Facebook is now one of the most popular advertising platforms today. The social media giant has grown to more than 2.934 billion active users, it’s also ballooned its advertising network to accommodate a wide range of businesses.
Facebook ads can help a brand get more visibility for its content and boost traffic to its core website content whether it’s cornerstone site content or simple ad copy.
Facebook ads can be set up to target more site traffic, more impressions, and even click-through-rate (CTR).
Facebook ads are a cost-effective and powerful tool for digital marketing, which boosts a company’s profitability and visibility online.
Advertising on Facebook has been on the rise, and business that utilizes it will gain a positive and long-term return on investment (ROI).
So you see, you can invest in a wide variety of campaigns without breaking the bank.
When creating your ad, be sure to target your audience by defining the key demographics (age, location, gender), interests and behavior, or psychographics (characteristics like values and beliefs).
You can also garnish your content with images and videos to capture viewers’ attention.
This article underpins the meaning of Facebook advertising; why Facebook ads are important to marketers; how to create Facebook ads; and more.
What is Facebook Advertising?
Facebook advertising is a platform that offers a variety of highly targeted paid ads and organic content, allowing businesses to put their products in front of a massive audience.
Over the last decade, Facebook has shifted from the most prominent social platform on the internet into one of the biggest marketplaces on the planet.
Does Facebook Advertising work?
Advertising on social media can be complex – and in this constantly shifting world, you need to be on the right platforms, not the sinking ones.
With the dramatic news headlines and modification Facebook has undergone in recent years, you may think the Facebook ship has sailed and users are jumping overboard by the dozen.
This is very far from reality. Facebook advertising is still here and has a major presence in many businesses’ social media strategies.
So if your question is whether Facebook advertising works.
The short answer is: Yes
while the long answer is: Facebook has a database of billions which is accessible to all marketers who are ready to get into Facebook marketing.
Do you remember a time when the Facebook platform was ad-free? Unless you were a very early adopter, your answer is: maybe not.
Facebook has offered some form of advertising since the year of its inception. The ads platform we know today is much more robust than the rudimentary system that kicked off its advertising in the early 2000s. Facebook Business Manager, which launched in 2014, changed the game in social advertising. This tool allows brands to create pages and have their marketing strategies managed within the Facebook platform. Everything ad-related is here, from creative, to budget, to campaign performance data, making it an invaluable resource for businesses and marketers alike.
Why Facebook Ads are Important to Marketers
#1. Precise targeting
One of the key advantages of social media marketing over other forms of advertising is the room to laser-target your audience.
Smart Facebook ad targeting can help you reach the users who are most likely to be interested in your product offer.
With advanced targeting options available on this platform, you can go a step further to reach the people who are likely to be interested in specific products, and who have already shown they are willing to shop.
All of this helps you earn higher conversion rates with your existing ad budget. And show me a Facebook advertiser who does not love a higher ROI!
#2. Increased website traffic
Facebook is one of the best social media platforms for marketing. No surprise there. It dominates online media with over 70% market share.
Generates $84.2 billion yearly as ad revenue. And has 1.73 billion daily active users, up 11% year-over-year users.
For brands, all this adds up to Facebook generating the highest ROAS amongst social media platforms and more than 80% of all U.S. social referrals to eCommerce stores.
Again, no surprise given that 78% of American consumers say they discover products to buy through Facebook.
While those statistics are very impressive, they don’t mean much to your business just by themselves.
That is unless you are successfully funneling traffic to your site from Facebook. This is why understanding what digital marketing strategies work best, and what Facebook tools are available, is crucial to being able to grow your brand.
#3. Variety of ad formats
Facebook offers a variety of ad formats to support your business objectives. You are at liberty to choose whichever drives your brand objectives better.
You can choose to leverage high-quality and engaging visuals to drive people to destination websites or apps through the use of your own images or by creating an ad with stock photos to tell your story.
You can show off product features and draw people in with sound and motion pictures. Upload a video you created or create one in Ads Manager using Facebook video creation tools.
Or you can target your ads through Carousel ads or collections ads.
#4. Positive impact on SEO
Search engines depend on social signals to rank websites.
Social signals comprise the activities on your social media content. These activities include shares, likes, and comments on your posts.
Facebook ads can help you increase your social signals, which will indirectly impact your SEO rankings.
#5. Customer support.
A lot of people prefer to connect with a business via social media. Phone calls have become a thing of the last decade.
Create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger to communicate with visitors based on their popular search queries.
