Facebook advertising has constantly been gaining popularity among businesses for the past decade. The platform, in its earlier days, was only known as a social media platform. Gradually, businesses started realizing the value of it in terms of promoting products and services. This was the time when Facebook ads were not yet launched. Businesses were taking advantage of many followers on their fan pages by posting marketing content about their brand. Soon after that, Facebook launched its paid advertising campaigns.
Today, millions of businesses are either organically promoting their stuff on Facebook or running Facebook ads with a properly allocated budget to do their advertising. Facebook ads come in several different forms nowadays. Each form has its own detailed settings that can be adjusted from the Facebook ads manager. Whether you are boosting a Facebook page or a Facebook post, you can set up your campaign with an exact daily or lifetime budget and target people based on their demographics, interest, lifestyle or habit, and past exposure to your brand. It is interesting how these settings allow you to set your ads accurately and build a large amount of data that you can use to modify your future campaigns and advertising strategies.
As more and more businesses get involved in Facebook advertising, the platform keeps tweaking its algorithm to favor these businesses by making the ads more effective and targeting options more accurate. It’s just that as Facebook users, we are so used to simply continuing scrolling down our Facebook newsfeeds that sometimes we do not even notice how many Facebook ads we come across in between. These ads are formatted exactly as any other Facebook post, which gives them a friendly outlook and encourages user engagement.
Image taken on Strikingly user’s website
If you are running a business but have not started using Facebook advertising yet, you could be missing out on a fantastic venue for reaching your potential customers. If you are looking to advertise on Facebook but are unsure how to do so, you have come to the right place.
In this article, we will discuss the ways and benefits of Facebook advertising. After that, we will provide you with a Facebook advertising checklist that you can go through as a guide before starting a new ads campaign on this platform. We will also discuss Facebook advertising costs in between and see if running Facebook ads is cost-effective for your business or not.
Benefits of Facebook Advertising
Here is a list of nine benefits of Facebook advertising.
1. Micro Target Your Audiences
Social media advertising usually gives advertisers the ability to run very accurately targeted ads. Based on the data derived from users, these social media platforms develop ad setting options for businesses to micro-target their audiences. The same is with Facebook advertising.
Facebook ads offer meticulously detailed targeting options that help you narrow down your audiences’ demographics to the micro-level. You can segment your audiences under numerous factors, such as age, gender, location, interests, spoken languages, education level, job title, political affiliation, buying behaviors, recent purchases, and more.
These options allow businesses to set core audiences for their ad campaigns. Another very good option is that you can target users who have particularly interacted with your brand in a certain way.
2. Get Valuable Insights into Your Audiences
Facebook advertising makes aggregate data available to you through its ‘Audience Insights’. This data includes information about how users interact with your Facebook page and the rest of Facebook. This data is highly precious and valuable for businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of their past campaigns and modify or strategize for their future campaigns.
Once you build your custom audiences using these insights, you can move them to your Facebook ‘Ads Manager’ tool.
3. Design Better Ads for Your Business Needs
Facebook advertising allows you to design a broad range of ad types. Some of the ad types you can create on Facebook include as follows.
- Photo ads, which appear in the form of single static images along with a caption
- Video ads, which vary in their length and can appear in the newsfeed, stories, or in-stream other videos
- Story ads, which are customizable ads that consume the entire screen
- Messenger ads, which appear between chats or conversations in Facebook messenger
- Carousel ads, which are comprised of a few static images for users to scroll through
- Slideshow ads, which appear in the form of short video clips, including sound, motion, and text
4. Run Affordable Ad Campaigns
Facebook advertising mostly runs on the pay-per-click model and is therefore quite affordable even for small businesses. Even the Facebook Ads Manager tool is free. The only cost of running Facebook ads is the budget that you set for your ad campaigns.
5. Get Very Fast Results
Facebook advertising gets you results very fast. Even before running your ads, you can see the estimated number of people who will take the desired action when your ad is shown to them. These estimates can be viewed in the sidebar as you adjust the setting to build your campaign. They are calculated instantly by Facebook, based on your targeting criteria and daily budget selected.
6. Get Access to the Largest Audiences in the World
Facebook currently has more than 2.7 billion active users. Being the gigantic ads platform that it is, the platform provides businesses access to the largest audiences in the world. Since Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012, it gives access to a massive database of audiences on both platforms.
7. Gain Access to Very In-Depth and Powerful Analytics
The Facebook Ads Manager provides a wide range of insights for your ads performance. Every ad you create and run through Facebook advertising can be measured in great depth through the platform’s ad tools.
Facebook provides three components of ad measurement.
- The breakdowns let you see the impact of age, gender, device, location etc. on user actions.
- Attribution reports help you identify the key touchpoints of your sales funnel.
- Ad comparisons are useful for fine-tuning your campaigns by adding more variations and testing which one gives better results.
8. Set Up the Ads Very Easily
Facebook advertising is meant for businesses of all sizes. Individuals looking to start a business or build an online stream of income can also run Facebook ads to give the initial boost to their initiative. Since Facebook targets everybody to run Facebook ads, whether or not they are adept with digital technology or familiar with the Facebook algorithm, it has built a straightforward procedure to create ad campaigns.
The process of creating Facebook ads is quite self-explanatory. Every field gives you options to choose from and also mentions a brief description of each option. The variety of choices available to target audiences can feel a bit overwhelming, but the process of setting your ads is actually quite simple. You just need to have a Facebook page or have an advertiser role for an existing Facebook page.
You can start creating your Facebook ads from one of the following.
- The Facebook page
- The ad creation page of Facebook
- The Facebook Ads Manager mobile app
9. Remarket Your Facebook Ads
Remarketing or retargeting refers to running ads to reach those audiences that have already previously interacted with your business in one way or the other. These can also be groups of people who have shown interest in your brand or products somehow. Remarketing is made possible through cookies or session tracking.
Image taken from Strikingly
Facebook advertising offers retargeting options using the Facebook pixel. This is a small snippet of code that has to be pasted on your website to enable Facebook to track your site visitors so that you can later retarget these visitors through Facebook ads.
If your website is built on Strikingly, you can easily install a Facebook pixel on it
You can install a Facebook pixel on your Strikingly website by following the steps given below.
- Get the pixel ID from Facebook.
- Enter the ID to your Strikingly website.
- Use the Facebook test events tool to verify and confirm that the pixel is functioning properly.
Image taken from Strikingly
The results will be available for you to analyze in just a few hours. You can view these results in your Facebook dashboard. You can also observe the sudden rise in your website traffic by checking out your stats from your Strikingly dashboard.
Facebook Advertising Checklist
Before you get started with Facebook advertising, here is a checklist to make sure you are fully prepared.
- Make sure you have a clear, precise, and long-term advertising goal.
- Create a measurable objective for your ad campaigns.
- Choose your exact target audience.
- Build a Facebook ads strategy.
- Create your ads.
- Launch your ads.
- Monitor your ads.
- Modify your ads with the help of Facebook analytics to get better results.
Facebook advertising is beneficial for businesses of all kinds. We even saw that it is very cost-effective, due to the minimized wastage of your marketing budget. Since you can micro-target your audiences for Facebook ads, there is a high chance that the people shown your ads will be interested in moving further along your sales funnel.
At Strikingly, we encourage our users to keep retargeting their website visitors through ad campaigns until they convert these audiences into their customers. The tools and features of Strikingly allow you to build websites that give the best browsing experience to your prospects. Facebook advertising or any other form of advertising is a lot more effective if your website is responsive, easy to navigate, beautifully built, and overall user-friendly.
