Facebook Ad Marketing for Your Business: What are the Advantages?

Have you heard that social media advertising is ineffective?

Or that, with the evolution of other social platforms, advertising on Facebook is no longer worthwhile?

If that's the case, reconsider.

How about you consult with the leading Facebook ad agency in India?

Here are just ten reasons you should include Facebook in your marketing mix, highlighting its key differences from other social media platforms and its advantages over other digital channels.

1. Reach a Wide Audience

Without a doubt, Facebook provides advertisers with one of the largest user bases. According to Statista, Facebook had more than 2.6 billion users worldwide as of July 2020. That is more than any other social media platform and possibly only second to Google's search users.

Facebook's audience is not only large but also diverse in terms of demographics. You should be able to find your desired audience profile on Facebook, regardless of who your business serves. While skewing towards younger users, with 62 percent of users falling between the ages of 18 and 34, Facebook attracts users of all ages, with 38 percent falling between 35 and 65.

The fastest-growing demographic groups of Facebook users are the older demographic groups. Since 2015 the number of Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) on Facebook has steadily grown by double digits. According to Pew Research Center, those parts of the Silent Generation (born in or before 1945) on Facebook almost doubled.

2. Alignment with Both B2C & B2B Businesses

Have you heard that the Facebook advertising agency in India is only for business-to-business (B2C) transactions? Prepare to be astounded by how successful B2B businesses can run Facebook campaigns. Business executives spend 74% more time on Facebook than the general population. Because the business-to-business market is competitive, B2B marketers must be aggressive when leveraging Facebook.

However, there is room for success if you use the right targeting, ad format, messaging, and off-Facebook user experience on your site. B2B marketers should think about Facebook remarketing the least. We frequently forget that anyone who is a B2B target remains so even after they leave the office or are online in snackable moments in between work engagements.

They are the same individual. Remarketing to them on Facebook is a dependable way to stay in their thoughts. Facebook offers the following targeting segments that are well suited to B2B needs when it comes to attracting new users:

• Employer name.
• Job title.
• Employment industry.
• Interest industry.
• Employer company size.
• Business travelers.

Another B2B strategy worth investigating is the creation of lookalike audiences based on an existing email list, website visitors, or customer base. While this is not unique to Facebook and other platforms now offer it, advertisers have seen it perform well on the platform. Hawke Media's Facebook advertising strategy began with this step, which resulted in a 4x return on ad spend.

3. Full-Funnel Targeting with Multiple Forms of Engagement

Facebook may be the only digital platform that successfully caters to users at all stages of their engagement journey. The ad formats, targeting options, and measurement capabilities of Facebook are well-suited to any marketing strategy. It is useful whether a user is in the proverbial upper funnel stages, casually browsing and just beginning their research, or in the market to buy.

For the awareness stage, Facebook sponsored stories, video ads, and carousel ads are excellent ways to pique someone's interest without being overly direct. If users are not in the right mind to consider your message, they will ignore it and move on. But if they are, this is your opportunity to surprise and delight them with something highly visual, memorable and demonstrates how your service or product can be used to provide value.

The goal is to show something that will excite users and motivate them to do more research when the timing is right for them. If you want to reach users in the middle of the funnel (i.e., in the consideration phase), Facebook has six different solutions for you. It's worth noting that they allow you to engage users on Facebook and drive off-Facebook actions such as users interacting with content on your website.

If getting users to consider your business actively is your main goal, Facebook can be a dependable source of highly qualified traffic (or, if your business relies on app usage to drive app installs). Conversion campaign options will benefit transaction-oriented marketers. Use the custom buttons provided by Facebook to enhance your ads. Depending on your industry and objectives, Facebook has a variety of tailored buttons to incorporate into ads with a specific call to action to help tailor your ad to your specific objective (e.g., book a hotel room, make a purchase).

4. Audience Transparency

While some programmatic networks offer similar targeting capabilities, Facebook’s audience reach is highly transparent. By self-selecting audience targeting, your business has high control and transparency over your target audiences.

• Fans: Your Facebook followers.
• Friends of Fans: Users who are friends of your followers.
• Behaviors or Interests: Users who meet the criteria you selected based on self-reported criteria.
• Remarketing: Users who have previously visited your site.

