6 Reasons You Should Test Facebook Ads for Your Business

I’ve come across my fare share of Facebook Ad doubters and I confess that once upon a time I was one of them, but I’m here to encourage you to at least try Facebook Ads for your business before you discount them. Even if you’re a business doing B2B sales, guess what, your customers are people too and lots of people use Facebook.

Here are a couple of reasons to test Facebook ads as a marketing channel for your business.

1. 14M+ Australians Use Facebook

With over 1 billion active global users per month, 150-200 million in the U.S. and 10-12 million here in Australia, chances are at least some of your customers are on Facebook. As you can see from Facebook’s Audience Insights tool below, in Australia, 53% of Facebook users are female, 47% male with the largest representation being those aged 25-34. These splits change from country to country so be sure you check Facebook Insights for the region your marketing to.

2. Facebook Ads Can Be Relatively Cheap

I say this with a caveat; the cost per click for your ads will vary depending on how interested your target audience is in what you are promoting and how effective your ads are. If you’re trying to sell life insurance to 18-25 year olds, you’re going to be pushing the proverbial up hill. If you’re promoting the next Angry Birds iOS app to the same demographic, Facebook is going to be a much more cost effective option than, say, using Google AdWords and targeting “iPhone Games”.

Here’s an example of what I mean. These kids of cheap clicks can still be had on Facebook. They can be tricky to find, but they are certainly more of these opportunities in Facebook than there are on Google AdWords.

To use a real life example; I’ve been helping a client promote their Wedding venue. The cost per click to target the keyword “wedding venues” for a local search on AdWords, is north of $2.20. Using Facebook Ads to target Women, between the age of 25 and 40 who are engaged to be married and who live within 25 miles of the venue, the cost per click averages out at $1. This leads me to my next reason.

3. Amazing Demographic Targeting

Compared with many other online advertising networks, Facebook knows a lot about it’s users. Think about the details people openly hand over to Zuck. As illustrated in the previous example this means that you, with your marketing hat on, can do some pretty amazing targeting.

Let’s look consider another example. Say Timbo’s going to put on a live event for Small Business Big Marketing in the Melbourne CBD. He decides he wants to target people who are interested in Marketing, live in Victoria, over the age of 25 and are likely to buy online (he’s selling tickets of course – marketing gold doesn’t grow on trees ya know).

As you can see in the Facebook Insights report above, he has a healthy qualified audience of 30-35k that can be targeted with Facebook ads. Once again, I encourage you to checkout Facebook Insights and research your target audience.

4. Custom Audiences

Facebook Custom Audiences are a powerful way you can market to existing leads, or “remarket” as it’s called. There are a couple of options here:

1. Upload a list of email leads you’ve collected and proactively target these people with your Ads.
2. Add a small piece of code to your website, then actively market to people who have visited your website.
3. Market to people who’ve taken an action in your app or game.

I’m going to assume that last point is probably not as relevant to you as the first two, so let’s look at points 1 & 2 using our “Timbo Small Business Big Marketing” event.

Tim has built an email list via this very website. Say he wants to market his live event to these leads, using Custom Audiences he can upload his list to Facebook Ads, segment out people who live in Victoria Australia, and promote his event to them via Facebook Ads.

Being the marketing dynamo that he is, Tim will be using other marketing channel to drive traffic to his website. Using website remarketing, he can also advertise to people who have visited his website but not purchased a ticket to the event. Powerful stuff!

5. You Can Track Everything

Facebook Ads has pretty awesome reporting. Apart from demographic reports (example below), you can also add a piece of code to your website that will help track conversions so you know how well your ads are performing and if they are indeed delivering leads or sales.

As you can see in the example above, this particular campaign seems to be striking a nerve with 55-64 year old males. Using this information, I might consider upping my spend to this age-group and stop advertising to 18-24 year olds as they’re much less responsive (ain’t that the truth).

6. The Lead Ads Format

In 2016 Facebook released the Lead Ad format. This revolutionised the way businesses could generate leads from an advertising platform such as Facebook. The beauty of the lead ad format is that when someone clicks on an ad, they are presented with a form that gets pre-filled with data from their Facebook profile. For people on mobile devices, this makes form submission very low friction. Learn how to create a Facebook lead ad here.