Facebook Advertising is leading the industry as far as social advertising goes, so will cover how to implement Facebook within your marketing strategy…especially how to align it with your Don Draper like a presentation you gave to your client complete with personas and heavy demo info!
Marketers who have had the opportunity to delve into the world of paid search over the past decade have seen first hand the differences between traditional marketing methods and marketing methods used online. Things aren’t as intuitive as they used to be.
In the old days, we profiled “target demographic”, created personas, crunched the numbers, and inferred what they like to eat in the morning before work, what kind of shoes they wore, how they felt about their bosses, and how they spent there recreational time. All this information, was gathered organized, and presented to our clients, and/or superiors in a Mad Men type of presentation with a bulletproof POA. We were geniuses!
Then there was paid search. As a major disrupter within the marketing world, paid search forced marketers and advertisers to see the world in a new light. At any given moment more than 3 billion people worldwide are logged in online with more than 300 million in the US alone.
We couldn’t tell Google that we wanted to serve our waffle ads to Sally, the middle-aged, a homeowner with three kids and a dog, who eats beagles for breakfast out in the suburbs of St. Louis, MO.
e had to instead target people in St. Louis, MO who were searching for “waffles”. And if no one was searching for waffles, well, no one was searching for waffles.
Paid search is about capitalizing on the demand. Once we get a read on demand, we can connect relevant search queries to our ads. But what if no one is searching for your products? How can you effectively “push” your product or search out to the marketplace? Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to Facebook Advertising.
Luckily, we have the ever-expanding platform on Facebook. Facebook is constantly improving to meet the needs of marketers in response to the constant disruption in the digital marketing space.
Below are the top ten reasons you should be using the Facebook Advertising platform for your business.
If no one is searching for your products? How can you effectively “push” your product or search out to the market place?
Facebook Advertising is Severely Underpriced…For Now.
Today, depending on your campaign objectives, you can spend anywhere from pennies on a dollar to $5 to reach thousands of people on the Facebook Advertising platform. CPC’s hover around $0.80. Significantly lower costs at a with a larger volume/audience than paid search.
You can spend $10 – $20 a day on Facebook and still see reasonable results advertising on Facebook. Scores of marketers Google Ads have seen prices skyrocket over the past few years. That’s the price of adoption and going mainstream.
Facebook Advertising is following the same trajectory. Now is the time to get on board. As of 2014, 92% of Social Media Marketers use Facebook Advertising; Facebook Ad Prices increased by 247% from Q2 to Q3 of 2014 Facebook. Marketers are increasingly noticing the importance of Facebook. This means that we have to be cognizant of how we target ads, they may not come at the bargain prices we have seen in the past.
People Online Spend the Majority of their time on Facebook
The average American spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook, more than any other network. The Facebook crowd includes the young and old as we have run successful, converting Facebook campaigns targeting the 65+ demographic.
Facebook Advertising consists of More than Facebook
When we say “Facebook Advertising” we are referring to marketing on not only Facebook but Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook’s Audience Network. Yes, that’s right 49% of consumers Like a Facebook Page to support the Brand. As I am writing this, The Messenger app is the top downloaded app followed by Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, in that order.
- Instagram has 1 billion monthly users worldwide with 71% of users under the age of 35, 95 million posts per day, and 88% of users outside of the US. Like math, images are a universal language. Another amazing stat is the fact that 95% of Instagram users also use Youtube. Any ideas yet?
WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion users, 450 million of which use the app daily. Chances are if you have traveled internationally, you’ve used WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends. Well, did you know there is a WhatsApp app for businesses? Yep.
Many businesses use the platform to manage orders, address customer service inquiries, and manage customer relationships. Now they can create Message Ad campaigns using WhatsApp the same way you use Messenger.
- Messenger has over 1.3 billion users each month with over 20 billion messages are sent between people and businesses every month. I like to think of the relationship between WhatsApp and Messenger as international and domestic.
