Do I Need Facebook Ads? The Benefits of Facebook Advertising
Are you still on the fence of whether or not you should be running advertisements on Facebook? Are those ads actually effective? Well, those ads you see on your Facebook feed work. If you’re still not convinced that they have an impact, I am here to outline the benefits of Facebook ads for you.
Sure, there are plenty of social media platforms that offer advertising options. However, Facebook is still the dominating platform with billions of active users. Here are the benefits of Facebook ads you need to know.
Table of Contents
The Massive Amount Of Users
As of 2019, there are a reported 2.45 billion monthly active users on Facebook and its subsidiaries including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Despite what you may have heard about Facebook “dying,” this is still an 8% increase in active users year-over-year.
Those two statistics right there is the reason why you should be advertising on Facebook and its child companies.
Regardless of who your target market is, they are most likely logging onto Facebook or its subsidiaries daily.
Facebook Ads Allow You To Compete With Your Competitors
Chances are you have already put some effort into building a Facebook Page for your business. This is a good thing! Facebook Business Pages provide you with many opportunities for increasing brand awareness and building customer loyalty.
However, Facebook has reported that there are currently 60 million active business pages on its platform.
That means you most likely have competitors competing for your target market’s attention.
Adding fuel to the fire, it is forecasted that 75% of businesses on Facebook will pay to promote their products or services. That number has increased year-over-year and shows no signs of declining.
Therefore, you need to advertise on Facebook so you can have a fighting chance against your competition.
Facebook Advertising Makes Up For Lost Organic Growth
In the aftermath of privacy-related scandals, Facebook has announced changes to the content they deliver to their users. Facebook now focuses on delivering content that is more meaningful to users, such as content from a user’s friends, family and liked brands.
What does this mean for a business?
This means that there is only so much room on a user’s Facebook feed for business related content. This makes it extremely difficult for a new or small business to build a following organically. Especially, if the business lacks the resources and time for creating high-quality content.
That is where Facebook advertising comes into play. When you advertise on Facebook you can make up for the loss organic growth by paying for your content to appear on your target user’s Facebook feeds.
Pin-Point Audience Targeting
The best feature that Facebook advertising has to offer is the ability to pinpoint your audience. Facebook allows you to create specific audiences that you can target your ads to.
Creating an audience on Facebook consists of:
- Setting Exact Locations: You can choose which geographic locations you want your ads to be displayed.
- Age: You can set the age range for the users you wish to target.
- Gender: You can specify the gender you wish to target.
- Demographics: Setting demographics allows you to target users based on education, financial situation, life events, job titles and whether or not the users are married/in a relationship.
- Interests: You can select an audience based on the things your target market likes. This entails the Pages users like and any related content. An example would be targeting dog lovers. You can select this interest and the ad could reach users who love dogs, cats or animals in general.
- Behaviors: You can select to target users based on their purchasing habits, device usage, etc.
- Languages: Target users who speak specific languages.
- Connections: You can target users who have previously connected with your business page in some way. Such as whether they shared an interest in the same event as you, whether they liked your business page or follow your business page.
Facebook advertising allows you to specifically target the audience you are trying to reach. This ability to pinpoint who you are targeting also provides you the opportunity to break into new markets you are considering going after.
Split Tests Allows You To See What Works
Facebook Ads have a feature within their advertising tools that lets you conduct split tests within your advertising campaigns.
Split testing entails creating different ad sets within a campaign and testing them against each other. You alter each ad set by changing certain variables, such as the audience you’re targeting, the ad placement, the creative, etc.
The benefit this has is that Facebook will provide you with a report on what type of ad performed best. You can then use this information for future content development and ad campaigns. It is all about understanding what works best!
Another benefit through split testing is that Facebook will identify which ads are performing best and will allocate the remainder of your ad budget to the advertisements that are displaying the best performance.
