In a previous post, I explained the benefits of using Facebook to advertise your products and services.
Facebook can do wonders for advertising your business. However, it is not for everyone.
For the right business, it is an amazing advertising tool. Even so, many business owners and marketers dive into Facebook advertising, only to emerge empty-handed.
Before committing yourself to Facebook advertising, you have to be sure that it is suitable for the line of business you’re in. If not, you could spend a lot of valuable time and resources advertising on a platform that isn’t meant for you. That would mean poor results and a dismal advertising campaign.
So I’ll give you three pointers here to help you decide whether Facebook is right for you.
1) Who is your target customer?
If you’ve taken the time to create a proper customer avatar, you’ll be able to answer this question right away.
If you don’t yet have a customer avatar, this post will help you set about creating one.
It’s important for you to know your target customer, because if he/she hangs out on Facebook, you can use Facebook’s advanced targeting options to get your advert in front of him/her.
2) Does your target customer hang out on Facebook?
It is often said that Facebook advertising works best for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) advertising. So, if you’re selling your products or services directly to a consumer, Facebook is a great medium to use.
For example, if you’re selling weight loss supplements directly to people who want to lose weight, it is easy to target such individuals using Facebook’s targeting options. Perhaps these are individuals who have ‘liked’ particular pages about losing weight, which pages you could specify in your targeting options. In addition, you could target individuals who follow a particular famous weight loss guru on Facebook.
However, if you’re selling your weight loss products to a wholesaler (instead of direct to the customer), it will be quite difficult to find and target such wholesalers on Facebook. And even if you did, it is unlikely that they would be quite as responsive to your advert. So Facebook might not be the right medium for such an advert. I would suggest LinkedIn, actually. But more on that in another post.
3) Narrow your targeting.
The idea is that Facebook will take your advert and place it in front of the people most likely to want to see it, and most likely to respond to it. Facebook does this easily because it has access to all the information given to it by its millions of members.
And that’s the beauty of Facebook.
But it can also be counter-productive.
If you target your advert too widely, it will reach a disproportionately large group of people, many of whom will have no interest in what you’re offering. As a result, your advert will be ineffective.
The key here is to make your targeting as narrow as you can get. Try to be as specific as possible.
What do I mean by targeting? I’m referring here to the set of options Facebook allows you to specify. For example, that your advert should be shown to people who live in a particular location, who have ‘liked’ a particular page, who have certain interests, who have identified themselves as falling within a certain age range. That sort of thing.
Normally, when marketing to cold traffic (broadly, people who have never encountered you online before), you might be tempted to cast the net as wide as possible, by making your targeting very wide. However, this is a mistake. A good rule of thumb is that, when marketing to cold traffic on Facebook, your advert should be targeted to reach between 500,000 to 1 million people. Any more than that, and it’s likely too wide. (In an upcoming post, I will give you some tips on how to do your targeting on Facebook.)
In general terms, the narrower the targeting, the better the results you can expect. An advert that says something to everyone actually says nothing to anyone. Keep your specific target customer in mind, and make sure your advert, and your targeting options, actually call to him.
Conclusion.
Facebook is an amazing advertising platform, no doubt about it. But it’s not for everyone. Before diving into Facebook advertising, ascertain first if it is the right choice for your kind of business.
If Facebook is the right platform to advertise your business, proceed, by all means, but don’t get carried away by the huge amount of data available to Facebook. Instead, be as precise as you can with your targeting. That brings better results than an advert targeted at a very wide group of people.
Have you used Facebook advertising in your business? Were you satisfied with the results? What was your general experience? Feel free to share with us in the comments.