Ever wonder how Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) actually work?

Can Facebook Advertising for Small Businesses generate huge Net Profit Growth?

A couple of years ago I thought Facebook was just for sad individuals who feel the need to share the details of their breakfast or to look up their old flames.

However my opinion has changed since then.

While I very rarely post on my personal newsfeed, I do now have a Facebook page for my business. 

Not that a Facebook Page like is the powerful marketing tool it once was. Several years ago if someone liked and followed your business page, then going forward they would see all of your future posts in their newsfeed.

Alas that is no longer the case.

In its bid to make more money, Facebook changed the page model so now only a small handful of your followers actually see your post. And the logic behind this change is?

If you want more people to see your post then you now have to pay Facebook to make it happen!

So with that said, does Facebook offer a significant business opportunity to small business owners?

Well while the power of the Facebook fan page has been reduced with the above change, the advertising opportunities now offered by the site do offer serious opportunities if used correctly.

Facebook have made it really easy to target people most likely to need and want your product or service. You can literally target potential leads by:

· Gender

· Age

· Marital status

· Location

· Interests

· Job

The list of targeting options goes on and on…

But as well as the targeting options, you can also build your own ‘custom audiences’ to advertise to.

For example you can choose to target people who have visited your web pages; watched your videos or who have already given you their email address.

With all of these options available to you as an advertiser, it gives you a really good chance to make a positive return on your investment.

Here are some of your Ad options explained in more detail:

Post Boost

Whenever you add a post to your Facebook page, you’ll see an option at the bottom of the post to ‘Boost’ it. You can then choose who to target with the boost. For as little as £5 you can dramatically increase the number of people who see and engage with your post. If you’re going to pay to boost your post make sure you add a link to your web site in the post content.

Page Like Ads

In Ads Manager create a new ad and select ‘Page Likes’. The aim of this type of ad is to increase your number of Page followers, so that more people see your new posts.

Website Clicks

As the title suggests, the object of this style of ad is to get people to click through to your web site from your advert, rather than to your Facebook page.

Offer Claim Ads

With Offer Claim ads you can offer your customers special deals. When creating your ad, choose ‘get people to claim your offer’ and then select ‘Offer Claims’. You can limit the number of people who can claim the offer and control how long the offer is available and who actually gets to see it.

Lead Ads

A great way to build a very targeted list of prospects in Facebook. You can create contact forms in your ads that are automatically filled in when a lead sees them (because the lead is logged in to Facebook, Facebook can pre-populate the fields on behalf of the lead). This auto pre-populate means all the lead has to do is click the submit button to subscribe, which significantly increases your optin rate! For each subscriber list you build in Facebook you can add a sequence of emails that will be automatically be sent to new subscribers to promote your services, products and offers.

Video Views

If you use videos in your marketing, then using them to promote your business via paid ads in Facebook can be really rewarding.

You can either upload your video as a post and then ‘Boost’ it as above, or choose the ad campaign objective of ‘Get Video Views’.

Videos are 8 times more likely to get shared and liked than image ads which is why video ads can be really cost effective to run.

Did you know that Facebook actually keeps records of how long people watch your videos. Why am I telling you this?

Well do you think if someone watches 20 seconds of your ad or watches it the whole way through that they might have a need for what you’re offering? The chances are they do.

Facebook allows you to target ads by the length of time viewed. So if you boost your video and say 200 people watch it all the way through, you can then target that 200 people with a follow up ad encouraging them to click through to your site.

The more times you put your ad in front of people who have a genuine interest and need for your product, the more likely they are to hand over their cash.

Combining a series of these different ad types in the right sequence to increasingly targeted audiences is the way to develop profitable ad campaigns. You need to think beyond a single ad campaign for maximum success.

Now we’ve discussed some of the Ad variations that Facebook offer you, I want to talk about a vital piece of code that you should add to ALL of your web site pages today without delay!

The code is called the ‘Facebook Pixel’.

Why is it so important?

Well the Pixel allows Facebook to track who visits your site. They then try and match your visitor to their database of members.

