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With the number of active advertisers on Facebook reaching over 10 million, the benefits of Facebook Ads are being harvested by thousands of businesses across Australia. But what are these benefits and how can they help your business grow?
There’s no shortage of conversations about Facebook today and everybody seems eager to talk about the advantages of advertising on Facebook. Statistics would indicate that every business and its dog is launching campaigns, too!
Despite Facebook cutting off access to third-party data many years ago, publishers have still reaped huge benefits from the platform. In fact, amidst other platforms now having to reconsider third-party data use, Facebook may have actually become a stronger force through prioritising this pivot for the purposes of improving privacy..
Benefits of Facebook Ads
For anybody hesitant to take the plunge, or for those of you who are simply overwhelmed by all the information out there on the interwebs, read on! We’ve written this blog to highlight the main benefits of Facebook advertising and how you can harness Facebook’s incredible advertising platform to the benefit of your business.
From its sophisticated advertising platform to the variety of advertising creatives you can deploy, there are many reasons why you should invest in Facebook advertising.
1. Facebook audience sizes are huge
One of the most well-known benefits of Facebook advertising is the number of people your business can reach. There are more than 3.5 billion active users on Facebook per month. Of which, 1.91 billion people log into Facebook each day and are considered daily active users. When you combine this with the additional 1 billion Instagram users whom you can advertise to with Facebook advertising, your market reach is gigantic.
While the main advantages of Facebook advertising are of course sales-related, there are also several other benefits beyond just driving new business. Using the Facebook Audience Network, you can increase post interactions, drive traffic to your website, promote an event, showcase your videos, encourage app interactions, or raise brand awareness.
No matter what type of business you operate, the volume of active Facebook users means that your new and existing customers are almost guaranteed to be found there. And being able to choose a campaign objective to target your audience at all stages of the funnel makes Facebook an all-encompassing solution for your business when it comes to building brand visibility and supporting not just customer acquisition, but also customer retention through continuing brand engagement.
2. Instantly advertise across multiple apps
Advertising on Facebook means you can access the entire family of apps in Meta Business Suite. This includes Instagram, Messenger & WhatsApp as well as Facebook’s own Meta Audience Network. This means there are more opportunities to get your ads in front of potential customers on multiple platforms for the same budget with almost no additional setup.
When you consider this benefit, the only other channel that enables you to advertise across multiple networks as quickly as Facebook does is Google’s advertising network with Google search ads, display advertising, and YouTube.
3. Facebook ads are cost-effective.
Another reason to invest in Facebook advertising is the cost. Or, the lack of cost.
Social media users are more likely to interact with an advert that captures their attention than on any other digital platform. Yet, the average cost-per-click and customer acquisition costs on Facebook are lower than those on Google.
So if you’re a small business, Facebook may seem like a cost upfront. However, the return on investment makes Facebook advertising an extremely cost-effective marketing channel.
Another great advantage of Facebook advertising for time poor small business owners is that you can select a Daily or Lifetime Budget for your ad campaigns and allow Facebook to bid automatically at auction for you. Alternatively, you can also look to operate your adverts yourself and follow this guide on reducing your Facebook advertising costs.
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4. Facebook offers advanced targeting
Advanced targeting is one of the most compelling reasons to advertise on Facebook. In fact, we would go as far as saying that Facebook’s targeting options are completely unmatched.
In addition to core targeting of age, gender, language, and location, Facebook allows targeting based on users’ interests and behaviours, education level, income, political affiliations, and major life events.
Furthermore, you can target people who have interacted with your business before and find people who are similar to your existing customer base but who don’t know your business yet. More on these audiences later!
Facebook advertising targeting options are also free and available to all advertisers, big and small. Whereas other platforms might hold the juicy parts behind a paywall, Facebook’s drive to ensure a level playing field is a huge reason why you should choose to advertise here.
5. You can harness data and machine learning
The reason Facebook offers such detailed targeting capabilities is that it has so much data on its billions of users. As an advertiser, you can harness this data to find the right customers for your business, as we discussed above in Targeting.
Having this data and learnings also means that Facebook can forecast estimated results from your advertising campaigns. When setting up or editing a campaign, you can see what effect your adjustments will have on reach and results in real-time. There are no alternative digital marketing channels that enable you to do this with such granularity.
Being able to harness vast data, machine learning and fine-tune the exact audience you wish to serve adverts is a huge benefit of Facebook advertising.
6. Businesses can retarget customers
Facebook advertising also allows you to create custom audiences of people based on various parameters. This can include people who have visited your website and did not make a purchase, people who interacted with your social pages or videos, subscribed to your mailing list, or who previously purchased from you—to name just a few!
Through intelligent Facebook retargeting, you can serve adverts to these audiences who already know your business for a lower cost. The benefit of this is that remarketing audiences are typically further down the buying funnel and have already engaged with your brand. So, while it’s cheaper to serve these audiences the adverts in the first place, it’s even cheaper still to acquire or re-acquire them as a customer.
7. You can create customer lookalikes
Not only can you retarget people who have already interacted with your business, but Facebook advertising gives you the ability to use this audience to create Lookalike Audiences.
Lookalike Audiences, as the name suggests, are people who have similar behaviours and interests on Meta’s apps as your existing customers, but who are not your customers (yet!). Targeting people with a similar profile to your existing customers means they are more likely to be interested in your business than a cold audience.
It’s a fast track approach to finding new customers that are akin to the behaviours and habits of your existing customer base. Have you ever been served a Facebook ad by a company you’ve never interacted with before and thought, “Wow, that’s exactly what I needed”? Well, this is most likely due to the power of Lookalike Audiences.
