6 Reasons To Use Facebook Advertising For Your Business

Facebook advertising allows businesses to promote their messages to a targeted audience through a system of enhanced targeting options. The invaluable targeted marketing that Facebook offers helps to increase brand awareness, and promote sales and customer service and engagement. For these benefits alone, Facebook advertising is definitely worth incorporating as part of your business’s marketing strategy. Facebook suggests you should use their advertising platform because all the right people are there, you can reach those people on a platform where they’re active and engaged, helping you to obtain results.

There are many reasons why you should use Facebook advertising for your business, the top 6 are highlighted for you below:

Massive Audience

Whatever industry you work in, it is more than likely that your customers, clients and colleagues will be using Facebook. Facebook suggest there are more than 1.3 billion people using Facebook to connect with what matters to them, with 64% visiting daily, making Facebook one of the most visited websites in the world. These large audience figures are virtually impossible to ignore. With your target audience using Facebook, it would be a huge mistake not to maximise your sales opportunities by taking advantage of Facebook's advertising capabilities.

Targeted Advertising

Facebook allows advertisers to target specific groups of people based on a variety of factors such as; age, gender, language, geographic location, interests, relationship status, pages liked and much more. This detailed level of targeting, facilitated by the data voluntarily available from people’s profiles allows advertisers to be extremely precise in their audience targeting, ensuring their budget is spent effectively.

The enhanced audience targeting offered by Facebook ads ensures that your adverts will only be seen by those who are likely to be interested in your business. Lookalike audiences where Facebook shows your ads to new people who are similar to your existing customers is also a unique feature which is also worth exploring.

Types of advertising – advertising with objectives

When creating an advertising campaign through Facebook there are a number of different objectives you can aim to meet, from clicks to your website, increasing page likes or gaining video views and app installs. Facebook’s user-friendly interface guides you through the process and helps you understand your objectives.

With a variety of bid types available, you can select the bidding structure which is most appropriate for your campaign. Bidding options include; bidding for clicks, bidding for impressions and bidding for conversions. Having both a number of bidding options and campaign objective choices allows you to tailor each advertising campaign to suit your needs. Furthermore, Facebook ads are known to be more flexible than Google AdWords ads, with Facebook offering a higher character length for ad descriptions.

Facebook is accessed by millions of smartphone users every day, meaning Facebook ads can reach people on the go at all times. The ads platform also provides the option to target specific devices and operating systems, which becomes extremely useful when promoting app installs.

Measurable and Cost-Effective

Using the Facebook Adverts Manager you can easily track spending, performance and ROI. Whatever your spending might be, you should always know how your ads are performing and what you are getting out of them. The Facebook Ads Manager provides you with all the relevant information such as:

• Impressions (The total number of times your ad was shown)
• Reach (The number of people who saw your ad)
• Actions (Page likes, engagement, comments and shares)
• Cost Data (e.g. Cost per Click (CPC) Cost per Like or Cost per Conversion)

This information can be used to work out your ROI and how cost-effective your Facebook advertising campaigns have been.

Competitive Advantage

Although Facebook’s advertising platform is now recognised as a powerful marketing tool, many businesses are still not using it to their advantage. Therefore, if your competitors are not taking advantage of the advertising capabilities of Facebook, you will have a fantastic competitive advantage and potentially gain business you may have previously missed out on. Using Facebook ads can help increase brand loyalty by increasing customer awareness and keeping your audience engaged. This brand loyalty can ensure you gain new customers and retain customers that may have previously gravitated to your competitors.

To Reach Your Existing Customers

Since changes were made to Facebook's algorithms to provide a more engaging experience for users by showing content that matters to each individual the most, it has become increasingly difficult for businesses to reach fans with their content. Out of 1,500+ stories a fan could potentially see when logged into Facebook, the news feed now selects (through an importance ranking system) and displays approximately 300 posts.

This has emphasised the role the Facebook advertising platform now has to play in businesses reaching and engaging with their fans. Using Facebook advertising will allow you to target your fans and new potential fans who may have an interest in and are likely to interact with your business.

Is Facebook Advertising Right For My Business?

It is important to recognise that Facebook advertising is not an effective platform for all businesses. Different forms of social media and advertising may be better suited to certain businesses. Overall, it is fair to generalise that Facebook is more useful for B2C companies and less useful for B2B companies.

At Silverdisc we have vast experience of online advertising. If you would like to discuss if Facebook Advertising would be appropriate for your business or you need any help or advice with other forms of online advertising, please contact us today.