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Advertising, Is It Good Or Just A Face-Ache?
Just about every small #business and sole trader will be working from a very tight #marketing budget, so every penny counts, as they say.
You may have already tried a bit of #social media marketing before, but may not have been totally confident about what you were doing, or you have been putting it off because you don’t know how well it works.
Well, if you have not tried Facebook advertising yet – I am here to tell you to get your finger out, and get in there while it is still cheap!
If you are not advertising on Facebook – you are missing out!
Not convinced that Facebook is for you? Let’s take a look at some stats shall we:
Globally Facebook has 1.6 billion users. That is pretty impressive, yes?
In the UK alone, there are an average of 24 million daily users.
Facebook has a pretty comprehensive knowledge database – they know a lot about us!
If you want an international audience, then in the USA there are 128 million users daily.
Because Facebook are incredibly nosey, and they know so much about us, it makes their advert targeting incredibly accurate, so your advert will be directed to the very audience you desire rather than a generic mix you get with newspaper advertising.
For a small business, entrepreneur and sole trader, this means that Facebook advertising is a very cost-effective option, especially when you are working from a limited budget.
How does Facebook Advertising work?
You can set your own maximum budget for each day your advert runs, and you can also choose the length of your advert set. You can even pause you advert at any time, so for example if you have booked a weeks advertising and there is a very sunny bank-holiday weekend approaching where you target audience is more likely to be out enjoying the sunshine rather than viewing your ad, then you can pause it until the weekend is over.
Depending on your industry and your target audience, you can pay anything between 5p and 50p per click. For example, I am promoting my brand new fiction writing page at the moment, and am paying about 39p per page like, but compare that to just 9p per post engagement I was paying for a recent post promotion on my fashion page.
You can choose to promote your page to gain likes, or an individual post on your page that may contain a sale code or special promotion you are running. Either way, you will end up getting page likes no matter which way you choose to promote. My fiction writing page is not selling anything yet, but I want to gain some likes and prime an interested audience ready to buy when I do have something to sell.
Monitor your stats
An interesting and useful tool that Facebook give you is a live breakdown about costs per response and how well you are averaging against other similar pages in your niche. This really does give you a blow by blow insight into your advertising efforts, and can easily highlight a problem such as poor targeting, which is a common failure point of a lot of advertising campaigns.
Before social media, and the development of tracking metrics, we really were working in the dark a lot of the time when it came to direct marketing. Small budgets were easily blown when sending the wrong message to the wrong people.
With newspaper or direct mail advertising, once you had committed your advert, it was set in stone. With Facebook however, it is easy for you to split test your adverts. You can change your advert images or headlines if your original choice isn’t working for you.
Another great time saver and good use for your advertising budget is to combine promoting your page for likes, as well as to pick up opt-ins for your email list. If you prominently feature your newsletter sign-up link on your page, then when people like your page, they may also choose to opt-in to your email list too.
If you are still wary about dipping your toe into Facebook advertising, then I would suggest testing yourself with a small budget to begin with and practice, practice, practice. Play around with your advert, monitor your results closely and amend if necessary.
It does take some time and effort to perfect the ultimate Facebook ad, but if you are happy to put in the time, then it will be well worth it!
