Have you ever wondered why you come across so many Facebook ads while scrolling your newsfeed? With more than 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook has become the most used social media platform worldwide.
Hence, now you can guess why Facebook ads can work wonders for both online and offline businesses if done right. Social media has become the new medium for users to conduct business, search for products, consume media, and whatnot.
As a huge chunk of your existing and potential customers are active on Facebook, it would be a schoolboy error to ignore the platform as a medium for showcasing your business and reaching more users.
1. Facebook Ads – An Overview
Facebook’s entire network of social media platforms (including Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger) has over 2 billion daily active users and about 2.8 billion monthly users.
This means that it is possible to reach 37% of the global population with Facebook each month. Facebook’s user base opens up unlimited possibilities for businesses to discover and target their core audiences.
Now that we have grasped how big Facebook is, it is easier to understand why every business and digital marketing company is putting time and resources into capitalizing on the vast potential of expanding its online presence through the platform.
Advertising on Facebook provides an easy and all-encompassing way of reaching different customers at separate stages of a sales funnel. Facebook Ads are among the most cost-efficient digital marketing tropes that can deliver visible results in a fraction of the time required to achieve the same organically.
In this article, we are taking a detailed look into the benefits of advertising on Facebook, and why you must make full use of the platform to take your business to new heights.
2. Advantages of Using Facebook Ads
Advertising on Facebook is one of the most potent social media marketing practices that every business is implementing irrespective of industry and size. From identifying whom to show your ads to analyzing your campaign’s performance, Facebook offers a host of benefits that take your business ahead of the curve.
2.1 Targeted Advertising
One of the most significant upsides of social media marketing is the ability to direct your ads toward the right target audience based on data from users. Facebook Ads Manager (now ‘Meta Ads Manager’ across Meta platforms) allows you to micro-target the audiences relevant to your business.
Facebook is one of the most data-rich social media platforms and this is a great boon for advertising purposes. You can make the most of the huge quantities of data based on user interactions and interests to identify the target audience for your niche.
For every ad you run, Facebook allows you to narrow down your recipients by examining demographic factors such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Languages versed in
- Personal interests
- Level or type of education
- Job or business type
- Income
- Life events like birthdays and wedding anniversary
- Political views, and
- Recent purchases.
Facebook Ads Manager allows a high level of precisely targeted and customized options. As a business owner or marketing manager, you can use the above metrics to determine your audience segment and design campaigns for these “core audiences.”
You can also use this data to target users who have interacted with your brand recently. Facebook uses ‘Audience Insights’ with cumulative data on users who visit your brand page along with how they interact on the rest of Facebook.
Marketers can create custom user personas or lookalike audiences and move them over to the Ads Manager tool to build an advertising strategy. This degree of insight makes Facebook Ads more productive than traditional PPC campaigns.
Owing to the functions of search engines, Google or Bing are unable to provide the same level of detail and demographic targeting as Facebook.
2.2 Cost Efficiency and Budget Options
Irrespective of the size of your company and your marketing budget, Facebook offers campaigning options for all price ranges. In simple terms, you can run ads for $5 a day to over $5,000 a day depending on the scale of your campaign.
Facebook offers advertizer-centric plans that give you full control over how much you want to spend on what ad. Once you have determined your desired return on investment (ROI), you have the freedom to regulate your budget.
For instance, you can choose to set a daily budget or a lifetime budget for paying for your ads on Facebook. The ‘daily budget’ option is a cheaper way of taking each day’s advertising processes at a time. You can closely monitor your daily performance and set the tone for the next day accordingly.
On the other hand, if you opt for the ‘lifetime budget’ option, you set your budget for the entirety of the campaign and select the date it begins and ends. Facebook is highly performance-conscious with lifetime budgets and allows you to plan details like hours of the day and days of the week you want the campaign to run.
Moreover, unlike many other pay-per-click (PPC) style advertising platforms, Facebook Ads are available for free to all businesses along with its Ads Manager tool. The only expenses you need to bear involve supplying a budget and running the ads.
