Should Your Business Advertise on Facebook?

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Should Your Business Advertise on Facebook?

Facebook isn’t the best advertising platform for every business. The way to know if it’s right for your business is to understand who your customer avatar is, where they hang out, and what type of product you have.

Your Business Should Be Advertising On Facebook

Facebook marketing is beneficial for many different kinds of businesses. However, businesses that will benefit most from Facebook ads offer a non-necessity buy or some type of impulse buy.

Some examples of businesses that should definitely be advertising on Facebook include:

E-commerce stores
Information/education business
Local businesses
Direct-response

Also, businesses that need to build brand awareness can benefit from opening a Facebook Business Page, setting up Facebook ads manager, and running ads.

Build Brand Awareness

The reason Facebook is so great for building brand awareness is that there is such laser-focused targeting available on the social media platform. A lot of marketers are aware of this. But if you’re just learning how to market on Facebook, this may be new to you.

Using the Facebook ads manager, you can drill down to a very specific target audience. You can tell Facebook exactly who your target audience is by narrowing down who sees your ad set.

Facebook allows you to narrow your audience by:

Interests
Behaviors
Demographics
Persona
Geographic location (city, zip code, distance, etc.)
Age
Gender

As you can see, this is particularly relevant to any type of local business, informational business, or e-commerce.

After running some ads, you’ll begin to see trends in who is responding to your Facebook stories vs. your Facebook post. You can test ad format, ad placement, and ad type, such as video, graphic, carousel, or text. All of this is available via the Facebook business manager.

Businesses that benefit from Facebook advertising

Track Ad Campaign Performance

The Facebook ads manager makes it easy for marketers or business owners to measure the success of ad campaigns. Think of billboards, radio, print media, etc. With those types of marketing channels, you can’t select a custom audience, engage with the potential customer, or measure your return on ad spend.

Inside the Facebook ads manager, you can track every detail of every ad set you publish. And since Facebook bought Instagram, you can do the same with Instagram ads.

Why Facebook Works

One thing to remember about Facebook is that intent, as part of the sales funnel, is non-existent on the social media platform.

Facebook advertising is interrupter advertising.

You’re kind of catching people off guard. With Facebook advertising, it’s like you’re trying to work your way into their social circle.

Facebook marketing, in particular, Facebook advertising, is ideal for businesses that are marketing specifically to an interruption-based audience.

Not All Businesses Should Advertise on Facebook

There are a handful of businesses that should not use Facebook ads. Remember that the news feed creates a great atmosphere for interruptive advertising. It’s not as great if your business needs to target an intent-based audience.

An ad campaign on Facebook will generally underperform if you need to meet the potential customer at the “intent” stage of the sales funnel.

For example, lawyers, insurance carriers, some doctors, law enforcement, etc. Those types of businesses need to engage the target audience at a specific moment.

Case Study: “I need a DUI lawyer.”

I was running ads for a DUI lawyer on Facebook. But no matter what we did, we couldn’t get any of the ads to perform. What we realized is that, when somebody got a DUI, they were actively and intentionally searching for a lawyer. The target audience wasn’t sitting around, waiting to stumble upon the best local DUI lawyer on Facebook. The ads didn’t work because they couldn’t reach the person at the right time.

One thing to note about intent is that Facebook could be a good avenue for brand awareness, instead. You just wouldn’t want to measure your success based on conversions. Instead, you would want to measure your success based on brand awareness.

Prohibited Products and Services

Businesses that sell products or services that are prohibited on Facebook obviously shouldn’t advertise on the social media platform.

There are a lot of businesses starting up that sell cannabis, CBD products, firearms, etc. Facebook won’t allow those types of products to be advertised on the platform.

You can try to get away with it. But what will ultimately happen is your ad account or your business ads manager will get shut down. Trying to sneak past Facebook’s rules will spell disaster for your Facebook page in general.

Even though everyone raves about how easy it is to advertise on Facebook, it isn’t the best platform for every purpose. To decide if it will work for your business, think about the different ways in which you could use the platform. Do you need to build brand awareness? If you answered yes, then you should consider Facebook marketing for your business. Do you need to meet your customer when they’re searching for you? If you said yes, then you might be better off advertising on another channel.

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