Why is this so important?

Because it allows you to track the effectiveness of your Facebook Ads; If someone clicks on your ad and visits your web page, you can track which pages they visit to know whether they subscribed or bought from you.

Even more importantly, if they didn’t buy on that visit, the Pixel allows you to build an audience of visitors that you can then advertise to again, and potentially, again and again until they buy!

This brings me to ‘Facebook Customer Audiences’.

A Custom Audience is built up of people who have already interacted with your business. Using the Pixel you can build custom audiences from people who have visited your web pages, or you can import the email addresses of your leads or customers.

You can then target Facebook Ads at your Custom Audience, or subsets of that audience. For example you can target web site visitors in a 5 mile radius of your business that are aged 35-40 and visited your site in the last 24 hours. That’s how specific you can be.

You can also use what Facebook call ‘Lookalike Audiences’ to find more leads whose characteristics mirror those already tracked by your Pixel or who mirror one of your Custom Audiences.

Think about it …

If you can target your Ads at people who are very similar to those that have already visited your site, then their engagement with your Ads should be very high because they should have a need and a desire for your products and services.

With so many people now using Facebook every single day, your potential reach with Ads is significant. Couple this with the incredible targeting features we’ve just talked about and the opportunity for you to grow your business with Facebook advertising is huge.

So why wouldn’t you start putting your business in the news feeds of targeted prospects today?

Well you should if you want to grow your business, however, if you want to maximize your Ad Campaign profitability you need to optimize your Ads, the Sequence you run them in and Who you show them to.

So in answer to the question at the top of this page, YES Facebook advertising is a huge opportunity for small businesses who want to grow their businesses. But to get the most from it you need a sequence or funnel that will allow you to only spend money displaying you ads to the really targeted prospects.

5 Ridiculously Powerful Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies

You can target audiences on Facebook with a dozen different ad formats and thousands of possible ad targeting parameters.

Mastering your Facebook targeting strategy gets you in front of very specific and often motivated segments of your audience, on the network where Americans religiously spend an average of 40 minutes of their day. Here are a few ridiculously powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies you probably haven’t heard of.

1. Tap Into Recent Purchasing Behavior Among Facebook  
   Users

Early on, Facebook was criticized by advertising analysts as a fun place to hang out, but a network with little commercial intent or potential for consumer insight. That changed early in 2013 when Facebook forged partnerships with data brokers including Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix.

These companies have access to trillions of data transactions each year. Acxiom executives have stated that their database alone contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with an average of 1,500 data points per person.

Suddenly, Facebook knew a whole lot more than whether you spent more time in Farmville or Candy Crush Saga. Getting married soon? Taking medication for hypertension? Love reading murder mysteries? Facebook probably knows.

This gave advertisers the power to reach out beyond their own CRM databases and tap into insights gleaned from shopper loyalty programs of all kinds and matched to individual user profiles. Facebook advertisers use this data to target audience segments by thousands of different purchasing behaviors.

Here’s one that I use: People who buy Business Marketing Services (which is relevant to my company, as we sell business software and services).

 

Purchasing behavior subcategories include Buyer Profiles, Clothing, Food & Drink, Health & Beauty and a lot more. Within each broad subcategory, you can drill down into types of behavior; for example, choosing Buyer Profiles will then let you target DIYers, Fashionistas, Foodies, etc.

Facebook shows you how many user profiles you can target in each subcategory, based on their aggregated, multi-sourced offline transaction-based data (or in simpler terms, the number of Facebook users in that category they’ve matched to offline purchasing data).

The options here are limitless. Get in there and explore!

2. Get Creative With Life Events Targeting

Certain types of businesses or campaigns are based on selling to people experiencing certain major life events. Funeral homes, for example, obviously want to connect with people who are planning a funeral, terminally ill, or lost/losing a loved one. Moving services want to get in front of you if you’ve just purchased a new house or apartment. Wedding photographers target people who are engaged.

Facebook has pretty much every conceivable life event targeting option, since we tend to post these to our timelines.

