5 Facebook Advertising Tips For Small Businesses

We live in the digital age, and Facebook plays a huge part in it. For years, Facebook has been the most popular social media network in the world, and today, the number of people actively using it on a monthly basis is almost one-third of the entire world’s population (2.9 billion). It’s so huge to even think about. This enormous number clearly shows why Facebook should be an important point of focus in your marketing strategies. Facebook hosts almost every demographic which makes it a promotion paradise for almost every niche. Almost any business of any vertical could potentially find clients on the platform. Think of it as a massive billboard that’s visible to the entire world.

The sheer number of users isn’t the only reason to consider it. Facebook also provides one of the most sophisticated advertising platforms. In addition to being a terrific social network with lots of features to connect with friends, family, and customers, Facebook is also superbly feature-rich when it comes to paid promotions. Throughout the years, Meta has developed advanced technologies for understanding user behavior and processing accumulated user data.

The result has been powerful automated systems that are capable to display highly relevant content to users, connect advertisers to potential clients, and analyze and optimize campaign performance to achieve the best results with reasonable costs. Audience targeting on Facebook is top-notch, and you have a lot of flexibility in terms of managing your budget, segmenting your audience, and keeping track of your campaigns. Facebook Ads also gives you access to Instagram and the Audience Network’s user base, making it one of the largest third-party marketing channels in the world.

After going through some very turbulent times in the past few years due to major privacy issues and scandals, Facebook has considerably changed its platform to regain the trust of users and clients and rebuild its image. A serious change in policies and systems is how Facebook prioritizes the content that appear on the user’s feed. Now, relevance and quality are the most important factors when the algorithm is deciding whether a post should appear on a feed. Consequently, it’s much more likely now to see posts from friends, family, and pages you’re interested in and the share of brands and businesses in the content of your feed has significantly shrank.

Brands now have a much harder time reaching their prospects organically by posting non-paid content and building a fanbase, simply because it’s getting increasingly difficult to get Facebook to prioritize brand content and deem it worthy enough to be put up in people’s feeds. The huge decline in organic reach has caused many businesses to shift their Facebook marketing strategy to paid promotion, resulting in a price hike in Facebook Ads prices.

To be completely honest, The downfall of organic reach on Facebook isn’t good news for smaller scale businesses with limited budgets and resources. From a business point of view, online social platforms like Facebook were a superbly effective way to establish a closer connection with customers and build an fanbase without having to pay for promotions. Facebook used to be the best of both worlds; You ran ads if you had the money and wanted to expand your reach and generate revenue quickly, and you could’ve post organic content on your page to maintain connection with customers and build a following. Now, with the Facebook Ads price hike and hardships on organic reach, small businesses need to get smarter and utilize well-proven Facebook advertising tips for small businesses in order to make the best use of their advertising budgets.

Things have changed, but not that drastically to invalidate the basics of Facebook advertising. You still need a clear goal, a robust Facebook Ads strategy, sufficient knowledge of your ideal customers, and familiarity with Meta Ads manager and how its features work. We’ll skip the fundamentals and get right the Facebook Ads tips that’ll help you improve the quality and performance of your ads and reducing your cost-per-click.

Defining a clear goal for your Facebook advertising efforts is crucial before diving into the platform. Luckily, Facebook helps translate whatever your business objective you have in mind to the digital advertising language. The first step of creating an ad on Facebook requires you to select the campaign objective. For every goal and purpose, there’s an optimization goal and relevant performance metrics that determine whether or not you’re on the right track. For a small business, It’s extremely important to focus on the factors that actually make a difference to the bottom line. If your goal is to drive traffic, getting people to click on your CTA is much more important than getting engagements (likes, comments, etc.). Vanity metrics won’t help you on the long term, even if you’re currently doing great in them.

With this approach, you’ll be reducing advertising costs without sacrificing performance. If you plan on creating videos for your ads, try to make them shorter than 15 seconds and include a shock or surprise at the first few seconds to grab the audience’s attention and make them watch to the end.

People have very short attention spans on social media, so it’s crucial to get the grip on them quickly with scroll-stopping content that get right to the point. A couple of other tweaks could also greatly improve the performance of your video ads. For example, create your videos for a sound-off experience in a vertical aspect ratio. Use texts and graphics to highlight certain points in your video, and don’t forget to include a clear, easy-to-understand CTA at the end and tell the viewers everything they need to do next.

Don’t make generic ads that look like everybody else’s. If you want to stand out in the fiercely competitive environment of Facebook Ads, you need to make your ads stand out. There isn’t just one way to make your ads look unique and interesting. Humor, innovative photography, testimonials, and good writing are some of the best practices.

But don’t worry if you can’t come up with a good idea or theme for your ads. Including your company branding in your ad creatives could also give your promotional content a nice touch. It’s best to have an appropriate, well-though-out brand identity and make your ads consistent with it. When designing assets for ads, make sure they include the key elements of your visual identity and align well with your overall brand image. Use your brand colors, fonts, logos and use a language in your copies that’s relevant to your brand’s tone and identity. Branding consistency in ads significantly improves your image and helps building huge brand awareness.

A common mistake among SMBs is running Facebook Ads for the sole purpose of prospecting and generating awareness. Facebook is great for reaching more people and make them familiar with your brand, but it doesn’t end there. This where a marketing funnel shows its importance. A large part of your Facebook advertising efforts should be focused on prospecting, but you should also have a plan for marketing to people who already know you. Facebook provides some of the most advanced retargeting features to help you drive potential customers down your marketing funnel and convert them into actually customers.

However, since adding the retargeting layer to your Facebook advertising strategy requires some extra efforts, many people tend to skip it. You’ll need to set up pixel on your website, create separate audience lists, campaigns, assets, and product feeds in case you own an e-commerce brand, but believe, it’s worth it.

Sometimes, it’s better to turn your existing organic post to a paid promotion instead of creating a new ad. Facebook Boost lets you promote a non-paid post to expand its reach and display it to people who are likely to find it interesting and relevant.

If you already have a post that’s been successful in grabbing the attention of your existing audience, you can boost it to reach even more people.