Top 25 Benefits of Facebook Advertising
Want to know the top benefits of Facebook Advertising? We’ve outlined everything you need to know here …
Facebook advertising is highly targeted
Facebook ads allow you to advertise to people by age, interests, job titles, behaviour, and location. Provided you know your customers and who your target market is, you can use Facebook advertising to reach them.
You can use Facebook to target high-income earners, and don't forget to learn how to use exclusions too.
Facebook ads integrate with Instagram
Facebook owns Instagram, and because of this, they make it extremely easy to run ads on both platforms all from one ads manager.
Facebook ads develop increases in revenue, sales, and leads
The effectiveness of Facebook advertising is not a myth. These ads really do drive revenue, sales, and leads. According to Wordstream, the average conversion rate for Facebook ads across all industries is 9.21%. This means that, on average, 9.21% of people who CLICK ON a Facebook ad, then go on to convert (eg, make a purchase, submit a contact form, phone etc).
It's great for increasing brand awareness
What is brand awareness?
"Brand awareness refers to the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognise a brand. Brand awareness is a key consideration in consumer behaviour, advertising management, brand management and strategy development."
Facebook is great for driving brand awareness. You can showcase your brand to hundreds of thousands of potential customers. I always describe social media as a great way of saying "hello, I'm here"!
Facebook advertising can be used for remarketing
Does it ever feel like you're being followed by an ad? This is likely the result of remarketing. Remarketing works by using Facebook pixel to track visitors on your site and then show ads back to the visitors on various websites across the internet and on social media.
Remarketing can be simple or highly in-depth, depending on who you want to target. Some people simply target everyone who has been on their site, but we advise taking your time to set up more specific audiences. You can target people who have visited particular pages of your website, such as the contact page or target those who have added items to their basket and left (these are known as shopping basket abandoners). You can get further in-depth and target those who have visited specific pages AND spent more than x amount of time on your site. There are endless possibilities.
Facebook advertising can assist with your SEO
Search engines also take into account social signals when ranking your website. We've talked in detail before about how social media as a whole can influence your SEO but simply put social signals consist of the activity on your social media content. Your engagement, such as shares, likes, and comments on your posts are all included as well as which profiles are sharing and linking back to your site. By increasing your social signals, you can help to improve your organic rankings.
Chances are your competitors are advertising on Facebook
At least some of your competitors are using Facebook ads to grow their business and online presence. By not running ads yourselves, you're allowing potential customers to fall straight into your competitors hands. You need to be visible to stimulate business sales and growth. This means using both paid ads to increase sales and organic presence to increase customer loyalty and brand awareness.
Facebook advertising is replacing organic reach
Gone are the days when posting on your Facebook business page would lead to significant reach. Even with a relatively large following, most small businesses will struggle to grow their page significantly just through organic reach. Integrating Facebook Ads with your organic strategy will dramatically improve the results you achieve for almost all metrics, including reach, page likes, engagement and more. If you are posting content organically, you may benefit most from boosted posts.
People spend more time on Facebook than any other social network
When it comes to analysing the amount of time spent on social media platforms, not surprisingly, Facebook leads the pack, with an average of 58 minutes spent per day on the platform. Instagram comes a close second at 53 minutes, and YouTube third at 40 minutes per day (according to this article from Medium).
Facebook has billions of users. In fact, Facebook has 2.45 billion monthly active users, and as is evident by the time spent on the platform, most of these users check their Facebook page multiple times per day.
Facebook advertising increases your customer attribution
Attribution is the number of times, on average, your audience sees your brand. The more times they see and interact with your business, the more likely they are to convert. Running Facebook ads alongside a strong organic social media strategy leads to multiple touchpoints between your brand and your customer. This, in turn, increases customer attribution.
Build engagement on your page
Engagement basically means the likes, comments, and interactions on your advertisements. Gaining engagement organically has become increasingly more difficult over the years as the Facebook algorithm is constantly changing and doesn't seem to favour businesses as much as it used to. You can use ads to gain new pages specifically or boost an existing organic post to reach new prospective customers.
If you're looking at boosting some of your organic Facebook posts, you may be tempted to go for the ones that are performing poorly to get a more even spread of views. However, Facebook's advertising algorithm rewards more engaging content, and so choose to push posts that are already generating a large amount of engagement.
Grow your blog traffic
A blog won't grow without traffic. Similar to our point about brand awareness, you can use Facebook advertising to display your blog to thousands of people and generate instant traffic.
Grow your reviews
You can use remarketing to target people who have already bought from your site and encourage them to leave a review. When doing this, use an incentive such as a "free £5 gift card or 20% off your next order when you leave us a review".
Reporting happens in real-time
This means you can look at your campaign and its results as they happen. Combined with Google Analytics (another real-time reporting tool) you're armed with everything you need to see how your ads are performing any minute of the day.
One of the biggest advantages of real-time reporting is that if you are unhappy with the results, you can make adjustments to your campaign instantly. Be patient, though. Making too many changes too quickly doesn't give your campaign time to actually start working. It'll never leave the "learning" phase if you don't give it a chance to.
When evaluating your strategy, bear in mind that making immediate changes is not possible with many other forms of advertising. This is particularly true with traditional advertising such as radio ads, television ads, or print media. Once you've started a leaflet drop campaign, for example, you will have to just take the loss if it doesn't work.
