Most smart business owners understand the value of Facebook advertising and are excited by the prospect of being able to reach such a huge number of prospective customers using the world’s largest social media platform. Facebook Ads can return big bang for your advertising buck. However, many business owners don’t know how to get started and are confused by the myriad of options provided.
This 3-part series walks you through your options to help you pick the best advertising features for your brand. I’ll be covering the following:
- The power of Facebook Ads
- What are your options with Facebook Ads?
- Facebook Ad tips to get the edge over your competition.
Part 1 – The Power of Facebook Ads
Engagement is the key to your consumer’s heart
The first thing you should understand is how Facebook marketing differs from traditional advertising mediums. Unlike television, radio and magazine advertising, the hard sell doesn’t translate to Facebook – instead, brands need to take a softer advertising approach and be more consumer-friendly by giving visitors desirable takeaways, like a call to action (CTA) for more valuable information. Sound like a sales pitch and you’ll send your viewers searching for another page to visit. It’s important to reach out to consumers without sounding too promotional, which means taking time to engage people in what you’re saying about your brand.
Follow the data to find your fans
Although businesses build the same targeted consumer list they would through traditional means, such as email marketing or mailing campaigns, with Facebook ads they get more available data and control over who sees their ads and when. If you compare this with television and magazine ads, the yellow pages or radio, where you are not able to get that customer list, it’s easy to realise what business owners can achieve with Facebook ads – a growing community of loyal clients that act as brand evangelists for them. People see other fans of a product or business on Facebook and they see their friends like it, so they follow, creating a highly effective marketing opportunity.
Test, measure and succeed
And if you need even more proof of the power of Facebook marketing, Facebook has also become super-proficient at providing analytics for their advertising, such as the new Actions metrics in Facebook Ads Manager and Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights gives Facebook platform developers and page owners’ specific data concerning the effectiveness their content, however, in order to utilise the data, one must understand and then analyse trends in traffic, demographics, and content creation and consumption. Having such information at one’s fingertips gives page owners and platform builders the information they need to increase sales and provide better Facebook pages. There are also many third party platforms that provide Facebook analytics, like PageLever, EdgeRank Checker and Webtrends.