It is quite surprising to note that Facebook, the third most opened website in the world after Google and YouTube, has some of the cheapest PPC and CPC (Cost Per Click) rates, at an average of $1.35 per placement. Other platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn come in at $3.56 and $5.26 respectively.
According to a KPI survey by Wolfgang International, Facebook has the highest retail ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) in e-commerce among all social media platforms with the Facebook Feed, Marketplace, and Messenger ad types occupying the top spots.
Such a high return on investment, coupled with affordable costs makes Facebook ads the go-to for every small business while handling their advertising campaigns.
2.3 Maximum Reach and Visibility
As already stated, Facebook is the third most frequently visited website in the world. Over 80% of all internet users are active on Facebook and even 65% of individuals over the age of 65 are using it.
Regardless of factors like age, region, and occupation, literally all your potential customers are on Facebook and they are using it daily. This is a huge plus point considering the amount of reach your ads get with so many people using the platform every day.
Such a vast user base enables you to generate significantly more leads by studying and assessing the behavior and interactions of your users. This helps to drive more traffic to your brand’s Facebook page, and from there, to your company’s website.
Moreover, targeted Facebook ads help you reach more people than just organic social media posts and searches. Paid and online advertising are not exclusive processes though. You can do both simultaneously.
With different types of ads designed specifically for customer engagement, new registrations, or followings, paid advertising on Facebook enhances your organic traffic as well.
Paid ads enjoy more engagement, better impressions, and increased conversions all at a fraction of the time required to achieve the same organically. Thus, they guarantee you steady and scalable conversions by making your content visible to more users.
Every mobile app and website development company is taking note of these benefits and looking to integrate them into their operations. Let us look at a couple of examples of the Reach and Visibility of Facebook Ads.
OneCard
For example, OneCard is a metallic credit card offered in collaboration with South Indian Bank, Federal Bank, SBM Bank, and BOB Financial. It is an entry-level card that offers benefits like reward points, EMI conversion, and special card offers.
If you want to develop a successful finance and banking application like OneCard, we strongly advise you to study its Facebook Ads. They promoted their new ‘Lifetime Free’ credit card and introductory offers with Facebook Ads.
The campaign resonated strongly with young working professionals in India who are most likely to use credit cards and purchase from popular retailers like Myntra and Zomato.
Coca-Cola
Global beverage giant Coca-Cola utilized Facebook Ads to market its “Share a Coke” campaign. They made the ad experience personalized by putting people’s names on Coca-Cola bottles and targeted users on the basis of their behavior and interests.
The campaign went viral on Facebook and resulted in a 2.5% rise in sales and a 10% increase in brand favorability among users.
Read Also: 6 Powerful Reasons Your Business Needs Digital Marketing
2.4 Analytics and Insights
Facebook Ads Manager is absolutely free and provides you with a comprehensive analysis and stats on the performance and effectiveness of each of your ads in particular and your overall campaign in general.
You do not have to rely on assumptions or guesswork to determine what is working and what needs to be changed. You also need not worry about evaluating your conversion rates and other social benchmarks – Ads Manager will do it for you automatically and constantly.
All you have to do is study the results provided and determine your next strategy or course of action accordingly. You can get evaluations and statistics based on your weekly reach, user engagement, number of likes, and how each post is performing.
Apart from these, you can also get insights on every minute detail like clicks, conversions, and sales. Based on this data, you can modify your ads depending on what is needed, rather than making wrong decisions on the basis of guesses and assumptions.
Real-Life Use Case – GrowthSchool
GrowthSchool launched a new web flow development course and advertised it via Facebook. This campaign is an apt example of how to design and promote an educational mobile app with social media marketing.
It goes without saying that GrowthSchool identified users who might be interested in web development and directed this ad toward them.
In the ad, the organization has highlighted the average hourly income of a webflow developer to grab the immediate attention of interested users. It is followed by two strong CTAs (calls to action) urging users to sign up for the course.
2.5 Ads Specific to Your Business Goals
Facebook offers a wide range of options to design personalized ads that have a higher percentage of drawing user interactions and conversions. In all probability, it is the only platform that can engage with users at any stage of their journey with the brand.