Facebook advertising is fast
Facebook advertising is speedy and usually drives instant results. You can show your ads to thousands of people starting right now. Your ads do have to be reviewed by Facebook before they can go live, but this usually takes no more than a couple of hours, if not minutes.
Facebook ads are cheap
There are two main benefits here. Facebook advertising is cheap, which means your cost per conversion (cost per lead or sale) is low leading to increased profit. The second benefit is because Facebook advertising is so cheap, you can cut out some of the other more costly advertising campaigns you are using. Why spend more on radio advertising, newspaper and magazine adverts, and other traditional media sources to reach the same audience?
Reach new markets
Facebook ads are perfect if you are bringing a new product or service to the market; you can use Facebook advertising to increase your product or services exposure. Similar to the brand awareness point we made earlier in the article, Facebook ads offer a great way to let people know you're out there, and you exist.
Capture mobile users
Over 50% of all internet searches now happen on mobile, and over 84% of Facebook users access Facebook from a mobile device. There's both some pros and cons here. Targeting this audience is perfect if your website is mobile-friendly. If your site is still stuck in 2007, you might want to look into getting it redesigned or modified to suit mobile traffic. According to Quora Creative nearly half of mobile users switch to your competitor instead, after a bad experience with your mobile site. Check your design, usability, load speed etc. of your site on mobile before using Facebook ads. Alternatively, you can opt just to show your ads on Facebook desktop; however, there are controversies around the effectiveness of this compared to mobile-based ads.
Facebook ads easily integrate lead gen forms
Lead ads allow you to collect information from potential customers directly from the ads. When people click on your lead ad, they'll be prompted to fill in a short Instant Form to send you their contact info.
Facebook ads are digital which means they are measurable
As with any digital marketing campaign, it's super important that you can track return on investment and the results of your campaign. What's the point in running an ad campaign if you don't know how many of the sales and leads you receive in that time have actually come from that ad campaign?
Facebook Pixel alongside Google Analytics makes it easy to measure the results of your campaign/s. Conversion tracking should track ALL leads and sales and not just some. Even if you're e-commerce, ensure you're also tracking phone calls and website form submissions where appropriate. An ad could lead to a phone call from a potential wholesale deal that could change your business!
When set-up correctly, your conversion tracking should be able to identify exactly which ads have lead to which conversions (leads and sales) you've received. This is something that your Facebook advertising specialist will help you with.
Compete fairly and affordably with larger businesses
Facebook ads are both cheap and fair. This means it's much easier to compete against large companies than with marketing strategies such as SEO (where competing with the "big boys" can be near on impossible without a LOT of time and money). As long as your ads are relevant, your ads will likely perform efficiently with Facebook advertising.
One key thing to remember here is that larger companies will be doing their advertising right. Chances are they are employing companies just like ourselves to ensure their ads are relevant, eye-catching and showing to their most relevant audiences. If you're unsure on how to use the Facebook ads platform correctly, it's advisable to outsource the running of your ads to someone who knows exactly what they're doing. You'll be paying for management fees but will be much less likely to waste money showing your ads to irrelevant audiences or on placements that just don't work.
Facebook ads can help build email marketing lists
You can use Facebook ads to help build your email marketing list. Run ads specifically targeting people to sign up or alternatively, run ads promoting content from your blog with a newsletter sign up at the bottom of the content. Both of these strategies are effective.
Facebook advertising increases website traffic
If you're looking to drive new potential customers to your website, Facebook ads could be for you. With a range of call to action buttons such as "Book now" and "Learn More" it’s easy to drive new and engaged traffic through to your website.
Drive footfall and offline sales
Many of our clients who are running localised Facebook ad campaigns see higher in-store traffic after working with us. Why? Customers see you on Facebook, visit your website and choose to visit you if your product or service is both local and of interest. I've done this myself before, and I'm sure many of you reading this have too! This is particularly applicable to businesses such as restaurants or cafes who use digital advertising to increase their brand awareness and in turn, increase in-store visits.
Affordable = budget-friendly
We've already talked about Facebook Ads being affordable with generally low CPC's, but did you know you can also control your daily spending? There is a lower limit which at the time of writing is a mere £1 per day, but Facebook allows you to set your budget at anything higher than this amount. You can also edit and change your budget at any time, making it easy to lower budget over periods you want to slow down your advertising. For example, we know Christmas is a really quiet time for ourselves. It's unlikely anyone will take out a marketing contract just a week or so before they'll be closed for a few days or even a couple of weeks. Because of this, we reduce our own Facebook budget over this time, allowing things to still tick over slowly but without coming back from the holidays to a huge bill!
Remember; if you underspend, you may not get enough exposure actually to generate any real results. If you're unsure what your budget should be for your aims and industry, get in touch, and we'd be happy to offer some advice.
Facebook ads are extremely cost-effective (when done right)
We believe Facebook (and Google Ads) are the most cost-effective advertising investments any business can make. But, it's important to get your ads, audiences, placements and even budget allocations right in order to reap the benefits.
Want help with your Facebook ad campaigns? Book a free consultation with us today. We'd be happy to talk.