Why use Facebook advertising for your business?

While you’ve been thinking about your digital strategy for this year, have you considered advertising on Facebook?

Unlike traditional media like newspapers, radio and television, Facebook advertising can be tightly targeted for your potential audience, offers surprising flexibility, and provides good data on reach and effectiveness.

We’ve pulled together three articles on why Facebook advertising can offer clear value for your business.

1.       Targeting

How does targeting work?  Facebook collects personal information about users each time they like, share or post on it.  Instead of selling the information, it acts as matchmaker.  The advertiser chooses the demographics and interests of the target Facebook audience.  Facebook shows the ad only to those Facebook users who match the target audience.

We like the examples on Facebook’s own Suggested Best Practices for Advertising on Facebook.  Be clean and crisp with your location and keyword targeting.  Specific is better than general.  Why show your ad for surfboards to a Facebook user in central NSW when you want customers at your shop in Cottesloe, Western Australia?

Get help building your target audience profile by mining your customer data or using a service like Quantcast.

2.       Flexibility

You can tweak your ads.  You can simultaneously run multiple tailored ads, each to tightly targeted audience.  You can set a daily or lifetime budget for each ad campaign to ensure you don’t spend over your budget.  You can pay per click when people act on your ad, or pay per million page impressions when people see your ad.

Optimum7’s article Pay Per Click (CPC) vs Pay Per Impression (CPM) covers some basics on the lingo to get you up to speed.

3.       Analytics

Test.  Monitor.  Rinse and repeat.

It’s all in the data.  We can’t emphasise that strongly enough.   Use the analytics that come with Facebook advertising to see how your ad performs and make it better.  Don’t just set and forget.

Facebook’s Reporting Guide covers the baseline information you need on report customisation and applying reporting data.

Tell us

Have you tried advertising on Facebook?

We’d love you to hear your favourite tip on Facebook advertising.