While other platforms will optimize your placements for you, segmenting your campaign on Facebook based on these known audience clusters allows you to derive insights. A campaign could do well in either case. However, on Facebook, you will see which segments performed the best, allowing you to form hypotheses and test and refine strategies in the future.

Psychographic Targeting

Facebook's targeting options extend far beyond demographics. Demographics alone are becoming a poor predictor of someone's lifestyle or purchasing needs. For example, not all millennials have large amounts of student debt or live in a way that would be associated with having little disposable income.

Facebook's targeting capabilities enable targeting based on various lifestyle characteristics such as interests, life events, behaviors, or hobbies. This allows for more precise targeting and better digital strategy alignment with offline tactics, ensuring that the same behavioral criteria are used across your entire marketing channel mix.

Competitor Targeting

Few solutions will allow you to target your competitors' audiences. You cannot target fans of other brands on Facebook. You can, however, continue to target users who have indicated an interest in specific brands. That is based on self-reported data and may not be up to date, as it is dependent on when a user last updated their settings.

Still, if used at scale, this can be an effective strategy for attracting well-qualified users. By creating a custom audience of users interested in 20+ well-known brands, one can quickly reach thousands of users without paying fees for these audience profiles, which may be required on other channels.

Variety of Ad Formats

With ten Facebook ad formats, Facebook leads the way among social media platforms regarding the variety of ad options available. There are a few options for each target marketing funnel stage, with the most commonly used image and video ads.

It is worth noting that nearly all ad formats allow for some text and visual elements, giving you a significant opportunity to both describe and showcase your business. One ad format worth noting is Sponsored Posts, especially if your company allows others to post on its feed. Boosting a user-generated post on your feed will increase engagement with other users.

Strong user-generated content frequently outperforms purpose-created ads, more easily identified as purpose-created messages. By contrast, user-generated content is organic, and people are less likely to be on the defensive if seeing it.

Drive Traffic Directly to Your Site

Many of Facebook's ad options allow you to drive referral traffic to your company's website. True, most users open Facebook to stay and browse its content. However, if your ad is compelling and your targeting is highly relevant, the user will be enticed to leave Facebook and visit your website.

Measurable Performance

While it may seem obvious, it is worth noting that Facebook allows for reporting on a wide range of metrics, and many metrics are available depending on the ad format. These range from actions that users can take before leaving Facebook (for example, reach and ad engagements) to off-Facebook events (e.g., conversions, revenue). The only requirement is that the Facebook pixel be installed on your website.

While third-party analytics tracking can report basic conversion metrics, Facebook relies on its pixel to auto-optimize campaigns. Without it, Facebook is unable to zero in on the user profiles that convert the best and will continue to serve ads to the same demographic throughout the campaign.

Keep Your Existing Audience Engaged

One significant advantage of Facebook advertising is that it nurtures and assists in the growth of your Facebook followers and fans. While driving referral site traffic, site engagement, and conversions is critical, engaging with and maintaining your Facebook audience regularly is also critical.

Consider your Facebook profile to be a second website for your company – another digital marketing agency in India for your company. As with your website and any other offline presence, some users will naturally lose interest in interacting with you as time passes. They must be reminded of and provided with new reasons to keep you in mind.

Users who leave permanently must be replaced. Whatever your primary goal, Facebook advertising always has the important secondary benefit of increasing your follower base and giving your existing fans something new to think about. You can run campaigns that only target your existing followers regularly if your budget allows it.

Being a follower does not guarantee that you will receive all updates. A sponsored campaign aimed at followers does not guarantee that all followers will be reached. However, it will allow users to get much closer, incentivizing them to check your profile more frequently.

Conclusion

The top ten benefits set Facebook apart from other social media platforms and digital channels. Like them, Facebook's ad platform provides user-friendly budget management tools, near real-time results monitoring, is accessible to any business of any size, and can drive measurable results, including revenue.

Finally, maintaining your Facebook presence has the indirect benefit of improving your organic search presence. A Facebook advertising agency can help you increase your social signals (shares, likes, and comments), which can indirectly impact your SEO rankings.