They can include “price,” “payment options,” delivery,” “purchase,” etc.
You only need to develop a scenario relying on users’ FAQs and write the answers. Your chatbot will clone the real conversation. As a result, your support team will have time for more complex issues and you can automate routine tasks.
Tips for making Effective Facebook Ads
Making effective ads depends on your campaign objective. Do you have a conversion event or you are targeting building brand awareness?
#1. Experiment Constantly: Because half of Facebook users log in every day, you need to create multiple ads to grab their attention and in doing that you need to be up to speed with trends in your industry.
#2. Track Performance: Facebook gives you a tremendous amount of insights through your advertising reports.
Use a unique tracking link for each ad and then pull your insights minimally on a weekly basis to track ad performance.
#3. Leverage Targeting: One of the most valuable aspects of Facebook ads is the rich targeting options available.
Think about the types of consumers you are trying to attract.
What are their interests? What demographic are you targeting? If you target those that like “crossword puzzles”, then try to highlight that in your ad.
#4. Use Promotion Codes: Promo codes have long been known to boost CTRs in online advertising.
If you do not have any easy way to adopt a promo code, at least make a strong call to action (CTA) in the ad. Asking questions in the ad is an effective way to engage the user also.
#5. Practice “Less is More”: Some of the best-performing ads have the simplest text and few words. Resist the temptation to use every character available in the body text of the ad.
Why Facebook Advertising is Still Relevant
#1. Facebook Crushes the Competition
Every year, new social platform pop-ups and drums up so much hype. There was TikTok; Clubhouse; Twitter Spaces, all came at different times behind Facebook with so much hype.
While these new and exciting apps created a buzz, oldies like Facebook remained steadfast watching as the buzz died out and attention returned to it again.
This is because they can crush competitors. It’s important to remember that there’s more to Facebook than Facebook, you get? Facebook owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus.
You have the option to run Facebook ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram seamlessly. If you want to just run ads on Instagram, you can do that as well. You have those juicy options all packed up there in Facebook Business Manager.
#2. The Decline of Organic Reach
Organic reach, or content that is not promoted, was once a thing in Facebook marketing. Brands grew a following on their Facebook pages and fans engaged via posts from brands.
This was a fantastic way to get in front of the needed audience without having to pay to play. Unfortunately, those days are fizzled out and ushered in the days of paying to have a befitting place in the mind of the algorithm.
The Facebook algorithm decides which content shows up in users’ feeds and in what order that content shows up.
If a brand created content that got high engagement, it was served in the algorithm more often and reached more users.
However, this algorithm was adjusted, and the reach of organic content began to decline. Other types of media, like paid content and videos, become prioritized over organic content.
Studies reveal that these days, on average, a brand’s Facebook content reaches about 2.2% of page followers. That’s an incredibly poor percentage.
With organic content reaching a fraction of followers, brands wonder, why invest in Facebook marketing if nobody sees you?
Should your energy and dollars go somewhere else, where quality content has a chance of being seen by the market?
It depends. If you want to keep social media in your marketing strategy, Facebook still offers key advantages over other social media platforms.
A good social media strategy combines both paid and unpaid reach. Posting organic content consistently alongside advertising the relevant products can produce results. Most importantly, you need to be where your market is.
#3. Facebook Has Massive Market Share
Facebook’s market share is unrivaled. In the US, they are the third most visited site, right behind Google and Youtube.
They were the most visited social media site in 2021, a spot claimed since 2010. Facebook doesn’t just drive a ton of traffic, they also have the most users of any social media website.
Facebook has an estimated 2.7 billion monthly active users globally. That’s roughly two-thirds of the US population. Compare this to the social app TikTok, which currently has one billion active worldwide users.
The huge user base is a major reason brands are currently advertising on and will continue to advertise on Facebook.
If you need a social media channel that reaches a wide audience, converts more customers, and generates new leads, Facebook ads are worth taking a bullet for.
Conclusion
Facebook advertising is still relevant in 2022 and surely beyond it. Leaving Facebook out of a paid social media strategy means losing out on its massive user base, market share, and technological capabilities.
Advertising on Facebook will continue to fit into new ad formats emerge, privacy and data regulations loosen or constrict, its user base fluctuates, and social media trends come and go, yes and that is because the platform has shown an uncommon level of flexibility in adapting and changing with the times.
The businesses that have succeeded are the ones that share high-quality, engaging content and advertisements.
With the right expertise and strategy, Facebook ads can move the horse through the eye of the needle and produce the results companies are looking for.
