Importance of ‘Facebook Marketing for Small Business’
Facebook – the largest social media network in the world has an average 1.2 billion active users per day. The number of users is increasing day by day as the world is completely changing to a digital world. In this situation, ‘Facebook marketing for small business’ became an unavoidable marketing strategy in the businesses world. For small scale businesses, especially the budding companies, social media is a platform to showcase their products and reach the global audience without spending a huge amount for marketing. It is important for social media managers and digital marketing managers to perceive how to improve facebook ads to strengthen the marketing strategy of a business. Undeniably, facebook ads are the best way to reach the audience in every nook and cranny of the world without shelling out a single dime from your pockets. This will save time and cost very much and is beneficial for a budding company and make it effective for ‘facebook marketing for small business’.
This article will let you know everything that is required to know how to advertise on facebook from creating an ad to tracking its performance and an idea of facebook marketing for small business.
How to promote your products or services by Facebook Advertisement
If you wish to do a ‘Facebook marketing for small business’, contact any good facebook marketing services company. This will be the best option and they will give you an idea of ‘facebook marketing for small business’. You can know the possibilities of marketing your business on facebook. Facebook ads enable the businesses, (irrespective of the industry) to promote ads or post content, targeting a particular group of audience. The amount you need to spend on the ad totally depends on its reach and engagement. The facebook ads created will be showcased either on the news feed of the target audience or on the facebook page of the social media users towards their right side. When you post an ad on the facebook, you would get to know about what your customers are looking for. The data gathering will let you improvise the product. It strikes the right chord and gives an incredible advertising experience too.
Best practices to be embraced by the businesses while creating a Facebook ad
Prior to start creating a facebook ad, you need to keep the below best practices in mind.
Have a clear goal before creating an ad: Without a goal, you can reach nowhere. The same applies to the advertising campaign that you create on social media. To create and post an ad on facebook, you would need to pay a small amount. However, having a goal of why you are creating an ad prior to allocating budget is paramount. You need to know the goal you would like to accomplish by showcasing the ad. The goal for ‘facebook marketing for small business’ includes gaining huge traffic to your site, improving sales, creating brand reputation or gaining huge likes. The action performed by the audience on the ad will cost you, so ensure to have a clear objective prior to investing in the social media ads.- Know your target audience: There are billions of facebook users and you need to know the target audience to showcase the ad; only to the intended audience instead of showing to the people who are not really interested in using your product.
- Be specific on your audience targeting. Facebook has millions, if not billions, of data points. Take the time to narrow your potential audience to ensure your ad will appear only to the target audience. So that facebook marketing for small business can be more effective without costing much money & time.
Do not irk the potential audience showing the same ad:
Unarguably, the audience will be bored of seeing the same ad every day when they login into their facebook account. When you showcase the same ad, the customers get irritated and never click on it. When there is no or less Click Through Rate (CTR) for your ads, then the social media site will slam penalties wherein you would need to pay high for every click by the potential customers. This, in turn, takes a toll on likes and comments that you receive. Also, this affects you campaign totally and disturbs your marketing strategy.
Facebook marketing for small business – Simple steps to advertise on Facebook
The below seven steps for ‘facebook marketing for small business’ will help you set a goal, identify the target audience, allocate budget, create an ad and showcase to the target audience on their Facebook pages.
Step 1: Creating a Facebook page for your business/service
When you are creating a Facebook page for your business, you would need to select the right category in which your business falls into. The category will determine the kind of business you do and help the potential users to find you on facebook with fewer efforts. When the audience land on your page, they look the category of your business.
To create a page, navigate to ‘facebook.com’ and click pages and then click create a page.
A list of categories is displayed. Choose the appropriate category and then click get started to start creating the ad by reading the instructions.
Points to take into consideration while creating a Facebook business/brand page
- Provide complete details about your business in the appropriate fields. This information will improve the credibility of the business and let the customers get in touch with you easily.
- Upload the cover photo that conveys about your brand to the audience and keeps the facebook profile relevant to your business.
- It is a best practice to have a page category
Step 2: Set goals for your Facebook ads
Every ad should have a strategy to accomplish the set goal within the desired time span. You need to have a SMART goal that is specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant to your business and is bound with time. Interestingly, having a SMART goal will let you achieve the campaign goal quickly and helps you earn huge profits.
For instance, if you are planning to take a session on Internet of Things in the next two months and your goal is to get at least 200 people registering for the session, then this will drive you to create an ad that is a perfect fit to meet your goal.
Step 3: Have a clear objective for your ad
After creating the Facebook ad and setting the goal for the ad, you need to navigate to the Facebook Ad manager to set an objective for the created ad.
