If you have a Facebook page and use it for personal use, you have likely seen ads or sponsored posts that show up in your newsfeed. Have you ever clicked on one? Or made a purchase from an ad shown in your timeline? Or better yet, have you wondered if using Facebook ads would benefit YOUR small business?
The short answer is yes, small businesses should be using Facebook ads!
Benefits of Facebook Ads
Facebook ads offer small businesses many opportunities to increase exposure to their local customers, gain new fans and advertise their services and products. Not to mention Facebook ads are far less expensive, and often outperform, traditional advertising methods like post card mailers, printed ads and radio ads.
So why aren’t more small businesses using Facebook ads?
It’s complicated.
Facebook ads are a lot like the game Jenga – it seems easy but it can take a lifetime to master.
Facebook ad objectives, audience targeting options, location options, etc. are all Jenga building blocks. When you set up a new ad, you decide how to use these blocks to build the perfect ad campaign. You layer in custom audiences, interest targeting and more like you would layer Jenga blocks to build a tower.
When you know what you are doing, and how to measure the results of your campaign, the process can be fairly easy and rewarding. If you don’t know what you are doing, then the process can be complicated, time-consuming and you may end up spending more time picking up your fallen tower than serving new customers.
For example, many small businesses want to promote their products and services to their local customers. Facebook ads are perfect for this! But which ad objective do you chose: page likes, page post promotion, or local awareness? Do you really have the time and budget to set-up three different ads and compare the results of each to know what to use in the future? Most small businesses don’t. Even if you chose one ad type and put your marketing budget towards that campaign, is it worth the risk if the ad doesn’t perform the way you want it to?
Another challenge many small business owners face is using the Facebook ad platform itself. Since it is unlike anything business owners have seen before, just logging in and viewing the platform can make your head spin. Even if you know what type of ad you want to run, correctly setting up an ad, audience, and targeting takes time… a lot of time which many business owners are short on.
What are your options?
If you are overwhelmed by running Facebook ads for your small business, you are not alone. Facebook has (and will likely continue to) update and change the ad platform in an attempt to make it easier for small business owners to use. While this may seem like a good thing, it actually makes it harder for people as they are constantly having to re-learn how to run ads effectively.
Facebook has also created several training modules for small business owners to learn about Facebook ad types, how to use them, and how to set them up. This is great for people who have the time to complete the training. The only problem? Most small business owners don’t.
So what is the best option for your small business? Hire a professional. An ad expert can help determine the best type of Facebook ad to help reach your goal, what targeting options you should use, how to optimize your budget, and much more. The best part – it only takes a quick phone call. Moving a portion or all of your ad budget to social media and Facebook may be the best thing you can do for your business in 2016.
Have questions? Contact us today to learn more or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more tips!
