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What You Need to Know About Facebook Advertising

by Brian Colling - September 02, 2015

What You Need to Know About Facebook Advertising

If your company is looking for a great way to advertise effectively to a select target market, you should consider Facebook advertising. Facebook’s advertising platform allows you to target your target market down to location, age, gender, interests, job title, and more. Instead of wasting money on a wide demographic and not receiving valuable leads or return on investment, you can choose to advertise on Facebook, which is more efficient and effective for many verticals.

Even local businesses can use Facebook advertising to increase foot traffic at their locations. If you are targeting local consumers, you can set your advertisement to only show up for people in your area who are interested in your products or services. According to Marketing Land, the average Facebook user spends a minimum of 40 minutes per day on the social networking site or app. That means you have about 40 minutes to get in front of the right audience to market your brand. In fact, in a report by State of Inbound Marketing, researchers found that “social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.”

Regardless of whether you are planning on launching a big advertising campaign or simply want to test the effectiveness of Facebook advertising, there are a few steps you’ll need to take. Here’s everything you need to know about this advertising process.

Determine What You Want to Accomplish

Before you begin planning your Facebook advertising campaign, you will need to determine what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to gain exposure for your brand? Are you looking to get visitors onto your website? Are you looking to sell a product or a service through the ad? Or are you looking to promote your company’s Facebook page or upcoming event?

By determining what your main goal is, you will be able to track your results and determine your success rate.

Determine Which Type of Facebook Ad Is Right for This Campaign

Once you know what the goal of your advertisement is, you’ll need to determine what type of Facebook advertisement is right for you. Here are some examples:

Boost a post: When you post on your company’s Facebook page, only a percentage of your followers will be able to see it. When you promote a post, you are able to increase your reach and get your post out in front of the right audience. This can help you promote your post to your existing followers as well as a target audience that isn’t yet following you. You can also boost a post that you are looking to promote, such as information about your brand, products or services, or an event you are running. Boosting a post can even help local businesses reach a local audience with their posts and promotions.

Promote your company page: When you first put together your company page, there’s a good chance no one will begin following you right away. Facebook allows you to promote your page to a select audience so that you can gain followers. These followers will then be accessible to you when you publish posts. When new users begin following your page, it often shows up on their feed; therefore, you’ll get a bit of free publicity from that, as well, and possibly gain some free followers by association.

Drive users to your website or a landing page: You can use Facebook advertising to send users directly to your website or a landing page outside of Facebook. This is often used to promote a product or a service. It works as a great tool to get visitors to your website.

Get your video viewed by a target audience: If you upload a video directly onto Facebook, you can advertise it and get it in front of the right audience. This works great for both informational and marketing videos.

Cost per impression: If you want to get your post seen, you can use a CPM Facebook advertisement and pay for every thousand people that see your post. This works well to promote your Facebook page, website, services, or products, or even a contest.

Sell your products or services: Facebook advertising offers conversion campaigns that allow you to sell products and services directly from your Facebook ad. This works best for companies that sell products online.

Determine Who You Are Trying to Reach

One of the greatest benefits of advertising on Facebook is that you are able to take advantage of the advanced audience targeting features. Their targeting allows you to pinpoint who you are trying to reach with your message and to drive better quality results from your advertisement. Facebook’s targeting feature allows you to target location, demographics, interests, and current followers or non-followers. If you have a list of emails, you can upload them onto Facebook and use the Custom Audience feature to advertise directly to those individuals, or you can use the Lookalike Audience feature to advertise to people with similar interests to those on your list.

Keep in mind that you’ll get better results by targeting a narrow, specific audience than by marketing to a ton of people who may not be the least bit interested in your product or services. Facebook advertising is on the rise and many businesses have started putting 50% or more of their paid media budgets into Facebook. Where are you putting your digital advertising dollars?

You may also enjoy this article: 3 Tips for Hosting a Killer Facebook Live Broadcast

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