I own a social media strategy firm in New York City and meet with clients and prospects daily who tell me that they are not advertising on Facebook, either because they don’t see any ROI, or because they don’t want to pay to reach an audience they’ve worked hard to cultivate over the years. It’s almost as if they’re simply trying to spite Facebook for being a company that wants to change access to their incredible amount of data. But Facebook is a business, and through my work, I’ve seen that they’ve created the best targeting platform for marketers on the planet. So while others walk away, I will continue to advocate for this powerful advertising and marketing tool.
An Example Campaign
Below is a screenshot from one of our client’s Facebook ads accounts that breaks down one of their successful Facebook ad campaigns from September. For this campaign, they spent $598 and earned $11,033. I’m not a math expert, but those numbers seem pretty good.
In this example, the targeting was tailored to three different sets: website visitors from the last 30 days (excluding those who actually did purchase and who are not already fans on Facebook); Facebook fans who hadn’t visited the website in the last 30 days; and website visitors from the last 30 days who are also fans of the page. These and more are potential targeting options for Facebook ad campaigns.
It is quite powerful to target in these ways — while a potential customer is on Facebook, you can bring them back to your site for a purchase. Sometimes prospects just need an extra touch point or nudge. As a marketer, you should at least explore this type of approach before unilaterally dismissing Facebook advertising.
How to Get Started
The Facebook ads platform is easy to use: they provide instructional videos that break down each component in laymen terms. They want to make it simple to get started, whether you’re a digital marketer or just a business owner looking to advertise.
Facebook is an objective-based ads platform, so you go in and craft campaigns based on what it is you’re looking for. If you want “likes” from new targeted fans, CPL campaigns are your best bet. If you want website traffic, you should try CPC campaigns. If you want increased reach or engagement on your great content, then you can experiment with Page Post Engagements. All are worth experimentation, and each has a different type of value for your business.
Once you’ve chosen your campaign type, you can experiment with different types of targeting. Here’s a great article from Facebook for Business that can help you get started with targeting. If you want to get the right messages in front of the right audience, I’ve found that Facebook can really help. Not only can you now reach fans with guaranteed impressions, you can go out and target fans of your competitors, visitors to a specific website and members of your email database, to name just a few I’ve tried.
If you are ignoring Facebook ads completely, you are compromising your ability to win online. I encourage you at least explore the options before passing over the platform. You will be pleasantly surprised by what you can do, and your ROI argument might start to change.
A version of this post originally appeared on the author’s blog, here.