Build Ads Based On Your Campaign Objectives
Facebook Ads Manager is a robust tool. One primary feature of Facebook Ads is that when creating campaigns you can select an objective that aligns with your overall social media marketing goals.
When you begin building a new Facebook advertising campaign, you are prompted with a selection of marketing objectives to choose from which then consist of variations of each objective. Below are the three marketing objective categories optioned to you:
- Awareness: You can create campaigns centered on building awareness for your brand. Facebook will prompt you with steps for creating advertisements that are meant to spread awareness about your company or the products/services you offer.
- Consideration: These campaigns are all about getting your target market to think about your business. You can set up these campaigns to facilitate more traffic to your website, increase user engagement on your posts, generate new leads and more.
- Conversions: Campaigns built with a conversion objective are meant to encourage your target market to take some kind of action on your page or website. It is all about getting your target users to convert whether it be through purchasing a product through your catalog or increasing store traffic.
Once you select these campaign objectives, Facebook will offer formats and other settings that will help you craft the best advertisements to meet your marketing goals.
This provides you the benefit of simplifying campaign creations.
It Is A Fast Process
Advertising on Facebook can be complicated to many, specifically those who are not familiar with how advertising works on the platform.
Despite that, once you have an understanding of the process, creating and running Facebook campaigns is a fast process. Implementation is fast once you have your creative assets, know your campaign objective and have determined your target market.
Creating campaigns is a 4 step process.
- Set the campaign objective
- Create your ad sets
- Assemble the actual ad that will be displayed
- Wait for Facebook’s approval
Facebook will review every ad you create. However, this process has a fast turnaround rate and your ad will either be approved or disapproved in a maximum of two days.
Creating advertising campaigns on Facebook is fast and easy.
Facebook Advertising Is Cheap!
This is one of the biggest benefits of advertising on Facebook.
A problem for small businesses today is that many of them lack the ability to compete with larger corporations because they simply do not have as big of an advertising budget to make an impact.
On Facebook that doesn’t matter.
Businesses with smaller advertising budgets can still run successful advertising campaigns on Facebook. You can allocate as much of your advertising budget as you want to Facebook ads.
Of course, the more money you put in the more often your ad will be seen. However, your budget can be adjusted to how much you want to spend with each campaign you create. Along with that, you can pause your campaign at any time.
Facebook Ads Offer A Call-To-Action
Consumers like to have direction. They want to be walked through the purchasing process.
Like most digital ads, Facebook advertisements have a CTA (call-to-action) button within their ads. This button directs your target users to the next step in the purchasing process.
The CTAs within Facebook ads can lead your user anywhere you want them to go whether it be a website, contact form, etc.
Currently, Facebook advertisements offer the following kinds of CTAs:
- Book Now: Can be used to book appointments, services, etc.
- Apply Now: Perfect for job listings.
- Contact Us: This leads the user to a contact form that they can use to contact you.
- Sign Up: Directs users to sign up for newsletters, subscriptions, etc.
- Download: Directs users to download anything of your choice.
- Learn More: Typically directs users to a company website, blog, shopping cart, page, etc.
Facebook Ads Offer Remarketing Benefits
Facebook can help with your remarketing efforts.
You can add what is called a Facebook pixel to your website which is a code that collects data on people who have previously visited your website.
This pixel lets you remarket to users who have expressed interest or have taken action on one of your web pages.
With Facebook advertising and having the Facebook pixel, you can show ads to your target market who have already visited your website once.
Use Ads To Target Lookalike Audiences
Speaking of the Facebook pixel, the data collected can help with your future advertising efforts through building lookalike audiences.
A lookalike audience is an audience created through Facebook examining the users who have previously interacted with your website or business page and finding commonalities.
From there, Facebook takes the commonalities and creates lookalike audiences.
These lookalike audiences consist of users who are most likely interested in your business and are a powerful marketing tool for finding users who are most likely to make a conversion.
You can use these lookalike audiences to tailor your future advertisements. This is all in an effort to help you understand and reach your ideal customer.
