How important is Facebook advertising for your business today?
Facebook is one of the world's most popular social media platforms. With more than 1 billion users, Facebook is still one of the most important tools for people to stay in touch digitally with friends, family and acquaintances. But what about businesses and their ability to use Facebook for advertising today? Is Facebook marketing still relevant for companies, self-employed and corporations today?
Facebook advertising explained briefly
Like other forms of marketing, Facebook advertising can be a tool to reach your desired target audience. Advertising on Facebook can be cheaper than on other platforms. On Facebook, you use the Ads Manager, which allows you to create and target ads to your specific audience . If you have a business page, you have the option to use Facebook's targeting options.
These are based on interests, age, gender, location and many other options you can choose from. You can display your ads with a photo or video - slideshows with multiple photos are possible. All Facebook ads are reviewed by Facebook itself before they go online.
How do I use advertising on Facebook skilfully?
Facebook ads, as already mentioned, can be targeted pretty precisely to specific audiences. You can target all people or only people who live in a certain area, have the right age and gender or even belong to certain professional or interest groups. This way you can show your target group exactly what they want to see. For example, if you have an online shop for clothing, you can easily assign products to specific target groups.
Define the target group
Based on your website products , you can determine who you want to target. If your product or service can be used by everyone (e.g. a WordPress online shop), you should not assume that you only need to advertise to people of a certain age, gender, income group, etc. The target group will be somewhat larger, so you will need to optimise it further to reach new customers based on interests and possibly hobbies. There, the target group will be somewhat larger, so you will have to optimise it further in order to reach new customers more on the basis of interests and possibly hobbies. Besides demographic data, interests play a big role in advertising your ads.
Do you offer specific articles or services?
For example, if you have a local business that specialises in selling sporting goods, it's worth running ads that target younger people between the ages of 18 and 35 who are interested in various sports. You can even advertise running shoes in a way that shows them to people who are interested in running and jogging. Powerful, isn't it?
What are the costs of Facebook advertising?
First of all, you need to know how advertising can be used on Facebook. Basically, as with Google and other advertising platforms, you pay for impressions and clicks. Facebook has its own algorithms that allow your ad to be displayed to your target group. For example, you can choose whether you want to forward users to your website. To do this, you can use the "Read more" button, for example, which makes the ad more prominent for an external website visit. Other goals are, for example, to direct users to a Facebook page, a job ad or other product ads on Facebook.
In addition, there is conversion tracking with the Facebook Pixel, which can be very interesting, especially for online shops.
The Facebook Pixel as a conversion tracker
Das Facebook Pixel ist Facebooks eigenes Tracking-Pixel und befindet sich auf jeder Seite einer Website, die in erster Linie Facebook Werbung nutzt. Das Facebook Pixel besteht aus ein paar Zeilen Code, den du im <head> Bereich deiner Webseite einsetzt. Innerhalb des Facebook Business Managers konfigurierst du dann per Point and Click Strategie, wo das Facebook Pixel wie interagieren soll.
For example, you can give a button on your website that says "buy" the command "initiate purchase process". As soon as someone from Facebook clicks on your website and clicks on this button, the process is tracked. We will go into more detail about the Facebook Pixel in another article later.
So what are the benefits of advertising on Facebook for your business?
Clearly, there are two advantages of Facebook advertising:
- The costs
- The specifically adjustable target group
Die Kosten für Klicks sind bei Facebook Werbung wesentlich geringer als auf anderen Plattformen. So zahlst du womöglich nur ein paar Cent pro Klick (<10 Cent), wenn alles korrekt eingestellt ist. Die Skalierbarkeit ist ähnlich gut wie die auf anderen Plattformen – du kannst pro Tag oder pro Laufzeit dein Budget angeben.
In addition, the ability to set the specific target group on Facebook offers enormous advantages over search engines. This is also obvious because your audience (i.e. target group in German) is already registered and has stored its interests in the profile. This is usually not the case with search engines, as most users are not permanently logged into the browser or do not want to be. This is where the advantage of the social network is great.
Are there any disadvantages with Facebook advertising?
Unfortunately, Facebook advertising is often not able to stand out in the abundance of posts you receive every day. Videos, for example, sometimes have to be actively clicked on in order to be played (data protection settings). The "pinboard", to put it this way, contains a lot of posts from your friends and acquaintances, from groups and pages. This means that an advertisement quickly slips to the bottom or does not catch the eye at all.
Another disadvantage is the ad rotation, which pops up randomly by algorithm. With search engines, the ads appear exactly when a user searches for a certain topic. There is a huge advantage on the part of the search engines: for you, for example, an automatic vacuum cleaner is interesting right now; therefore, you search for models and at that very moment, ads pop up that dynamically contain exactly what you were looking for.
My conclusion on Facebook Advertising 2021
We could write long texts about Facebook advertising and its benefits. As in life, there are always advantages and disadvantages. Also, Facebook's reputation among the younger generations is that it is 'only for older people'. What used to be the hype in our school is now used less by young people, which should not be a disadvantage throughout. For me, Facebook advertising is still a lucrative advertising model and at the same time a powerful marketing tool. Ultimately, it depends on the product or service you want to make money with. You might want to get a marketing expert on board who will work with you to create a marketing plan for your products or services.
Social media is as important today as it has ever been. The saying 'Do good and talk about it' is still one of the guiding principles in marketing for me today.