 

The Life Events parameter is unique in that you can choose to target people at specific intervals of time after the change. For example, a jewelry company would obviously be interested in getting in front of people celebrating their one-year anniversary, so they could target audience members who were newlyweds one year ago. The date ranges possible are 3 months, 6 months and one year.

3. Nurture Leads & Build Loyalty With Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook Custom Audiences are an advanced feature that enable you to connect on Facebook with your existing contacts. Getting in front of your existing customers and app users on their favorite social network reinforces your brand, but also gives you the opportunity to increase lifetime customer value, order frequency, and loyalty.

 

This works the other way, too – you can increase the efficacy of your campaigns and avoid wasted clicks by excluding your existing customer list. If you’re offering a free trial to new users, for example, there’s no reason to show it to your loyal customers.

Custom Audiences are created by uploading your customer phone list, or purchaser/subscriber email list in CSV or TXT format, to Facebook. You can also create a Custom Audience based on your site visitors (and specific pages visited on your site), or on specific actions taken within your game or app.

 

Then target or exclude the whole list, or just specific subsets of it using other targeting parameters to home in on your ideal Facebook audience.

This is crazy powerful! You could target your existing customers who work in a specific job function, make XX amount of money per year, and live in a certain ZIP code with a higher value product offer, if those insights told you these people are more apt to be your affluent customers.

Or, you could target people who visited your company’s blog with offers to demo your product. They already know your name and were interested enough to visit you, but not to convert. Facebook Ads targeting that Custom Audience can close the gap.

The number of different demographics points you can target and combine is staggering. Net worth, living arrangements, marital status, parental status, interests, location – it’s all in there, and more.

4. Expand To A Lookalike Audience

Lookalike Audiences are a logical next step, once you have a good Custom Audiences strategy in place. Even if you don’t have your own email or phone list, you can mirror your Facebook fan base. Lookalikes allow you to expand beyond your reach but still target people with highly specific profiles, by creating audiences that look like your own targets.

If you have neither a list nor a big enough Facebook following, you can still create a Lookalike Audience using a tracking pixel to create a Website Custom Audience to mirror.

 

Once you’ve decided which audience you want to replicate and expand on, you can make the audience larger (more broad) or smaller (more specific and similar to your original audience). At the most similar level, Facebook is going to find you the top 1 percent of users with similar traits, in your target country. At the opposite level, optimizing for reach, Facebook will display your ads to the 10 percent of users in your target country who are most like your target audience.

5. Get Super Granular With Layered Targeting Options

The really powerful thing about Facebook ads is in your ability to layer targeting options on top of one another, gradually making your audience more and more specific. An extreme (and hilarious) example of the power of hypertargeting was featured in AdWeek last year, when a marketing pro targeted his roommate with ads so specific the poor guy thought he was being cyberstalked.

Yes, you can use combinations of behaviors, demographics, and geolocation data to reduce your audience to as little as one person. Far more useful for you, however, is the ability to match ad creative and offers to smaller audiences created using combinations of data.

 

For example, a moving company promoting a special discount for senior citizens could target people who purchased a house within the last month, layered with an age range of 60 years old or greater and their service area locations.

Or, a retailer selling baby products meant to soothe and calm a baby could target new parents who have purchased colic medication. Imagine the ability to speak directly to the parent experiencing those sleepless night with such targeted messaging! (As a new parent, I totally get this.) Your messaging can be tailored to speak directly to that problem and offer your solution.

If you can understand the intent, needs and likelihood to respond of any given audience segment, you can layer Facebook Ads targeting options to tap into it and get in front of them.

The Best Facebook Ad Targeting Strategy Is Diversified & Comprehensive

You don’t have to pick just one of the strategies above; check each of them out and see how they might fit your various target market segments.

Create personas for your ideal customers – who are they? Where do they live? What do they do for work and what do they do after work? What traits and characteristics might they have, and how do those align with the many targeting parameters listed above?

Identifying just who it is you want to reach will guide you to the most effective Facebook ad targeting tools and options to get in front of them.

Note: This post originally appeared on the Momentology blog.