Facebook boasts that its platform has more than 1.9 billion active users, with 802 million people logging in daily and five new profiles created every second. However, these big numbers should be a goldmine for businesses.
Any online marketer knows you need to reach your target audience where they spend most of their time, and Facebook is the most obvious answer. After all, who can ignore the social media channel that everybody uses?
Facebook Advertising and Why You Should Use It
More than 30 million brands are using Facebook on a daily basis to connect with their target audience. With the increased popularity of the platform and fierce competition for consumer attention, Facebook is moving towards a “freemium” business model, making its advertising program crucial to the digital marketing success in 2014 and beyond.
However, whilst Facebook’s efforts to make advertisers pay to reach their audience has left a lot of marketers scathing, it’s not too concerning because in terms of ‘bang for buck’, Facebook is more cost effective than any other advertising medium. Here is why:
- The platform delivers more ROI. It’s reported to reach 1,000 people than other social media channels.
- Facebook ads have the potential to reach as many people as radio or TV advertising, but with more controlled targeting capabilities.
- The depth of social profiling and data that Facebook owns is one step ahead of any other platform (with the exception of Google).
- You don’t need a big budget to test Facebook ads. In fact, you can get results for as little as $1 per day.
Furthermore, here are three useful tips to employ Facebook advertising in your marketing strategy:
1. Choosing News Feed Placed Ads rather than Right Hand Side Placed Ads
Let’s take a look at customer’s point of view for a moment. Why do they log in to Facebook? To enjoy the ads?
Sadly, the answer is obviously no. Most people log in to Facebook to connect with their friends, to be entertained or to get valuable information. Therefore, what advertisement would get their attention? Is it the one that was delivered in context with the user experience (a news feed placed ad) or one on the peripheral of the page (right hand side ad)? With any advertising the first aim should be to get the consumers attention and to do that you need to deliver advertising in context with the user experience. Remember, no matter how good your ad is, without the consumer’s attention you have nothing.
Also, news feed placed ads are the only ad type that appear on mobile devices. With mobile internet usage surpassing desktop internet usage by the end of the year, a mobile optimised ads will play a huge role in your Facebook Advertising Success.
2. Using Custom Audience Targeting
Facebook’s new custom audiences feature allows you to deliver your advertising program to prospects that you already have a relationship with. You can upload email lists, phone number lists, Google+ circles, app user or Facebook Id’s and serve targeted advertising to these consumers. As email open rates are declining, uploading your email list and serving advertising through Facebook can be a perfect way to regain these consumers attention. Remember, attention is key in social media marketing. Without it, your marketing program will be useless.
Another effective tool within custom audience’s is Facebook’s remarketing feature. Once you install the Facebook remarketing Pixel on your website, you can build custom audience’s based on your website visitors activity, which you can later use to serve future ads too.
3. Utilising Rotating Ad Creative to Maximise Click-Through Rates (CTR)
If you use Facebook frequently, you might have been overexposed to an advertisement before. It just a matter of time when you become frustrated by these ads. The technical term for this is ad fatigue. It means that there is a maximum “ad frequency” you should expose to your target audience, otherwise it will give a negative impact on your brand. Moreover, it is also important to understand that if you overly exposed your target audience to advertising, the click-through rates will drop, and Facebook will only keep an advertisement with high click-through rates.
The solution of this problem is creating an ad rotation to keep ad creative (both images and ad copy) fresh and click-through rates high. As frequency (the average number of times people saw your ad) increases and CTR starts to drop dramatically, you need to change the ad immediately. As a rule of thumb, you should not let ad frequency get over 5. However, you have to monitor the relationship between CTR, frequency and set a standard for ad rotation within your company. This standard may change from a campaign to another campaign.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Facebook is moving towards a “freemium” model. Still, it would be a fatal mistake to abandon this big ship over a couple of bucks in a month. The Facebook audience is too big to ignore. Get more strategic with your Facebook advertising, deliver fresh ad creative, optimise ads for the mobile experience, provide valuable content and deliver advertising in context with your sales funnel. Facebook also gives you multiple tools to surpass any other platform. Use them wisely.