5 Reasons Why Facebook Advertising Works Best For Small Businesses

It’s almost unbelievable to see people disrupting your life with flyers and posters and billboards to promote their businesses. Unfortunately, there are still businesses that are marketing like it’s 1995. Offline marketing has clearly been on the decline in the last decade and small businesses have to determine their best-suited mediums of online marketing. Well-funded startups can probably afford some offline flirting but for the bootstrapping entrepreneurs and low-budget startup/SME’s finding their ‘sweet spot’ online marketing medium is essential.

For my business, which is in the education space Facebook Advertising worked really well. I’ve learnt that the key to optimizing your online marketing budget is to test and determine a proven go-to method of marketing for your business – a social network where you are to sure to find your target audience. From there on, it’s up to you to determine how well you want to narrate the story of your brand.

Here are 5 points for you to consider as you plan on using Facebook Advertising:

#1 Targeted Marketing

I can’t think of another online marketing medium that lets you target your audience better than Facebook – especially for B2C companies. Right from age to relationship status to behaviors, interests, choosing to target both genders or just one, tablet users or mobile users – everything is specific and it helps you to reach the people you want to reach.

#2 High-Quality Leads

Let’s face it. You aren’t going to convert every website click on your ad into a sale. And not every form submission is a customer who wants to give you their money. That being said, Facebook helps you generate high-quality leads that need to be nurtured. If you do get a form submission, phone call or an e-mail through Facebook you can be sure that they are a high-quality lead. To get high-quality leads you need to know the interests of your target audience, what pages they are liking, which celebrities they are following etc.

• On average, 50% of the leads in any system are not yet ready to buy (Marketo).
• Almost 80% of new leads never become sales (MarketingSherpa).

Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects, and providing the information and answers they need. (Just FYI)

#3 Relevance Score

This point is probably my favorite one yet. Facebook’s relevance score tells you how relevant your ad has been after the first 500 impressions (No: of people who have seen the ad) This is huge for an advertiser because it lets him know if he has really understood the interests and behaviors of his target audience and it helps an advertiser decide if Facebook is a suited social media platform for the particular business. The key is to have a thorough understanding of your target market so you will know which interests you need to type in while creating your ad.

#4 Multiple-Image Ads

This is a new feature that Facebook advertising recently brought about. It lets you show multiple images in one ad that can lead to different landing pages on your website. What works well with this feature is you can now have multiple landing pages for a single ad and give your audience a choice to click on from your various value propositions. This feature helps you communicate more about your products or services when compared to the “single-image” ads.

#5 Choose Your Budget

You always save the best for last. To be able to choose your budget makes life so much more easier especially if you’re bootstrapping. My suggestion would be to start small, maybe use $10 for each day for at least 5 days. Watch your engagement, see if people are responding to your ads and then decide whether Facebook advertising is the best way for you to go. If you are a B2C company you have got to be launching your Facebook ads!

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