How Facebook Makes it Easy for Small Businesses to Advertise to their Audience

How much time do you spend on Facebook every day?

I’m not just talking about your personal account, but also your professional one. If you’re a small business owner, then you should absolutely have a significant professional presence on Facebook (and other social media networks). Facebook is one of the most popular social media channels in the world, with over 2.4 billion users and over 1.56 billion daily users. There are 9.3 million in Florida alone! That’s a lot of horn honking Floridians! Those kinds of numbers can give you a massive reach to connect with both current and potential clients. 

But how can you get started?

You might have already been posting a few messages or ads here and there, but without much success. In order to succeed on Facebook, you need to conquer the algorithm and make sure that you get your content delivered to your audience!

[TWEET “If you have a small business, then Facebook might be your best friend when it comes to effective and affordable marketing!”]

Figure Out Your Audience

Before you can create Facebook ads, you need to know who your audience is. In other words, who are you going to be marketing to through your Facebook Ads and other Facebook posts? Do you know who your client avatar is? 

Some inexperienced marketers and small business owners adopt a “throw money against the wall and see what sticks” method of social media marketing. Instead of narrowing down their target audience, they spend all of their marketing budget advertising to EVERYONE. Not only will this give you a dismal ROI, but it won’t be effective. To succeed, you must actually reach the people who are likely to want your services. 

So, ask yourself, who is your ideal customer? What do they do? Where do they live? What are they interested in?

Facebook Ads use this kind of information to target who sees your ads. You need to do some real thinking about these categories before you get started writing your Facebook Marketing copy:

• Location
• Demographics
• Interests
• Behaviors

Data is Your Friend

So, you have narrowed down your ideal audience (you think), and you now have a few ads running on Facebook. It’s time for my favorite part of marketing: data analysis!

I love digging through data, especially when it comes to demographics! If you can figure out exactly who is looking and clicking on your ads and posts, you can narrow your messaging to that group, giving you a huge ROI. Of course, that kind of data analysis takes time, so many people prefer to leave it to me rather than pour through all of the data themselves. 

The data that comes from Facebook ads includes a comprehensive breakdown of users’ demographics, including all of the points that I mentioned above. You can see exactly how effective an ad was at capturing your target audience. 

This allows you to do two things.

First, if your ads aren’t converting your target audience, you can course correct and try different kinds of ads to see what will work better. Or second, you can see which ads REALLY worked and double down on them. One technique that I like to use is to put up two similar ads with slightly different wording or graphics, to see which one performs better. Then you can use the winner as a template for future ads. 

Let’s take a look at some of the numbers up close. These are from Bear Creek Felting, a wonderful company and one of my favorite clients who teaches people how to make jaw-dropping felted art. Using the data that we pulled from Facebook, we were able to refine their audience targeting and pull in even more people. A LOT more people. Check out that ROI! Take a look:

Engage With Your Audience

Facebook comments can be a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, people commenting on your posts is an incredible way to interact with your audience. It’s direct feedback, a rare and valuable commodity in marketing. On the other, it can take a huge amount of time to sort through all of the comments and respond to your audience, one by one.

This is another place where hiring me can come in handy. I can respond to comments quickly and in a way that will build your customers’ relationships. This allows you to continue working without Facebook chiming in to interrupt your workflow constantly

Tweet This!

[TWEET “Facebook marketing taking up a ton of your day? Why not hire me to handle it for you?”]

Adblock Proof?

If you’re going to be spending money on advertisements, then you want people to see them. But there is a war going on in web browsers across the world right now as Ad Blockers keep people from seeing your ads. 

So, you want to make sure your ads can’t be blocked. Where can you post them? To Facebook!

Is Facebook Adblock proof?

Well, not fully. There are specific ad blockers that can be used to prevent ads and sponsored posts from showing up in newsfeeds. But they are much rarer than basic ad blockers and chances are that the average user won’t be using them. This means that Facebook is your best shot if you want to get eyes on your ads. 

While you want people to see your ads, you also need to make sure that they are of professional quality. If you aren’t experienced in writing marketing copy, then your ads might not be very effective. This is one of the reasons why I offer this free Facebook Ad Writing Workbook. In it, I lay out how I write Facebook ads to attract users to your website and landing pages. 

But writing social media campaigns takes a ton of time, and that’s time you might not have. So why not hire me to write all of your Facebook advertisements for you? Not only that, I can write your social media marketing for every one of your channels, including Twitter and Instagram. If you’d like to talk about getting a social media audit so we can get your social media cooking, I invite you to contact me today to book a free consultation.