Facebook ads can at times cause confusion. But they are a highly effective and affordable way to advertise your business. Facebook has the largest and most active user base of any social media platform. Most American adults are on the platform at least once a day. To not advertise on Facebook is to loose valuable leads. Paid Facebook ads increase the reach and exposure of your business on the platform. These ads can be very powerful if done right and they are very affordable. I will go through quickly some of the features of Facebook ads and how Facebook gives you tools to measure their effectiveness.
For as little as $5.00 a day you can create a Facebook ad that will reach thousands of people. With a little effort you can make sure your ad is displaying to your prime target audience. But before we get there, there are two important things you have to do first. You have to have a business page for your business on Facebook. This is different from your personal page, and you do not set your business up with another personal page. If you need help in setting up a Facebook page for your business we offer a training course for you. Just email us at contact@armedia.us and we will help you out. Why do you need a business page? Again millions of people use Facebook every day why would you not have a business page on the site? Also while it is possible to create an ad without a page it severely limits where you can place and what you can do with that ad, rendering it basically useless.
The second thing you need to do is develop a profile for your prime demographic. Who are they? What do they want? How do they buy? In the coming months we will be releasing a series of training sessions on how to develop this profile for your business and then use it in your marketing efforts. Or if you do not have enough time to do this yourself contact us and we will be happy to help you out. But you need this profile so you know how to target your ads on Facebook. If you do not target your ad while the numbers may look amazing (potential ad reach in the millions) your ad has just as much chance to go in front of people who would never in a million years buy your product or service as to go in front of those who desperately need it. So know your prime demographic so you can target those who are desperate for your service or product. This will make more sense in a moment.
Your Facebook ads!
Immediately upon choosing to create a Facebook ad, Facebook takes you to a page where you can set up the targeting demographics of the ad. There are two things to keep in mind here, your potential reach which could be in the millions and is based off of demographic, interest, or behavioral qualifiers and then your estimated daily reach which is based off your budget. It may look cool to have your ad go out to a million people but if you can only afford a small budget and your daily reach is two thousand then you might want to consider targeting more.
Here is an oversimplification of the point I am trying to make here. Lets say your company makes only blue skittles. You can get on Facebook and advertise to everyone who loves skittles (the millions of people in the potential reach) but then your ad will display in front of people who only buy yellow skittles or red or green or purple. If your estimated daily reach is only two thousand people it is very likely your ad will only display in front of people who like any color of skittle but blue!
This is I think the key to Facebook ads you need to target your potential audience so that you get in front of the people most likely to buy your product or service. If you are a restaurant it may look cool to advertise to the whole city, but if most of your customers come from a 10 mile radius then maybe you should target your ads to that radius. If you only sell products to small businesses then limit your Facebook ad to that group. Targeting ads in this way is not lessening the impact of your ad in fact it is doing the exact opposite, increasing the ROI by ensuring your target audience ready to buy are the only ones seeing the ad.
Now that you have targeted your ad remember that Images sell! In fact Facebook understands this so well that they will not allow you to create an ad without an image. Now do not worry they have a robust library of stock images for you to choose from but I always feel if you are going to spend money advertising then have your business in the image not some generic stock photo anyone can use. Be different be unique.
After you have completed your ad and it has run its course there are quite a few tools built into Facebook to see how well your ad performed. In the ads manager you can find stats over how many people clicked your ad, how many were reached by your ad, and how many impressions you had (this is how many times your ad was shown even if it was shown multiple times to one person.) Use these numbers to see how well your ad performed and as you make tweaks you can use these numbers to fine tune your ads.
It is important for you to understand how a Facebook ad works. If you decide to do this yourself you have been informed and will be more effective at it. If you are going with a social media manager you will now be able to tell if they know what they are doing or not. You have enough understanding now to test them and make sure they are doing everything they can to display your business in the best light. Good luck with your advertising.
