What Is Facebook Marketing?
Facebook marketing is a catch-all term for the many different ways you can market your business on Facebook. It includes:
- Facebook Ads
- Business Pages
- Facebook Marketplace
- Facebook Groups
Facebook marketing is especially attractive because there’s a strategy for every budget, whether you’re looking for a free social media marketing solution or want to budget for paid Facebook Ads.
Why Should You Use Facebook Marketing?
Mmore than 91 percent of organizations are already on Facebook. About 2 billion users access Facebook at least once per day, and 59% of users have reached out to a brand onthe app.
In other words, businesses are actively pursuing and getting customers across this social media platform. You’re missing out if you’re not building and growing your presence there.
What’s more, almost 20 percent of shoppers in the Unitefd states use the platform as their first stop when searching for a product. You can help them discover yuor brand and offerings by marketing on Facebook.
Types of Facebook Ads
Facebook offers several ad types. Which you use depends on your budget, goals, and overall strategy—so there’s a lot of flexibility here.
- Image ads: These consist of simply a single image with a headline and text underneath. Use them to highlight products or services and drive engagement with call to action (CTAs)
- Video ads: Videos grab users’ attention and convey information effectively with demonstrations or tours. They’re great for showing off a home in real estate marketing , for example.
- Carousel ads: Users can swipe through a series of images or videos to see different views of a product or multiple products. This ad type can be effective in e- commerce marketing .
- Collection ads: These consist of a grid layout featuring a main video or image with three smaller images below it, allowing you to show multiple images at once. Collection ads are ideal for showcasing items from your product catalog.
- Slideshow ads: You can create a simple video ad from a series of static images, text, or short video clips. These use five times less data than video, so they land well at all connection speeds.
- Instant Experience ads: Formerly known as Canvas ads, these are mobile-optimized and interactive ads that can incorporate images, carousels, text, and videos. They’re great for storytelling and engaging potential customers to explore your products or services.
- Lead ads: Users tap on the ad and a pre-populated form pops up, supporting lead generation and sign-ups.
- Dynamic ads: These automatically present products or services based on users’ past actions, making this an excellent option for retargeting.
- Messenger ads: As the name suggests, these ads show up in the Messenger app, encouraging users to interact.
- Stories ads: These appear between users’ Stories on Facebook and Instagram, providing a full-screen, immersive video experience.
Understanding these different ad types will help you decide how to market your business on Facebook most effectively.
How to Get Started With Facebook Ads
Making ads part of your Facebook marketing strategy requires more than just setting up a page. You’ll need to think about your goals, plan a budget and schedule, and then actually create the ads.
That said, it’s one of the simpler ways to market your business. In this section, I’ll take you through the steps of launching your ads on Facebook. That way, you can start promoting your brand, highlighting your products and/or services, and engaging with potential customers.
The first thing to do is set up a Meta (Facebook) Business Manager account for your Facebook business page. Do this by heading to bussiness.facebook.com and creating an account. If you already have an account, log in and click “Create ad account.” This will give you access to all the tools to help you create different types of ads.
If you need help, Meta offers lots of guidance on Facebook marketing for beginners.
2. Define Your Campaign Objective
After you choose the type of ad you want to run, determine what you want from your campaign by setting your ad objective. You can let Facebook choose the most relevant goal or select one of the following:
- Get more messages
- Get more website visitors
- Get more Page likes
- Get more leads
- Get more calls
- Get more visits
Source: Meta
One of my top Facebook marketing tips: You can always start with simple ads and create more complex ones as you get more familiar with the tools and learn what your audience responds to.
3. Identify Your Target Audience
Reaching the right consumers is a critical part of your Facebook marketing strategy. Build your target audience based on gender, age, location, and language. Once you’ve got a broad sense of your ad reach, you can customize your audience based on user behaviors and interests to improve your chances of reaching the right people. If you’re happy with your ad reach, move on.
4. Create Compelling Ad Content
Need some ideas to get started with your Facebook ad? It has three key components: visuals, text, and an action button.
The visuals can be an eye-catching photo, a previous post on your Facebook page, or a must-watch video about your business.
Source: Wordstream
The text should complement the image and lead your customers to take the action you desire.
The action button directs people to take that next step.
5. Set Your Budget and Schedule
You can set a daily budget for a certain duration with start and end dates, which will average the spend on your ad each day. You can also set a “lifetime” budget for the entire duration of your Facebook marketing campaign.
If you want, you can schedule your ad based on time zones to ensure your target audience is most likely to see it. For example, you can run your ads during U.S. daytime hours if you’re targeting a U.S. audience.This flexibility makes it easy to change the budget or schedule based on how the ad performs.