If you engage a managed marketing solutions provider to drive traffic to your website and customers through your business’ doors, it might come as a surprise when that provider recommends you channel some of your marketing dollars into Facebook advertising. Doesn’t it seem a little counterintuitive after all, to advertise on a membership platform when search engines and website ads can present your marketing messages to a much larger audience?
Why Facebook Advertising Makes Sense
As a provider of managed marketing solutions myself, I can say with absolute conviction that you shouldn’t question your marketing partner’s sanity when he or she suggests Facebook as an advertising channel. In fact it makes complete sense and here are five reasons why.
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Facebook is Bigger than China
It may be a membership site, but as of 2015, the number of active Facebook members was nearly 1.4 billion, which is greater than the population of China, the most populous country on the globe. That’s what technology reporter Timothy Stenovek told readers of The Huffington Post in his article called Facebook Is Now Bigger Than The Largest Country On Earth. With a potential advertising audience that large, your managed marketing solutions specialist would not be doing her job if she neglected to tap into it with targeted ads.
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Top for Targeting Granularity
Targeted advertising on Facebook is simply awesome for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Facebook has more data on its members than any other social media platform. As one commentator put it “Google knows what you want, but Facebook knows who you are”. That quote from a Facebook marketing guru was reported by Dillon Baker, Associate Editor at Contently, in his article titled How to Use Facebook’s Best Feature: Targeting.
Baker also goes on to talk about the second reason Facebook is great for targeted advertising: the granularity with which you can define your target audience. Because Facebook has so much data about its members, you can target by geography, people’s likes and preferences, and of course, characteristics like age and marital status. You can even try look-alike modeling, a technique normally reserved for advanced programmatic marketing on the ad exchanges.
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Super-affordable Advertising
Compared with other advertising channels, the cost per 1,000 impressions is about $0.25, which as social media author and speaker Brian Carter points out in a Moz Blog post (Why Every Business Should Spend at Least $1 per Day on Facebook Ads), is just 1% of the cost of TV advertising. That’s extremely inexpensive for ads that can be targeted with laser-precision, require little effort to serve, and get your business a whole lot of exposure.
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You Can Leverage Social Influence
Facebook helps you get the most from your advertising by adding social proof. For example, if you post an advertisement and it gets some likes, the friends of the likers will be notified and guess what? If they view the ad because their friend did, they might be tempted to visit your website or even make a purchase. People are readily influenced by friends, family, and even peers when making purchase decisions.
For example, as web designer William Johnson proclaimed in his 2014 Small Business Trends article (What’s the Biggest Influencer in Consumer Purchase Decisions?) 38 % of mothers are more likely to buy brands that receive Facebook likes from other women. Leveraging social influence gives your advertising more credibility, offering an advantage that’s missing from many other advertising channels.
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Measure Results Across Platforms
According to Laurie Sullivan, a writer for MediaPost, the majority of sales conversions take place on a different device from the one on which the first impression was served. In his MP article It’s Not Magic, Just Cross-Device Conversion Tracking, Laurie puts the figure at about 90%. So what this means is that when your managed marketing solutions provider advertises your business on a website, someone may see the ad on their laptop browser, but will probably end up purchasing your product or service using a different device; a smartphone perhaps.
Why is this important to know? It’s because Facebook uses a person’s real identity rather than cookies for campaign tracking, allowing you or your marketing provider to track your customers’ journeys across all devices, providing valuable data for use in future campaigns.
Facebook Advertising: Is it Part of Your Strategy?
A small marketing budget can go a long way on the world’s favorite social media website. Don’t miss out on inexpensive targeted advertising to an audience that’s bigger than China. But it’s also easy to throw your money away on Facebook ads… Ask your managed marketing solutions provider about getting your business found on Facebook.
If you haven’t yet managed to take advantage of managed marketing services, Changescape Web can help. We’re based in St Charles, Missouri and provide managed marketing solutions to help small businesses like yours. To discover how we can help you with business advertising online, just provide us with a few details using our online inquiry form and we’ll get right in touch with you.