The power of Facebook is undeniable, and as a marketing tool it is proving to be successful and effective for many businesses. It is primarily a B2C medium but there are B2B companies who are also making a success of it, such as Dell for Business and Cisco, so even if other businesses are your primary target customers, don’t automatically write off the idea of Facebook marketing to gain leads and new customers.
When you create a Facebook Page for your business, you can begin building relationships with customers and prospects and promoting your brand in an organic way. Taking it a step further and looking at Facebook advertising is a very popular way to increase a business’s fan base, spread the reach of a marketing campaign and connect with a highly targeted audience. Different advertising options are available, including Promoted and Sponsored posts.
One of the key benefits of paid advertising on Facebook is the degree of targeting that can be applied to the ads. The success of these ads is essentially based on the site’s vast number of users, combined with the detailed information which is amassed about them and their preferences and tastes, so brands have the ability to display adverts only to their most responsive demographic, or to a potential new audience that you are targeting. The targeting options you are offered include:
- Geographical area
- Age
- Gender
- Level of education
- Whether it is the user’s birthday
- Workplace
- Connections
- Relationship status, and
- Interests.
This means that if you want your new wedding-focused product range to be displayed only to women aged between 18 and 35 who are engaged to be married, and who are fans of films and eating out, you can do so. And if you want to promote your music-related Facebook Page to males over the age of 45 with a University education who enjoy Leonard Cohen and Dire Straits, you can do this, too. This incredible targeting ability is impossible to achieve by organic means and can improve a brand’s chance of successful conversions when the target demographics are carefully chosen.
To measure the success of your advertising campaign, Facebook offers detailed insights to measure and track conversions. These metrics can be used to improve existing ad campaigns, so that the ad copy, call to action and image can be adapted and updated for maximum success and increased conversion rates.
Businesses need not fear that Facebook paid advertisements will become ridiculously expensive, because they can put a limit on how much they want to spend on a daily basis. This means that costs cannot spiral out of control, and ad ideas can be tested – and rejected if necessary – depending on the returns they are showing.
When Facebook ads are displayed, even if they do not result in a direct conversion they will succeed at increasing brand awareness among customers or clients. Segmenting an advert’s audience and analysing its success can inform better and more effective campaigns, and the opportunity to influence Facebook’s massive user base, in such a targeted way, is pretty much unparalleled in internet marketing terms. Many businesses are finding advertising on the site an effective way to find customers who convert, and the ability to limit ad spend makes it an incredibly low-risk strategy which has great potential.
