With digital advertising hitting its peak, you want to promote your business on a platform that promises the best results. Facebook ads have been on the trend for several years and it seems businesses are discovering how they can leverage this platform to reach a bigger audience. But you’ve probably seen some blogs that argue Facebook advertising is no longer effective. If you’re wondering whether to proceed with advertising on Facebook, here is what you need to know.
Does Facebook Advertising Work?
To find the right answers to this question, you should only consult industry experts such as The Profit League. This is important as you want to get accurate information from professionals who deal with marketing every day.
On whether Facebook advertising still works, the short answer is: Yes, the platform works incredibly well if you know how to promote your business. To help you understand why it’s one of the best platforms, here is a review that shows why you should include Facebook advertising in your business’ digital strategy.
How Facebook Advertising Works
Before answering if Facebook ads works, it’s essential to understand how advertising on Facebook works. To explain this, you need to distinguish between paid search and paid social advertising. Paid search ads help customers find businesses, while paid social ads allow your business to target prospective customers.
Facebook advertising allows you to target audiences most likely to buy your products or services. Facebook leverages the data it maintains about its users.
First, you specify your campaign objective, which could drive traffic to a website, generate leads, increase sales, or encourage visitors to download an app. From this step, you then tell Facebook whom your ad should target.
Through audience segmentation, you can explain to Facebook the profile of your target audience. Facebook will only target the ads to those who match the criteria you provided. The beauty of Facebook ads is that you can run them on multiple devices, and they also offer access to Instagram, which broadens your campaigns’ reach.
Why Facebook Ads Are Still Effective in 2020
So, now that you understand Facebook ads’ basic operation, it’s time to look at why running Facebook ads in 2020 still makes sense.
- Immense Global Audience
The very first reason you should give Facebook advertising a shot is the massive global audience you can reach on the platform. Facebook hosts more than 2.7 billion monthly users, which gives an incredible opportunity for market penetration. But, why must one submit an ad when you can simply create posts and root for organic reach?
Starting in 2018, Facebook revised its algorithm to show users less content from businesses and brands. The algorithm favors posts from friends, families, and groups to keep people connected. Even for pages that boast millions of likes, these changes meant you could lose up to 90% organic reach to your audience.
This is where Facebook ads come to rescue your promotion campaigns. In 2020, Facebook ads are still relevant and effective than ever before, especially if you look to attract new customers or raise brand awareness. The only reason you’ll not benefit from Facebook ads is wrong targeting, rushed budgeting, and low-quality content.
Unlike traditional advertising, digital advertising emphasizes finding the right people and not just reaching many people. With a large user base on Facebook, it means the potential audiences you can target are also big. You can customize your ad targeting to focus on personal interests, demographics, purchasing behavior, and hundreds of other criteria that will help you improve the ROI of your Facebook ads.
- Cost-Effective Advertising
Facebook offers one of the most affordable advertising in the digital space. This, coupled with the many ad formats and the massive user base, allows you to make the most of your advertising campaigns. Although the cost of advertising on Facebook has risen over the years, overall, you get a significantly lower rate in pay-per-click campaigns, which can be effective if set to target accurately.
How to Use Facebook Advertising
You probably have tried advertising on Facebook and things are not working as you expected. This usually happens if you fail to customize your ad correctly.
Here are quick tips you might want to implement to help you make the most of Facebook advertising.
- Track Qualitative Data
Before you start Facebook ad campaigns, look at your business performance metrics. Pay attention to your website conversion rate and average order value. If you know your conversion rate is 3% and the average order value is $100, you know you’ll get $3000 for every 1,000 visitors. This helps you track the impact of your Facebook campaigns.
- Audience Targeting
There are many ways to target audiences on Facebook. The best way to find the perfect strategy is to experiment with targeting. Use Facebook Custom Audiences to design effective remarketing ads. Custom audiences help you target users based on engagement, offline activity, app activity, customer file, and website traffic.
- Optimize for Mobile
Nearly 80% of Smartphone users prefer to use their mobile devices in making an online purchase. This tells you optimizing your ads for mobile users is vital. Tailor your ads to mobile using vertical images and videos, and limit the use of text.
- Multiple Ad Formats
Facebook offers different ad formats, including messenger ads, video ads, sponsored mentions, dynamic ads, carousel ads, collections, and lead ads. Each of these formats works for different types of brands, so experimentation would help. But based on your objectives, Facebook will recommend formats.
- Retargeting
Targeting an audience once is not enough. Retargeting ads are shown to people who engaged with your brand before. These are people visiting your website, following your page, or engaging on a post. These are people familiar with your brand and likely to be converted.
Conclusion
So, if you’ve been thinking about taking your business to the next level through digital advertising, Facebook ads still work. Facebook offers a massive platform that allows you to reach potential customers accurately.
