Facebook is the world’s most popular social media platform — so it’s an essential part of every marketing plan. Facebook business marketing can feel overwhelming at first due to the various components needed to set up Facebook ads for business. We’re Facebook business marketing experts that will break down everything in a digestible way for those who are beginning the journey of utilizing Facebook for marketing purposes. Here’s everything you need to know about setting up (and optimizing) your FB business ads:
What is Facebook Marketing?
Facebook marketing can occur in various ways — but the organizations that see the highest ROI utilize Facebook ad services. These services appear in two ways: promoted posts and classic ads.
Classic advertisements can be seen at the right-hand side of someone’s newsfeed on Facebook. While this form of Facebook advertising is used regularly by marketers, approximately 44% of people will never click on these advertisements. Why? Consumers do not want to feel like companies are pushing their products. The classic ads that appear to the side of the Facebook newsfeed are clearly advertisements. According to a study done by Nielson Norman Group, users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads. This phenomenon is called banner blindness — and Facebook classic ads tend to fall victim to this.
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Professional Facebook marketing agencies tend to favor Facebook’s promoted posts feature. Promoted posts can include image ads, video ads, carousel ads, or collection ads. We recommend these types of Facebook ads for new businesses and small businesses alike. These advertisements are seamlessly integrated into a user’s Facebook feed, so banner blindness doesn’t play a factor with these advertisements.
Setting up a Facebook Business Page
To run any marketing campaign for your business, you will need to set up a Facebook Business Page. If you haven’t done so already, here’s how to do it:
- Visit http://facebook.com/pages/create. (Note: you’ll need to be logged into a personal account to set up a separate business page. The public won’t have access to the personal account that set up the business page.)
- You will need to choose your business type: business/brand or community/public figure.
- Enter the details of your business.
- Upload a profile photo and cover photo that accurately reflects your business.
- You should click ‘edit page info’ before filling in details about your business, including operation hours, contact details, and a description of the company.
- Next, please click ‘create page’ and adjust your @username to create a URL for your business. This URL can be up to 50 characters long — people will be able to search for your business using this unique URL.
- Under your cover photo, you have the option to ‘add a button’ that serves as a call to action. Businesses usually opt to make this call to action button a ‘contact us’ or ‘shop’ hyperlink.
- Your Facebook Business Page is now set up — you’re ready to set up your first marketing campaign on the platform!
How Facebook Marketing Works
After you’ve set up a Facebook Business Page, you can set up as many marketing campaigns as you’d like. Facebook offers several in-application services to try to boost the likelihood of advertisers creating effective campaigns. For example, Facebook gives the ability to target an organization’s target audience based on available user data. You can select the age range, location, education level, and interests of the people who you wish to target with your promoted advertisements.
The popular social media platform also gives the marketer the ability to set ad budgets. The customizability offered for ad campaigns will help increase your likelihood of a significant ROI.
Not only will you be able to customize your campaigns to the fullest extent, but Facebook offers a service that allows you to test different versions of ads to compare which ones work the best. So, you can simultaneously run various campaigns before utilizing the built-in ad performance measurement tools that will provide you with the analytics necessary to improve your overall Facebook marketing efforts. Every marketer needs to understand what works and what doesn’t. Therefore, we recommend using all of Facebook’s tools to increase your return on investment and brand awareness.
Facebook Marketing Best Practices
Facebook offers marketing services that are utilized by approximately 10 million active advertisers regularly promoting their products and services. In a 2020 Q4 earnings call, Facebook revealed that its total advertising revenue was $20.7 billion. Since Facebook is a highly competitive marketplace, we recommend following our list of best practices to give your organization a competitive edge:
1. Make Your Content Visually Appealing
An average Facebook user only clicks on 12 ads per month — that’s one every 2.5 days. To make your marketing efforts effective, you need to utilize multiple forms of media (like photos, videos, and text-based advertisements) that are visually appealing. When someone is scrolling through their Facebook feed, they’re most likely to pause their scrolling if they see something that stands out. Content is king in the world of digital marketing, so you should ensure your content is unique and interesting.
2. Know Your Target Audience
Since you have to pay for running Facebook ads, you should know your target audience. We don’t mean that you should simply know their demographics and target your campaigns towards them through utilizing Facebook’s in-application tools. You should understand what your target audience wants to see. Ask yourself how you can add value to their lives by contributing to their likes and interests. If you really know your audience, you will create content based on their various interests.
3. Make it Relatable
People want to see content (or marketing campaigns) that apply to them. Your Facebook marketing efforts will be a lot more successful if you make relatable and relevant content for your audience. Howard Gossage, known as one of the mavericks of the advertising industry, has a famous quote that applies here: “People don’t read ads. They read what interests them, and sometimes that’s an ad.”
Find what interests your audience and create advertisements that resonate with them. The most successful Facebook ad campaigns experience success because they produced content that was relatable — and shareable. Never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing that occurs when customers share your brand’s content!
4. Engage with Customers
When creating marketing content for a business, it’s easy to forget this crucial component! Your Facebook Business Page should actively engage with your audience. People are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand if they connect and resonate with it. If you run a promoted post that receives several comments, it’s essential to take the time to respond to applicable comments, so your audience feels like you care about them. Engaging with your audience is an effective way to increase your overall engagement — which will further boost your posts free of charge!
5. Rely on Analytics
We recommend checking your campaign’s analytics regularly. You should never run advertisements on Facebook without knowing what will work best. The best advertising campaigns on Facebook are slightly tweaked over time after companies drew insights from analytics. Checking your analytics regularly will save you time, energy, and money as you market your business through Facebook.
6. Optimize Your Business Page
Your Facebook Business Page should be optimized with keywords! Ultimately, Facebook is a search engine that has an algorithm. You should find relevant keywords to include within your profile, so it will be one of the first search results if someone searches for a topic related to your business.
7. Diversify Your Content
Your content should not consist of promoted content entirely. Diversification of content is essential because it keeps your audience engaged. You should post photos, videos, links, and text-based updates relevant to your audience while staying true to your brand. Your audience will get bored and ignore your content if you solely focus on marketing campaigns! It’s necessary to market your business in ways that don’t always include paying for sponsored posts. Your audience might enjoy a video posted by your Business Page that wasn’t promoted — and decide to check out your website because of it. Your audience will be able to see which content is promoted and may feel apprehensive about your brand if every piece of content is promoted.
8. Post Regularly
Facebook’s algorithm will reward you if your organization posts regularly. If you’re unsure what to post, we recommend posting interactive content that encourages people to engage with your brand. You can upload to the Facebook Stories feature — or even go live! We recommend implementing a schedule for your content so your brand stays relevant in your audience’s minds. You know what they say: out of sight, out of mind.
Facebook marketing for businesses can be an impactful tool if used to its fullest potential. We encourage companies to utilize all of the tools that Facebook offers when creating advertising campaigns. Organizations that thrive in the digital space all have something in common — they have a significant presence on Facebook.
