds and Instagram stories.

If your goal is lead generation, then this may be an effective way of getting qualified leads. There are other tried and tested ways both organic and paid that may be better options, but this will largely be predicated on the stage your business is at and the advertising budget you have at your disposal. 

Do you have any questions regarding Facebook advertising for your business? Get in touch with one of our expert advisors today.