If you have set a goal for the ad as to expect a specific number of registrants for the session, then the objective of the ad would be to increase the attendance or else if your goal is to drive many people to your blogs, then your objective would be to drive people to the website.
Step 4: Set an ad budget and the intended audience
Personalize the ad for your potential audience
It is important to create the ad for your target audience rather than focusing on everyone. For instance, if you are selling ladies accessories, then you need to focus on teenage and middle-aged women rather than focusing on men and other age group people. The ad target would be based on various factors including location, age, gender, likes, dislikes, behavior, and language.
Also, you can create the ad for the people who are in your customer base or you can completely focus the ad on the new set of audience instead of targeting the existing customers. You can get the list of the audience to whom you have to target by checking your website traffic.
When you target the right set of audience for your facebook ad, you can make more out of your ad.
Set budget for the ad: You need to allocate the budget for ‘Facebook ad’ from your marketing budget and stick to it strictly. Once the target audience is finalized, the next thing would be to set budget. This budget should be the amount you can spend for the ad. You can also enter the amount that you are willing to spend every day. Furthermore, you can have a budget for the ad for the coming few years. The budget you allocate would be the maximum amount you would like to spend on the ad for the coming years.
Set an objective:
Choose your objective: Choose whether you want to go for pay per click or impressions. This is the deciding factor of how you pay for the ad. When you improve the facebook like page, then when the ad is showcased to the audience, they would get enticed to like or comment your page. Once the bid for the ad, you can also set the time during which your ‘ad’ has to be showcased. The best thing is that, people who are choosing lifetime budget package will have an option to choose the specific hours and weeks to run their ads.
When you set a time to run the ad, you can save a lot of money and reach the potential audience. Undeniably, the audience would visit their facebook pages during lunch or night times, so showing the ads during those hours would be lucrative. This helps you to run the ad when your audience are on the social media site. For instance, if your ad is targeting house wives, then these people will get free in the noon, thus running the ad in that particular time will let you get more likes and conversions.
Step 6: Choose the aesthetic appeal of your ad
Undeniably, ads should give a glimpse of the business rather than bore the customers by cramming content. It is really an intriguing task for the ad creators to create an ad, especially on Facebook. They need to choose relevant images, headlines, text, and position of the ad on the facebook page. The limit of images you can post an ad is five, but the character limit is only 25. So, you need to convey everything about your product/service in these 25 characters.
Ensure to keep the headlines, crisp, clear, and concise. The headlines should motivate the customers to click on the ad. In addition to headline, you need to add body text of 90 characters. The text should be promotional, sweet, and short.
Finally, you need to choose the ad position. You can either send to the news feed of the audience or place on the right column of their Facebook page.
Step 6: Place order
After the ad is ready and is reviewed by the concerned departments, you need to click ‘place order’ button that is available on the top right-hand corner of the page. You would be notified by the ‘Facebook Ad’ division once the ad is validated and approved by them through emails.
Step 7: Track the Ad performance through generated reports
Once the ad goes live, you need to track the performance of the ad to check whether it is running successfully and touching the pulse of the audience or not. To generate the report, you need to land on ‘Facebook Ads’ page where you need to navigate to the ‘Ads Manager’ and click reports. The report will give the performance of your ad in the last 30 minutes. If you want to improvise your ad and gain a huge traffic, then you need to allocate an extra budget for your ad and use ‘HootSuite‘ tool.
Procedure to advertise on Facebook using HootSuite tool
With the billions of users available on facebook, businesses are making this as a promotional tool to reach the audience. The HootSuite is a boon for the social media managers to advertise on facebook through it, in an effective way and earn a high return on investment.
AdEspresso by HootSuite:
This is an efficient tool that enables the marketing managers to create, analyze and improvise the ‘Facebook ads’ quickly. It is exclusively designed for the businesses that are in the budding stage and trying to establish themselves in their niche market.
Anyone who has knowledge of social media can sign-up to ‘AdEspresso by HootSuite’ and start creating ads. If you are an existing user of this tool, you can create ads and track its performance on the dashboard with ease.
HootSuite Ads
‘HootSuite ad’ has evolved to be the best tool to create ads and the developers are adding new features to this tool. You can create and test the performance of the ads in a matter of minutes. You can give privileges to a few people to create and edit ads. Also, you can promote the ads through the dashboard of this tool, thus saving your valuable time and stay productive. You can save the facebook budget or utilize it optimally using this tool. Undeniably, both these tools are making waves in the digital marketing world. You can use either of these tools to create, edit, manage and improve ads.