Facebook is THE largest social media platform on the planet with an astounding 1.55 billion users (as of 2015). What does this mean for small businesses? This means that the odds that your ideal potential customers can be reached using Facebook advertising are very much in your favor.
However, Facebook’s ever-changing algorithms for advertising make it difficult for small businesses because Facebook tends to favor larger advertisers. There are cost effective ways to reach your target audience as a small business.
Here are 3 hacks you can use as a small business to get the most out of your Facebook advertising:
Find a happy medium of your audience targeting
If you’ve ever built a Facebook ad campaign, you know that the options of audience targeting are virtually endless. It’s important not to get carried away picking the “perfect” audience. This means, if you define your audience too narrowly, you may not reach enough people and therefore, not exhausting all of your options. You want your audience selection to be in the green, which can be shown on the “audience definition” portion of your ad manager. On the other side of the coin, you don’t want to be too broad with your audience definition. If you want to target all 1.55 billion Facebook users, your campaign will go largely ignored.
Testing 1,2,3
One of the greatest things about Facebook advertising is the ability to change your campaign at will. Monitoring the performance of your campaign is key though. If your campaign is not performing optimally, you can change different aspects of the campaign such as the target audience demographic profile, the images on the ads, and even the text on your ads. To get a better idea of what is working and what is not working, change one variable and reevaluate the progress of your campaign. You may even want to split your budget between 2 campaigns and test their performance against each other. Once you find a combination of variables that is working, invest your budget into that combination and see your ROI increase.
Use your budget wisely
Likes do not equal business. Likes are a symbolic way to see how your post or campaign is performing but they do not directly equate to a dollar amount of business. When boosting posts and promoting your page in the ad manager, be careful not to allocate your entire budget into these options. You may earn lots of likes on a particular post or on your page, but this does not mean these “likers” are turning into paying customers. Balance is KEY in this regard. As a small business, you want to have activity and engagement consistently on your Facebook page. This is where the likes will play a vital role. However, you also want to drive traffic from your social media accounts to your website. This is done by using the “send people to your website” objective on the ad manager. People that are interested in the product or service that your provide will most likely take the time to visit your website to gain more information about your company and to find out how to contact you. This option can also help with your SEO, which is absolutely essential for small businesses. Strike a balance between optimizing your Facebook ads for likes and for website conversions to get the most out of your advertising dollars.
If you’re interested in growing your small business using Facebook advertising, contact Jungo Solutions today for more information.
