With over one billion (yes, billion – with a “b”) people visiting Facebook every single day, this means that almost one quarter of the entire world’s population are active Facebook users.
Unlike what the negative stories in the press would have you think, Facebook has by no means fallen off the cliff. It’s still an extremely dynamic and thriving online space. The vast majority of marketers on social media use Facebook, with 93% of them choosing to use Facebook as an advertising platform.
The reach Facebook can provide you is still unequalled, and it’ll likely stay this way for a long time. To not utilise Facebook advertising for marketing your business would be complete madness.
Scale aside, there are many reasons why you absolutely should be using Facebook advertising. Just because you’re fishing in a large pond, it doesn’t mean that the fish won’t bite. What else contributes to Facebook being a necessity when it comes to your online advertising? What else can you achieve? What tools do they offer you?
Read on for five amazing benefits of using Facebook advertising.
1. Crafting your perfect audience
Once you understand the true size of Facebook’s active users, it’s completely understandable to feel overwhelmed. It’s like casting your net out and blindly seeing what you can catch (another fishing reference, my apologies).
However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The audience you can create on Facebook can be as wide or as niche as you see fit.
Facebook targeting is way more than simply than age, gender, and location. You can target people based on what phone they have, or if they have a birthday or anniversary coming up.
Have they recently moved house?
How close are they to an exact location? You can literally drop a pin on a map and select your radius.
You can target people who have children of a certain age, people who work for a business or have a precise job title.
Have they expressed interest in retirement, estate management, or private investing? Are they fans of a certain sports team or are they frequent travellers? Are they expats, now living abroad? Do they align with a certain political party? All this data is at your fingertips for you to explore and craft your perfect audience.
As you add and take away elements, you will see an estimated size of your proposed audience. This changes during the editing process. Did an interest significantly decrease your audience size? This can happen often if the interest or element is niche, such as working for a small company, but if it’s a vital demographic then it is worth including, at least for the first month. An audience can be edited at any time as you learn more about your target market.
2. Different ad types to suit your business needs
One of the huge benefits Facebook Advertising has to offer is the wide range of campaigns you can create. All have different measures of success to help define your individual business goals.
From a single image ad to a video, to a carousel ad displaying multiple creatives, there is a wide variety of options to choose from regarding how the end user will see your ad.
There is also a large variety of campaign objectives to measure your ad’s success – from website clicks to video views, app installs and lead generation adverts. Facebook Ad Manager is entirely customisable, and you can choose the end goal of the campaign to fit your business perfectly.
A lead generation campaign is a favourite at Yardstick and the one we find the most effective for our clients. That’s because it gains you instant access to the relevant information of those interested in your services.
We all know that, for many of us in 2022, our concentration levels are at an all-time low so it’s vital to keep the user as engaged in your ad as possible. A guaranteed way to lose someone is by requiring them to visit a second website.
They see your ad, click on it and are then taken to another website to fill in their data. They don’t know how much they will have to do on this website or how long it will take to load. For a large amount of people, as soon as that Facebook window swaps to an internet browser and your website URL begins to load, they aren’t interested.
You’ve just lost a huge number of potential clients as they close the window and move on. Too many steps in the process can be a data collection killer.
Therefore, Facebook lead generation campaigns are vital as they keep the user within Facebook.
When they click your ad, a form appears for them to enter whatever data you’re asking of them. It must be their name and email address as a minimum, but anything else is your choice – age, location, phone number and so on.
The beauty of this form is that it is inside Facebook, so they stay on the app. This provides a much easier user experience and increases the chance of you gaining their data, but it doesn’t require too much effort on their part.
From there, they can be taken to a separate website such as a custom landing page on your website. But they don’t access this until pressing submit, giving you their data. Whether they choose to continue to your website is up to them, but you have the golden ticket: their information.
3. You don’t need a massive budget, you just need to know your objectives
A very common question clients ask us is “how much would you recommend spending”?
This is completely understandable and a genuine concern of many smaller businesses as they don’t believe they have the resource to begin advertising on Facebook. However, you would be surprised by how low of a cost Facebook Advertising can be.
The minimum amount required by Facebook advertising is £1 a day. If you can afford to spend that much on your campaign then, in a literal sense, you can afford to advertise on Facebook.
However, it obviously is not that simple.
The honest answer to the question of how much money is needed for a Facebook campaign is “it’s entirely depending on the campaign itself”.
An easy objective, such as simply clicking a link or purchasing a low-ticket item through an ad, very often doesn’t require a high spend as it’s already a very attractive ad. It doesn’t require much input from the user, and it can relate to a lot of people.
Your spending will depend on how many leads you wish to generate. If you are happy to gain a couple of leads every week, then this will require a much smaller budget than if you wanted to gain 10 leads a week, or more.
Also, your audience can have a big impact on how much budget your campaign needs to be successful. A small, niche audience may be exactly who you’re looking to target. But, a small audience can often mean a high cost per click, as you’re relying on a large proportion of that small group of people being interested in your ad. This may require a high spend.
The reverse of this is true. If you have a very broad audience, for example anyone who over the age of 30, of any gender, living in the UK, this is an audience of millions. You are much more likely to get more interest, because more people are seeing your ad.
This often means a lower cost per result and doesn’t require a high spend. But it is a very broad and unspecific audience so you cannot guarantee the leads being of a high quality.
4. A/B ad testing for performance growth
When creating a Facebook campaign for the first time, a common concern is that it won’t be perfect straight away. Especially if you are limited in your knowledge, there is a worry that you will spend a lot of time and resources on a campaign, and it does not gain the results you wanted. This can deter many people from even trying.
Facebook advertising knows this and have provided a great function, allowing you to A/B test multiple variables. You can test different image creatives and different copy to see which resonates with your audience the most.
You can also test different locations – should you focus on your local area or try a UK wide campaign? Try both audiences! By splitting your budget between two variables, you can see which option provides you with the best results.
With Facebook advertising, it is so important to understand that testing is key. It would be wonderful if, during the first month, your campaign overachieves and provides results you could only dream about, but this is very unlikely.
The first month is vital in understanding how your ad is being received. What is working well? What can be adapted? You must accept that this will be a trial-and-error process which, if given patience, can achieve great results.
5. Facebook ads can give results extremely fast
So, your campaign is live. Congratulations! Once Facebook has approved an ad, it begins showing immediately to your selected audience. Impressions and clicks start to appear in your Ads Manager within hours. This is a huge benefit of Facebook Advertising – extremely fast results.
However, this can be a disadvantage if you aren’t prepared. Before a Facebook campaign goes live, it is essential that you are ready to receive the results and act on them.
If you are running a lead generation campaign, have you decided who within the business is contacting the leads? Will they be around to contact the leads, or do they have annual leave coming up soon? Are they sure of what to say? Is your landing page set up?
If you’re offering an asset such as a guide, is that completely signed off and ready to download? There is nothing worse than having a perfect campaign which is gaining high quality leads, only to lose these people due to a lack of effective communication or technical issues which could have been avoided. Facebook moves fast, which means so must you.
Get in touch
If you’d like to explore how Facebook advertising can benefit your business, we’re happy to help. Email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 8965300.
