If You’re Selling, You Need To Think Facebook

Facebook as a social media platform has grown hugely since its release way back in 2004. Advertising soon became a key part of the company’s growth strategy in 2012, which has developed massively to the present day – even more so since Facebook bought Instagram – and mobile usage continues to explode!

Facebook has 1.65 billion monthly active users as of June 2016 so is without a doubt the largest social media advertising platform in the world.

source: simplymeasured.com

One of the main reasons why Facebook advertising is so unique is its sophisticated targeting capabilities. Social media channels work very differently from search; instead of targeting users actively searching, Facebook proactively targets users based on profiles, which adds a whole new layer of targeting capabilities for advertisers to reach their customers.

Below we’ll run through the available targeting methods and how these can be used to leverage ads to your audiences:

Audience Targeting

• Adding the Facebook pixel to your site enables creation of custom audience lists to retarget users of your site through Facebook ads.
• Email lists can also be utilised like Google’s (Customer Match) technique whereby you can target ads directly to your user base or subscribers.
• ‘Lookalike audiences’ through Facebook take this one step further, giving you the ability to target similar audience sets to those who most closely match your customers.

Demographic / Location

• This goes beyond the country or city you want to advertise in, for example target by relationship status or education level which would be much harder to reach on traditional advertising platforms. Take the example of a wedding photographer being able to reach people who have just got engaged!

Behaviour / Interest Targeting / Connections

• There are a vast amount of interest categories and behaviours available to drill down your audience. You can also target by connections e.g. people who like your page and friends of people who like your page.

Summary

So, in summary, why should companies invest their marketing budget into Facebook advertising? Here are 5 good reasons:

1. Facebook is the leading social media platform internationally so you can guarantee a large percentage of your key customers will be spending a lot of their downtime there.
2. Multiple targeting criteria enable you to reach a very specific audience giving you ultimate control to smartly target your key customers when stationary on desktops and whilst on the go via their mobile devices.
3. Facebook offers a wide variety of creative ad formats to reach customers from the carousel ad, slideshows and video ads tailored to your advertising objective whether it be driving customers to your website, brand awareness or to download your mobile app.
4. The cost of advertising on Facebook is relatively cheap compared with all other media, working on a cost per click or CPM basis with average CPCs of as little as $0.27!
5. The Facebook pixel can be used to track key conversion points such as purchases (and transactional values). This gives confidence to advertisers since they can track back their return on investment.

If you want to find out more about Facebook advertising, then we can help! Get in touch and we’ll take you through the options that are most relevant to your company.