Quick Content Promotion With Boosted Posts
In a former blog post, I covered the difference between running Facebook ads and boosting posts.
Boosting posts is a way for the content of your Facebook business page to reach a much larger audience in a short amount of time. In fact, it is the fastest form of advertising on Facebook’s platform.
Boosting posts is the easiest way to promote the content on your Facebook page. In as little as a few clicks, posts you create or have previously posted can begin appearing on your target market’s Facebook feeds.
This advertising option allows you to scale and promote your content affordably and within a short amount of time.
Facebook Advertising Is One Of The Easiest Ways To Advertise On Mobile
Desktop is not dead, but mobile plays a much bigger role in user’s lives today.
As of 2019, 96% of Facebook users access the platform through a smartphone or tablet. Facebook is also one of the largest mobile applications that exist today.
By advertising on the platform, your business will be available for viewing on the devices your audience uses daily! This increases your chances of generating interest, reinforcing brand awareness, increasing conversions…the list goes on!
Facebook makes it easy to advertise on mobile. Their ad management system creates dynamic advertisements for your business and offers ad placement opportunities. This gives you control where your advertisement is shown.
In-Depth Analytics
Facebook advertising really does make your life easier.
While running your ad campaigns, Facebook will provide you with a report on how your advertisements are performing. Through your campaign’s duration, you will be able to see important data which includes:
- Reach
- Engagement
- Page Likes
- Messages
- Clicks
- Conversions
It doesn’t end there, however. Facebook’s analytics are robust and entail a lot of information. Along with the Facebook pixel, you can find out information on all users that have interacted with your advertisements.
All this information provided to you will help with your marketing efforts. There is no more guessing about your performance. Cold hard data will show you what works.
Facebook’s analytics is all about measuring the success of your advertising efforts. You can use the information provided to you for altering current campaigns, creating new campaigns and thoroughly understanding your target audience.
A Conclusion On Facebook Ads
As you can see, Facebook advertising provides you with many opportunities and benefits for increasing business.
You have to realize also Facebook advertising doesn’t just apply to the main Facebook platform. Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger all provide you with opportunities for reaching your target market.
So, what are you waiting for? It is time to stop weighing your options. Begin Facebook advertising today and watch your business grow!
I know there is TONS of benefits of ads on Facebook, but HOW TO DO THEM CORRECTLY is the tricky thing for me!
I’ve heard many great things about facebook advertising. I should start considering it for my blgo
This is really useful information about fFacebook advertising. It’s something I need to look into.
Thanks for sharing!! I have been doing a lot of research about facebook ads recently and this has been extremely helpful!
To be honest I don’t have so much knowledge in creating a Facebook ads but this article really gives me a lot of helpful info that will help me in making my own Facebook Ads in the future. Thanks for sharing!
To be honest I don’t have so much knowledge in creating a Facebook ads but this article really gives me a lot of helpful info that will help me in making my own Facebook Ads in the future.
So much great information about the FB adds. it’s exactly what I needed x
Laura
https://www.beautywithlala.com/
I’ve been using Fb ads minimally and so far it helps on increasing my traffic.
I could not agree more with you on this! I use facebook ads and it has been very benefitial with my Brand.
I am not able to use FB ads as I cannot figure out how to use FB smartly. The tips here are a good start for me to look into the tool again.
I definitely think I will be using Facebooks Ads in 2020. I keep hearing about how great they are for growing traffic as well as for targeting potential customers. So I hope to be able to use them effectively for my blog next year.
I used to work with Facebook Ads for a long time a couple of years ago and the amount of targeting you can do is absolutely amazing. It was so easy to find the right audience.
Great article. This is a topic I know I need to learn more about and you really helped me understand some good ways. Thank you.
When done properly Facebook advertising can be very effective. Most unfortunately though, don’t know how to target ads.
Every way of promoting yourself/brand has its pros and cons. Thinking through it does help to decide.