8. Facebook enables creative campaigns
Unlike search marketing services where the majority of campaigns are text-based, social media is visual, with Facebook offering a plethora of ad types to showcase your brand. As an advertiser, you can use an assortment of images, video and text copy to create rich user experiences to attract and retain customers.
Additionally, you can customise your creative for each placement, testing which creative works best for each user and platform. You can even upload various creative assets and allow Facebook to choose the best one dynamically. This delivers a benefit of Facebook that not many other platforms can brag about. If your social media ads library needs organising, using an ad library tool like Swipekit can help you track performance and shelf life while comparing yourself to competitors with Meta-informed metrics.
9. You can capture leads directly
If your objective is capturing leads, Facebook & Instagram offer Lead Generation campaigns that allow users to submit a form with their contact details without leaving the app. Comparatively to building conversion-driven landing pages and sending traffic to your website, this form of advertising is quick and effective.
With lead capture forms on Facebook, you can customise the questions you ask. Choose between multiple choice, short answers, or even allow users to download a PDF upon completion. Contact details are pre-filled with the user’s information, as provided to Facebook through their account, thereby reducing typos and also increasing your chances of converting a lead.
10. You can use chatbot functionality
Facebook allows users to send your business a message from ads and allows you to automate this conversation with a Chatbot. Research shows that chatbots can increase conversion rates by up to 50%. This can be an advantage especially when you are not physically present at the office or not working over weekends and holidays.
So no matter what your business objectives are, using a chatbot in Facebook ads will have a beneficial impact. Being able to create a Chatbot within an ad campaign, without needing additional software or code, is a definite benefit of Facebook Ads.
Trust us, building chatbots on your website is not for the faint of heart…
11. Take advantage of brand safety features
An important positive of Facebook’s advertising platform is the option to prevent adverts from showing in low-quality placements throughout the Audience Network. If brand safety is important to you, you can create “block lists” with your ad campaigns to prevent your business ads from showing to URLs where you don’t want to appear.
You can also prevent your pages from showing in certain apps, certain pages in the Audience Network, in-stream videos, and in Facebook Instant Articles. Brand safety means different things to different businesses, but having the option to control where your ads do and don’t show up is an appealing benefit of Facebook Ads.
This is extremely beneficial for sensitive markets and markets where Facebook may become extremely influential.–
12. Facebook supports content marketing
Advertising on Facebook can form an important part of your small business content marketing strategy. You can use Facebook ads to promote your on-site content, encouraging website traffic and engagement with your brand.
Through content, you can nurture leads and become a thought leader within your industry. We have no doubt you have seen brands that constantly look like they have their socks together. That’s content marketing!
This soft-sell approach allows you to build a community around your brand without neglecting the commercial goals of your business. Sure, content marketing is a longer-term play, but for industries like SaaS products, the educational awareness you can deliver at scale through content marketing (i.e. via promoting your company’s tailored business blogs and social media content) is unparalleled.
13. Indirectly improve SEO rankings
One of the least known benefits of Facebook advertising is that social interactions are absolutely golden for your businesses reputation with Google or Bing. Did you know that social media links are considered authority signals for search engines that your brand is being shared and liked by real humans?
A strong social media presence improves your website’s organic rankings. Promoting your website content, links, videos, and posts while inviting engagement (Likes, Clicks, Comments, Shares) means search engines will pick up on the activity. Increased activity equals more reach and brand exposure. While this may not necessarily translate into immediate sales, you will see positive results in the long term.
You can use Facebook’s advanced targeting to ensure your content gets seen by an audience who will appreciate and engage with it. And you can do it faster—paid ads get more impressions than organic posts.
14. Facebook ads are scalable
With its global reach of billions, advertising on Facebook means you’re not constrained by geography, schedule, or audience.
There are many ways to scale a Facebook Ads campaign. You could increase budgets, introduce new placements, reuse winning creative, add lookalike audiences or widen your location targeting. You can start wide and narrow in on your best performing segments, or start small and widen your reach incrementally. Both are simple to do with Facebook advertising.
15. Facebook campaigns are easy to set up
Last but not least, one of the most relieving benefits you will find with Facebook advertising is that it is super easy to set up.
Facebook wants you to run ads on its apps, so they have made it extremely accessible for everyone. All you need to start advertising on Facebook is a page. Once you have your Page set up, you have access to all of Facebook’s advertising tools in the Ads Manager.
However, managing Facebook Ads can be time-consuming and it’s easy to become overwhelmed at the sheer choice of inputs you can make to a campaign.
This is where we come in–contact us today and we’ll take care of your Facebook Ads campaigns and help you achieve your business objectives.
So, why Facebook advertising?
Combining Facebook’s astounding reach with first-class targeting options and integrated enterprise tools, there are many reasons why Facebook advertising is a must-have for both small and large businesses. If you are wondering whether Facebook ads are worth it, the answer is yes. A resounding yes! The list of benefits that Facebook advertising brings is significant. So much so, we would go as far as saying that nearly every business should have some form of Facebook advertising campaign running.
While not every business should pivot entirely to Facebook, the majority of businesses will reap huge rewards from the platform in some way. No matter whether you are big or small, the flexible nature of Facebook advertising and the agility the tools provide you are unparalleled. There are not many alternative digital marketing platforms where you can be uploading a brand awareness video while converting hardcore leads via a short capture form.
Get your Facebook ads strategy from Digital Next today with a free growth plan!
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Article by
Chandan Mogla
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