Marketers can choose from a list of “advertising objectives” suited to their particular business goals. This feature is especially helpful for businesses that intend to prioritize separate results for different ads.
Facebook allows users to choose from three categories as the predesigned aim of each ad posted. These categories include:
- Brand awareness – to increase the reach of your business among users
- Consideration – to enhance traffic, engagement, app downloads, views, etc,
- Conversion – to boost sales, subscriptions, and store visits.
Based on the above segments, the Facebook Ads Manager enables you to set up “Ad Objectives” and create tailored ads to:
- Promote user interactions with your brand
- Page promotions to bring more people onto your Facebook Page
- Dedicated ads to attain website referral traffic
- Generate leads and collect information based on user interests
- Promote your calls to action
- Drive conversions in the form of product sales, form fill-outs, downloads, and so on; and
- Improving brand awareness by taking your ads to users who are likely to pay attention.
2.6 Customization and Creativity
Facebook provides an array of multimedia options as formats for setting up and running your ads. Based on your preferences you can choose to design and deploy your ads in the following formats:
- Photos
- Videos
- 24-Hour Stories
- Messenger App sponsored link messages.
- Carousel Posts
- Slideshows
- Product Collections, and
- Playables in the form of demo games and simulated experiences with AR and VR.
Unlike search engine PPC, Facebook ads are not limited to plain text and can be made intuitive with images, audio, and video. Unless you have the required skill set, it is judicious to get help from a graphic design company to create and run compelling ads that grab the attention of your audience.
An Example of Photo Ad – Tork Motors
Indian electric two-wheeler makers Tork Motors are promoting their new Kratos motorcycle via Facebook ads. The brand is also offering a limited-time low-cost EMI option to buy the product.
This is an ideal example of how to run effective ads in the automotive industry. Besides an engaging caption and copy, Kratos also has placed a CTA for booking the motorcycle and looking to popularize their hashtag “TheNewRace”.
An Example of Carousel Ad – GIVA Jewellery
GIVA Jewellery offered a limited-time discount on their products and promoted the campaign with a Facebook carousel ad containing a series of product images that were available in the deal.
2.6 Effective for Both B2B and B2C Businesses
“Facebook ads can only be used by businesses to draw the attention of customers” – is a myth today. With increasing competition, B2B businesses are also turning to Facebook ads and running successful campaigns.
According to Meta, business strategists spend 74% more time on Facebook than the average user. Anyone who is a B2B target is generally active on Facebook when they are not working.
Sending targeted ads to business professionals is a reliable method of staying in their consideration. Facebook provides a list of targeting segments that blend in well with B2B needs for focusing on new users. These include:
- Name of the employer
- Job title
- Industry of employment
- Interest industry
- Company size of employer, and
- Business travelers.
Yet another effective B2B strategy worth implementing is to create lookalike audiences modeled on a pre-existing email list, targeted customer base, or website visitors.
2.7 Transparent Retargeting and Remarketing
Retargeting and remarketing is the process of identifying users who have visited your website before or showed interest on social media platforms and advertising to them once again.
Facebook maintains complete transparency on how ads are used to target and retarget audiences. With the help of automated audience targeting, your business has greater control and clarity over the market segments that you target. The primary ones include:
- Fans – Your followers on Facebook
- Friends of Fans – Users who are friends or followers of your existing followers
- Interests or Behaviors – Users who fit the criteria you chose to focus on
- Remarketing – Users who have visited your site before.
The first time people visit a site or see an ad on Facebook, they often take a glance and do not proceed further even if you tried to attract their attention. The important question here is ‘Why would they?’
Especially if they are hearing about your brand for the first time, they have very little reason to trust you right away and make a purchase. However, the more they see your brand on various platforms, the more the chances of them interacting with your business increase.
In most cases, creating just one point of contact is not enough. Users need to see your business anywhere ranging from three to seven times before they are convinced to an extent to take action.
Remarketing on Facebook works with the ‘Facebook pixel’ which is a snippet of code that helps your site attract visitors, especially ones who have been there before. It tracks all types of actions users take such as ads they viewed before visiting your site, pages they visit the most, items they add to their carts, and so on.
