It’s important to understand what Facebook offers businesses and how its paid ad network is built to offer a number of advertising options before you can see how it might help you reach new audiences.
Facebook’s market share for digital advertising is close to 20%, making it one if the single largest options for advertising, behind only Google. As the world adjusts to decreased store traffic and lower brick-and-mortar results it only makes sense to consider the benefits of Facebook advertising for your business. Online-first companies and eCommerce are set to become the norm for businesses and the advantages of Facebook advertising over its competitors make it a good option.
Facebook’s advertising model functions on the ubiquitous “pay-per-click” model which has become the single biggest system for internet advertising. The reasons why PPC (Pay Pr Click) is important are also the same benefits of Facebook advertising: it’s affordable, effective, and fast.
1. Micro-target your exact audiences
Social media advertising for most platforms means giving advertisers the ability to focus ads towards their own target audiences using data from users – and Facebook is no different. In fact one of the main benefits of advertising on Facebook is that the platform is very data rich. You can micro-target the audiences that are best for your business.
Facebook has a meticulous level of detail that lets you narrow down the demographic for every ad you run. Businesses can create ads to narrow down their target audiences for segments under:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Spoken languages
- Interests (expressed interests, likes, and hobbies from their Facebook profile)
- Education level or history
- Job title
- Income
- Political affiliation
- Interests
- Behaviors and recent purchases
- Major life events
This level of insight is one of the advantages of Facebook ads that classic search PPC doesn’t offer. Because of the nature of search engines, ad networks like Google and Bing aren’t able to offer as much detailed demographic targeting.
2. It has the highest retail ROAS for any social platform
Marketers and business owners might wonder, “do Facebook ads really work?” They definitely do.
According to Statista, 41% of surveyed marketers claimed that Facebook gave them the best ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), putting it at the top of the most popular social media sites for marketing.
Compared to other similar social media sites, users are more likely to click ads they see in their Facebook feed, making it a highly beneficial place to invest your advertising budget.
3. Better ad types for your business needs
Another one of the advantages of Facebook advertising is that it offers a wide range of ad types – some not available in other paid channels.
There are multiple types of ads to choose from for Facebook business advertising:
Photo – These are static single images, plus a caption.
Video – Video ads range in terms of length and can be set to appear in-stream, in user feeds, or in Stories.
Stories – Stories are customizable ads that take up the whole screen. They can be videos or static images and tapping on Stories ads brings the user to your site (or whatever page you set).
Messenger – These ads appear between conversations on the Facebook Messenger App.
Carousel – Carousel ads are comprised of up to ten static images that the user can scroll through.
Slideshow – These ads show short video-like clips made with motion, sound, and text.
Collection – Collection ads showcase multiple products in a single ad, all of which can be individually interacted with by a user.
Playables – These are interactive demo games that users can preview before they download the app or game.
One of the benefits of advertising on Facebook for your business is that you’re not limited to certain ad types and aren’t locked into plain text ads (like you are with search engine PPC). In fact these ad types cater better to branding since they give marketers the ability to create visual, creative, graphic-styles ads with multi-media elements: video, photo, text etc.
4. They can be affordable and low cost (you set your own budget)
Like a lot of pay-per-click style advertising platforms, Facebook Ads are freely available to all businesses – The only cost is the cost associate with supplying a budget and running ads.
For a lot of SMB advertisers, this one of the most appealing benefits of advertising on Facebook.
The cost of running ads on Facebook is determine by a lot of factors (your budget, your ad types, industry, etc.) but generally marketers should expect to pay anywhere from a few cents to a couple dollars per click.
Facebook ads are low cost.
5. Facebook ads can give results very fast
Facebook business ads are ideal for brands that are looking to run both short-term and long-term digital marketing strategies – since they can start providing revenue/conversion as soon as they go live. But they’re best for fast results.
Once ad campaigns are set up in the Ads Manager, are reviewed by Facebook, and once they go live, they start working immediately and begin showing your brand/products to potentially thousands of people instantly. Ads are normally approved within 24 hours, so the Facebook advertising benefits come from giving businesses a way to start getting sales within a couple days.
6. Facebook offers ads for your specific business goals
Marketers can also choose from a range of “advertising objectives” that suit their business goals. This is great for businesses that want to prioritize different results for their ads. For example ads can be designed to drive more: post engagement/interaction, more site traffic, lead generation, etc.
7. Access to one of the largest audiences in the world
With more than 2.7 billion active users, the Facebook ads platform gives businesses access to one of the single largest digital ad networks. But that’s not all, since its acquisition of Instagram in 2012, the social media giant has built out its ad network to give easy access to both platforms.
Their ad network extents across both sites to give advertisers an option to have their ads display on each – with little extra set-up.
Instagram now has more than 1 billion users as well, and its daily active users are well over 500 million. In fact both Facebook and Instagram have great usage stats. Facebook advertising benefits businesses of all sizes by giving them access to an audience they wouldn’t get anywhere else.
8. Facebook ads remarketing
Remarketing means advertising to audiences or visitors that have already previously interacted with your brand or expressed interest in your business. Usually done through cookies/session tracking.
One of the benefits of Facebook advertising for your business is that you can use this strategy to increase revenue, boost conversion rates or get better ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
This strategy works using the “Facebook pixel” – a small snippet of code that you post in your site to help target customers and visitors. It tracks people, along with the types of actions they take on your site like any Facebook ads they viewed before visiting, pages they visit, add-to-cart actions, and more. Plus Facebook advertising benefits businesses by giving them the option to include “dynamic ads” that they can create to specifically target remarketed shoppers.
9. You reach more people than with just organic social media
This is another reason why advertising on Facebook is worthwhile. Because businesses will reach more people than with just their organic social media marketing. And they’ll be able to expand the reach of their existing content both on-platform and off.
Paid advertising and organic advertising aren’t exclusive though, you can do both! And with ad types specifically designed for engagement, signups, or followings, paid-ads can actually improve your organic traffic as well. And they’ll do it faster – one of the key benefits of Facebook advertising. Paid ads get better engagement, far greater impressions, and more conversions. This means your content gets more views.
10. They give better content marketing results
Facebook ads can be used to bolster an existing content marketing campaign. Content marketing is a broad digital marketing method that involves on-site content, blogging, social-media, and even search engine optimization. Facebook can help in all of these areas.
Facebook ads can help a business get more visibility for their Facebook content and boost traffic to their core website content – whether it’s cornerstone site content, simple ad copy, or blogs. Facebook ads can be set up to target greater site traffic, more impressions, and even click-through-rate (CTR).
Discover the benefits of Facebook advertising for your business – contact our team to get started! We can help your business grow with professional paid-media marketing services and Facebook ad management.