You can create Click-to-Messenger ads, Sponsored Messages, and Messenger Home Page Placement ads using Messenger. One of my past clients saw a significant uptick in conversions serving click to messenger ads.
- Facebook’s Audience Network is a collection of mobile apps and websites that extend beyond Facebook’s apps and placements. This network allows advertisers to reach up to 16% percent more people than on Facebook with an extended variety of ad placements including native, banner, interstitial, and rewarded video on mobile devices.
What’s more is that Audience network placements cost significantly less than other placements (Facebook, Messager, WhatsApp, and Instagram).
No Matter Your Business, Your Customers Are on Facebook…And It’s other Apps.
Chances are your market is on Facebook. Facebook has over 2.38 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2019, worldwide with 22 billion ad clicks per year. 80% of internet users use Facebook.
Five new profiles are created every second. Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded.
Your Competitors are Using Facebook Advertising.
1 million advertisers are spending over 8 billion on Facebook Adverting as of 2016. There are a number of ways to take a look at what your competitors are doing on Facebook. The bottom line is that they are exposing their brand to your market while you sit back and watch. Get started today.
Facebook Advertising is the Most Targeted form of Advertising
Facebook can target your leads by age, gender, language, interest, zip code, city, DMA, state, country, region, online behaviors, relationship status, education background, career, employment background, financial profile, ethnicity, generation, parental status, age of children, political preference, life events, event attendance, app usage, mobile usage, and pages liked.
This list is further expanded upon by the third-party vendors: Datalogix, Acxiom, Epsilon, BlueKai for online behavioral targeting.
Facebook Advertising Allows You to Keep In Touch with Past Customers
Given the daunting amount of targeting options…there are more, including the ability to retarget, which is HUGE. This gives you and your client complete control over your marketing funnel. You can import your customer list into your Facebook advertising account and you this list in a variety of ways. We had to list these reasons here.
- Create Lookalike Audiences. By uploading a customer list, you can have Facebook search the list, find those people on Facebook and create an entirely different audience with similar characteristics to the people within your customer lists.
- Remarket to visitors of your website. You can segment visitors by pages they visited and the actions they took while they were there. One of the most popular ways to reach these users is to target potential customers who abandoned their cart.
- Exclude people in your Customer List from seeing new ads. Sometimes you don’t want to serve ads to people who are already familiar with your brand or who have made a purchase.
Facebook Advertising can be Used for Brand Awareness and Direct Response
If you believe Facebook Ads is only for “getting the word out”, you must have missed the memo. With Facebook Advertising, you create demand (demand generation) AND capitalize on demand (demand fulfillment). In other words, you can use Facebook Ads as a brand awareness platform or a direct response platform. It is fully capable of both.
My experience with Facebook Advertising since my internship has always been direct response. I have never gotten paid to “manage a Facebook page”. I was have been paid to produce results not manage a community or calm someone down who is having a bad day. This should be your approach as well. Please stop thinking Facebook Advertising is some toy in a toolbox.
Facebook Advertising Allow You to Track Performance In Detail
We live in an information age. Facebook Ads is a shining example of what information is now available to us. We can quickly figure out what is working and is not working. Years ago, marketers ran ads in magazines and television networks on the faith that publishers weren’t fooling them with estimates of how many people were actually viewing their ads. Those days are long gone.
Not only do we know exactly what actions were taken by people who have viewed ads, but we also know what actions they take on your website once they click on your ads.
Clicks and impressions are just the beginning. With the implementation of Facebook pixels, we also know reach, video views, spend, revenue, cost per action, cost per click, relevance, likes, shares, comments, video play thru, click-through rates and much more. Learn more about digital analytics.
You can Get Started Quickly
Setting up and launching a Facebook Ads campaign is a fairly straightforward process, even though doing it the correct way may take a little more insight. When comparing this process to major media buying you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can start driving traffic to your website or event.
Ready to get started with Facebook Advertising? See 5 Steps to Success with Facebook and Instagram Ads.
