Why marketers love Facebook advertising
1st September, 2017
Facebook advertising enables marketers to use powerful information to refine their strategies so they become increasing more efficient and effective. What’s not to love there?
Whether you personally love or loathe Facebook, advertisers generally adore the deep data play which makes ads on the platform so effective.
That same dataset can help the smallest of companies punch above their weight.
Here’s how.
Opportunities for research
Research underpins all good marketing. Research assists you to make better marketing decisions and be more effective with your spend.
Facebook advertising provides opportunities to ‘split test’ advertisements so that you can discover which of two ads is the most effective. You can test images in advertisements or headlines to see which proves the more engaging.
The great thing about Facebook is that you get results from the testing in a timely fashion and can implement any changes almost immediately.
This means if something isn’t working you can quickly change it so you don’t waste your advertising dollars.
Using information to target customers
Direct marketing is not new.
Customer databases with information on customer preferences have been around for well over 20 years.
What Facebook brings to the table that is new and exciting and drives marketers wild, is the depth of the information gathered and the ability to classify customers according to this information.
Traditional categories for grouping customers include age, sex, postcode and occupation.
Facebook enables you to choose people you would like to advertise to according to their interests and hobbies, football team even what sort of dog they have!
Never before have you been able to specify this level of detail for an advertising audience. For this to work you do need to know your target market very well.
Monitoring results
You may have heard marketers say: “if you can’t measure it, don’t do it”.
It’s really important when setting your marketing strategy to be clear on what has been working for you and what hasn’t.
The only way of truly knowing this is to measure and monitor all your marketing activities. Asking customers “how did you hear about us?” can be all that is required however even this simple form of measurement can slip through the cracks.
Businesses may ask the question but recording the answer is a different matter! Facebook advertising provides all the analytics for you automatically. You don’t have to do anything.
You can measure your return on investment as well as sales, hits to the website and even the number of people who viewed your ad.
In print media, such statistics are not available and is definitely a true benefit of online advertising.
Remarketing
For a message to register with a potential customer, it can take between six to twelve exposures to the message.
Facebook advertising allows you to remarket to people who have shown an interest in your product or services.
By adding a pixel to your website you can organise to have your advertising displayed to people who have viewed your website or business facebook page.
This increases the chances of your advertising working because there is already an interest shown from the person you are advertising again to. I’m sure you get why this particular feature excites marketers.
Call to action
Advertising is only as effective as the call to action that is in the advertising.
Facebook advertising makes it easy for people to ensure that their ad contains a next step.
They provide suggestions and then have the functionality within Facebook to have people book, buy, call or download now.
In a nutshell Facebook advertising works on solid marketing principles and utilises technology to overcome some of the limitations of offline advertising that’s why marketers love it.
To do this is a cost effective and efficient manner is just icing on the cake and an absolute bonus for small to medium businesses.