Any Facebook expert will tell you that the work has only just begun when you’ve decided to start a business page on Facebook.
The benefits of Facebook for small businesses are compelling, with some of the most targeted advertising opportunities available at a fraction of the cost of conventional marketing.
Today, we’ll look at the options for advertising on Facebook for small business pages and how to ensure you balance your budget against company targets.
Facebook Advertising Functions for Small Businesses
First, let’s clarify that there are countless ways to make the most of social media advertising. And with over a billion users, the potential here is enormous.
We’ve summarized the most popular advertising options below with a quick overview of how they work.
Basic Facebook Marketing Tools
The most straightforward advertising resources use content from your page and boost it to a broader pool of viewers:
- Image ads: a simple, easy way to test the paid advertising waters. You can promote an existing post and won’t need to create new content.
- Video ads: videos routinely score the highest for engagement. You can broadcast videos in your News Feed or Stories and pay to display this media to a specific audience demographic.
- Polls: these surveys are commonly used to add interactivity to Facebook for businesses, usually with a separate link to react to each type of response.
High-Engagement Facebook Advertising Media
If you want to up your marketing game, you can create adverts specifically for Facebook with the functionality to incorporate options such as one-click shopping:
- Carousel ads: you can upload up to ten images or videos showing the best of your products or services, embedding a call-to-action (CTA) into each, such as Shop Now.
- Slideshow ads: slideshows use short video clips or still photos to sift through imagery at an attention-grabbing speed but use five times fewer data than a video ad, so they are an excellent option for mobile users.
Mobile Only Facebook Marketing
A large proportion of social media users browse on a handheld device, so there are tailored advertising options to design a campaign specifically for this audience:
- Collection ads: these paid adverts are only on handheld devices and pair with Instant Experiences, allowing customers to buy products directly from Facebook.
- Instant experience ads: previously called Canvas, this full-screen advertisement loads 15 times quicker than a mobile website away from Facebook and can incorporate a video and carousel below.
- Lead ads: this advertisement also only shows up on mobile to make it easy for users to fill in contact details, such as signing up for a newsletter or registering for a product trial.
Dynamic Facebook Advertising
Dynamic ads publicize products to visitors most likely to buy, based on targeted advertising and previous engagements with your business page.
For example, if a customer has viewed a product or added something to their cart but didn’t check out, a dynamic ad can showcase that product in their feed to prompt them to buy it.
These ads aren’t limited to making intelligent product selections but can also adjust language settings for international traders, automatically displaying your ad in the correct language for each customer.
Augmented Reality Marketing for Small Businesses
The final option we’ll look at is augmented reality, a growing trend where users can utilize photo filters and animation tools.
Ads with these tools perform well since they create user-generated content and provide an exceptional customer experience.
You might use this type of promotion to invite visitors to see how they’d look wearing your beauty products and jewelry or to create a virtual dressing room.
Choosing the Right Facebook Advertising Campaign
As we’ve seen, creating a Facebook advertisement comes with a substantial number of choices and different ways to engage, whether you want to promote products, enhance visibility, or reach new customer demographics.
Most small businesses hire a social media manager or Facebook expert to help select the optimal campaigns. Still, there are a few ways you can ensure you don’t blow your budget on an ineffective ad.
Facebook business advertising invites you to select options to control your spending:
- You can choose a daily limit, so once you reach the maximum for the day, Facebook won’t show your ad to any additional visitors.
- Lifetime budgets cover the duration of the ad, so if you’ve created a promotion to run for a month, the campaign will stop once you’ve maxed out your spending cap.
The cost per engagement (or view) varies considerably, so honing your targeting is essential.
When you first craft a new Facebook ad, you’ll see an audience definition, which estimates how many users fall into your parameters, the potential daily results, and what sort of page-like metrics and reach you can expect.
Campaign estimates depend on the performance of previous campaigns, your budget, market data, and targeting criteria, so you can play around with this until you’re satisfied that the indicated daily spend matches your goal.
The critical factor here is to do your research and drive every campaign towards as specific of an audience as possible. Even if it means fewer views, the potential returns will significantly increase if you show your ad to the exact customer who will want to respond!
