As it applies to many things in life, the fear of missing out, or FOMO, is something to be avoided whenever possible. Consider, for instance, how easy it is to get trapped in the endless cycle of scrolling through your friends’ Facebook news feeds, which brag about their latest night on the town or adventure to a foreign land. You can waste hours of productivity.
However, when it comes to marketing, a healthy dose of FOMO can help you stay up to speed with the latest advertising trends and outsmart your competition by spending your marketing budget smarter and more efficiently.
Now, let’s consider you already have a solid foundation of a well-converting website, lots of organic traffic, and a highly-targeted paid search account. What’s your next step toward digital domination?
As many small businesses shift their limited marketing budgets toward more targeted and measurable avenues online, Facebook has been quickly evolving their ad platform, opening up an audience of over one billion active daily users.
There are two exciting aspects here:
- Facebook advertising is a relatively untapped market because while there over 40 million active small business accounts, only about 2 million of those regularly pay for advertising, meaning ads are relatively inexpensive to purchase.
- Facebook has quietly built one of the most sophisticated sets of targeting options currently on the market.
Facebook’s ad platform offers a variety of ad types depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, a few of which include:
- Clicks to website: If you’re trying to drive more traffic to a page on your website, this ad type is perfect. We recommend sending consumers as close to their ultimate destination as possible. If you’re advertising for a specific product type, for example, make sure to filter the inventory page you’re sending them to.
- Local awareness: Branding-focused ads with a softer call to action. Building awareness will help your brand’s name recognition as consumers are shopping for one of your products. Consider these similar to traditional advertising, but with more geo-targeting options and with the ability to use a much smaller budget.
- Offer claims: If you’re running a limited-time promotion with a coupon or discount, this ad type allows shoppers to fill out a form to “claim” the offer. This works great for oil change coupons, discount off a particular item, and more.
There are 12 total ad types that offer a huge amount of flexibility for advertisers.
Facebook Offers Numerous Options to Narrow Your Audience
The exciting part is Facebook ad types are just the tip of the iceberg. The meat of the platform exists under their audience targeting options, where you can show your ads only to the audience most likely to take action at a fraction of the cost of other advertising methods. Not only can you upload your own customer database, but you can use in-market data through Polk and Facebook’s own behavioral models to hone in on likely shoppers. You know how Facebook knows your profile information, everything you like, use your Facebook account to sign into, etc? Turns out that information is a great indicator of consumer behavior.
Here’s a brief overview of the targeting options that Facebook offers:
- Demographics: narrow your audience by location, age, gender, interests, income level, and more.
- Lookalike audiences: find people whose behaviors are similar to ones you define.
- Customer database: import lists of people who’ve previously purchased from you.
- Retargeting: use a Facebook pixel to show ads to people who have previously visited your site.
In addition to being able to select from a variety of ads and targeting options, Facebook’s ads are completely trackable through a couple of methods. First and most simply, Facebook has extensive reporting available in its own platform, showing metrics like impressions, actions, cost per action, and many more. Facebook also offers a “pixel,” or code, you can install on your site to monitor site behavior and collect that audience for remarketing. Facebook’s reporting is extensive, but luckily, trackability doesn’t end there.
We recommend using UTM codes (Urchin Traffic Monitor, if you’re curious), which will allow you to monitor any Facebook traffic directly in Google Analytics so you can directly compare Facebook traffic’s performance vs. other channels like Organic traffic. With multi-channel attribution, you’re also able to view which conversions were “assisted” by Facebook ads.
As a whole, we believe Facebook advertising makes sense for many businesses because of the flexibility of the platform, the low cost to participate, and the trackability of funds spent through the platform. Even with a limited budget, Facebook ads allow small business to compete alongside national brands for an engaged, relevant audience.
If you’d like to conquer your FOMO of the latest digital marketing tends, contact us for a Free Digital Analysis today.