Also read: 15 Digital Marketing Trends For Your Brand’s Online Success
2.8 Building Community and Engagement
Modern-day social media marketing focuses on making their followers feel like a part of a family or community. Social media pages and ads give brands a chance to interact directly with customers and build loyalty among them.
Studies by the Customer Service Institute reveal that 65% of any company’s business is derived from existing customers. Moreover, it is cheaper to market your products to previous buyers as it usually takes five to eight times more time and resources to attract a new customer than selling to an existing one.
Facebook offers your business multiple opportunities to educate followers about their offerings, drive their interest, convince them to purchase, and convert them into loyal customers who keep coming back to buy from you. You can ensure these perks by employing the following practices.
2.8.1 Identify Your Most Engaged Fans
On social media platforms, customer loyalty is measured by metrics like time spent and actions taken (views, likes, comments, and shares) on your pages. These loyal customers do so as they hold your brand in high esteem and are willing to buy your products. In many cases, they are already your existing customers.
It is essential to identify these users and study their interactions on your platforms. This will give you valuable insights into their likes, preferences, and demands. You can shape your marketing strategy accordingly to cater to this group of customers and add to their list.
2.8.2 Encourage User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) refers to any form of content that is created and posted by users for a product or service. It includes reviews, ratings, photos, videos, and social media posts. You must motivate your customers to share their feelings and feedback on your brand and also post pictures and videos of or with your products.
User-generated content is much more trustworthy to customers than brands themselves vouching for their products. This is key in building social proof for your brand. It is a validation of the fact that customers have found your product useful and are actively recommending others to become your customers as well. This establishes trust in your business in users and also ensures results at reduced marketing costs.
2.8.3 Respond Promptly to Customer Issues
It is quite common for customers to have issues before and after buying from you. It is immensely frustrating for them if you don’t respond to them and address their problems in time. Delays in customer service greatly reduce the probability of customers ordering from you again.
Social media platforms are reshaping how customers share their feedback and how companies resolve their concerns. Instead of contacting customer service over the phone or email, users can interact with businesses directly through their social media pages.
Make sure that you respond promptly in the comments sections and direct messages from your customers. You should also make it a point to capitalize on positive reviews and display them on your website and other platforms.
Let us take a look at the comments section of this Facebook post from wristwatch and eyewear manufacturer Fastrack. A user has raised a query regarding the price of the new range of watches while another is expressing dissatisfaction about the brand’s service.
In both cases the brand has promptly responded to the users’ comments in a conversational tone, addressing them by their first names. Such a personalized touch goes a long way in boosting brand image and resolving the issues of disgruntled customers.
3. Best Tips for Running Effective Facebook Ads
Now that we have analyzed the all-important reasons why you must prioritize social media marketing on Facebook, here are the most effective practices you need to use while going about it.
- Identify your advertising goals and target audience.
- Create engaging and high-quality copies.
- Keep Facebook ad specs and dimensions in mind while designing your creatives.
- Make use of carousel and slideshow ads to show off your products.
- Use video ads for product demos and descriptions.
- Increase your reach with post-engagement ads.
- Focus on retargeting and remarketing.
- Identify custom audiences and experiment with lookalike audiences.
- Use the Facebook Pixel to track sales and conversion metrics.
- Adhere to the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) regulations.
- Study the social media marketing campaigns of your competitors.
Key Takeaways
Facebook Ads have emerged as a disruptive force in the digital marketing scene. The global user base of Facebook, the ability to conduct thorough research and target exact audiences, diverse ad formats, and the relatively low cost of implementation have collectively made it indispensable for businesses to reach more customers.
By leveraging the infinite possibilities of engaging audiences and constantly optimizing and innovating your campaigns, you can boost your brand’s image, generate leads, and drive sales without having to burn a hole in your pocket.
If you are looking to take your business to the next level by harnessing the potential of social media marketing, reach out to us at Webgen Technologies. As a highly regarded digital marketing company for over a decade, we make sure that your brand outperforms and stays ahead of the competition.
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