A little about Facebook
The social platform Facebook has long been more than just a social network, over the years, the social platform Facebook has become an extremely powerful marketing tool, where many business people choose to advertise and market our products and services. Seven out of ten adults actively use the popular social platform worldwide, with more than 2 billion registered users from all over the world and 800 million of them active daily, in Israel alone the volume of Facebook use is about 4 million users. These data have made Facebook the most powerful marketing tool in the world, as the level of exposure on Facebook allows us to reach a wide fan base. Yet despite all the good that Facebook has to offer us, the organic posts on our Facebook business page no longer achieve the range they once had. Over the years, as Facebook's algorithm continues to evolve and more and more competing brands continue to enter the market, the organic achievements of our Facebook posts and ads diminish.
After all, as brands and business owners, we have to compete with users' personal posts, ranging from puppy videos, pictures of sweet babies, updates to other friends and more.
Let us not forget all the sponsored campaigns and posts that run business pages competing in our field, we have to deal with them as a business and as a brand, and if we want more, we have to pay. A quick and easy way to do this is to increase our "organic" messages through sponsored posts, or increased posts.
Facebook's role in our marketing funnel
Paid advertising is indeed a great way to increase exposure and helps us drive more traffic to our business, but it is important to remember that it can quickly become more expensive and become less lucrative if we are not careful and do not follow the rules.
Understanding how to leverage Facebook ads is becoming a central part of almost every social media marketing strategy, it seems that paid advertising on Facebook is one of the most immediate ways to influence the reach of our content however although we will want to increase exposure to our posts we will probably have to pay for reach .
Facebook, for its part, offers a wide range of advertising options, from targeted advertising to segmented target audiences, through a likes campaign that attracts fans to the business page, to a leads campaign to create conversions.
As mentioned Facebook allows us to address and display our ad to a more segmented and targeted audience, to increase the chances of conversion percentages according to parameters such as: geographical location, age range, interests, marital status, hobbies, gender and so on.
Creating the ad for the campaign we want to promote, is done through a wizard where you can select all the details according to which we want to target our target audience, we can add an image or video with text and thus we will create the post / ad for our sponsored campaign.
However Facebook marketing has its limitations, so not every type of domain or business can benefit from such advertising, Facebook sponsored promotion is especially suitable for businesses that have a product or service that allows to target their target audience quite accurately and specifically so it is important to tailor the type of advertising Ours is already in the stages of setting up the campaign.
In this way, we are given the opportunity to advertise exactly to the audience we defined in advance and present our ad / advertisement to them, even if they did not search for our service, but only because it meets the criteria we defined in advance: geographical location, age range, interests, family status, Hobbies, gender and so on.
For example, a business of designer clothes for women in a young line, it will be possible to target young women aged 18-40, who marked "I liked" on the pages of fashion, designer clothes, apparel that are members of fashion groups, apparel. By this targeting, we will most likely be able to target as segmented a target audience as possible.
Facebook-sponsored promotion is especially suitable for businesses that have a product or service that allows to target a specific audience, Facebook advertising will not work in the field or in the case of a profession where the target audience are surfers looking for a "right now" service such as trucking, electrician, repairman, plumber and other professions Or in case there is no way to know the intentions of the target audience according to the criteria that exist on Facebook such as: lawyers, accountant, doctor, real estate, investments, finance, insurance. After all, we can not really know according to Facebook's criteria which surfer needs a lawyer or which of the surfers needs an accountant. In order to refuse to fall into the trap of dependence on Facebook - sponsored marketing we must keep our expectations realistic.
The importance of Facebook in our marketing funnel.
A marketing funnel (which we will discuss in the next article) consists of 4 significant steps and they are:
1. Initial exposure / initial acquaintance - initial attention on the part of the customer to the existence of a service / product
2. Interest / deepening of the relationship - the customer shows an initial interest in the product / service
3. Desire / formulation of a positive decision - After receiving information, the customer wants the product / service and is willing to pay for it
4. Purchase / action - the customer pays for the product / service
A business / brand that does not run a business page on Facebook and does not promote sponsored ads / posts from time to time, even if it is only a campaign of exposure only, will have a hard time branding itself and successfully go through the marketing funnel stages to the ultimate goal. Every business owner or service provider who wants to make conversions must operate on a variety of platforms and channels, conduct effective optimization throughout the marketing funnel, both in the field of social media and in the organic field (image site / blog - blog priority of course).
Does Facebook Advertising Work?
First, we need to identify the purpose of our campaign, or target what we want our Facebook ads to actually achieve. This could be traffic to our site, encouraging visitors to download our app, generate leads or increase sales.
Once we have identified the purpose of our campaign, we need to target through the Facebook wizard who our target audience will be in front of the post / ad being promoted. This is how Facebook displays our ads only to people who exhibit behaviors and demographics that we have pre-defined.
Facebook has thousands of custom audience parameters, which allow us to create refined and specific audience segments for our campaign towards building a loyal fan community.
Target by field - interest in the field / new business:
New business owners or service providers in their field, who do not have digital assets (website / blog) to build a base audience for themselves and want to appeal to a completely new audience, are given the option by the Facebook wizard to target the "saved audience" of Facebook - Saved Audience based About features and interests that Facebook collects for us.
How does Facebook collect information about surfers' interests?
Unlike the demographic criteria (about pre-demographic targeting we will talk about in the article separately) mentioned above, areas of interest are usually not a criterion that surfers actively define but information that is updated automatically and based on the following data:
● Pages that we or our Facebook friends have marked "I liked"
● According to our location physically or according to places where we have marked "Check in"
● From the information we display according to the behaviors of our profile - our shares, content we post or are interested in, groups we are members of, the level of interest we show in the content of such and other pages.
● The types of advertising or domain that we are interested in or click on / service types or products that we leave details on their landing pages.
● Shopping we did from various sites.
● Downloaded apps.
● Websites / blogs that we visited and incorporated a Facebook pixel into them.
The areas of interest are dynamic and vary from period to period according to Facebook's decision, although we can not determine the areas of interest, but we have the option to determine them in the Facebook wizard when setting up the campaign we want to promote.
The interests we will define in the Facebook wizard in advance do not have to be directly related to the service or product we market but to the content world of the potential customer - remember the 80/20 rule from the previous article? 80% of our updates need to be social, with only 20% promotional. Although the remaining 20% should also be more of an occupation instead of selling something.
for example:
If we sell courses or workshops for cake design and icing - it is true to market to people whose area of interest is baking, cake design, icing and other areas related to kitchen and baking.
But if we sell workshops or courses for financial and financial success - it will be very difficult for me to find people whose area of interest is to be rich.
However we need to explore the inner world of customers who may enjoy our product.
Targets by areas of interest - for service providers / businesses with an existing fan base.
As mentioned not every business owner or service provider can match the sponsored promotion that Facebook offers, an audience based on interests is the least quality audience to use for certain types of service providers or business owners, this is mainly due to the accuracy of the interests probably.
Therefore, business owners or service providers who have a website / blog with visits and subscribers, a fan base on one of the social platforms or databases of existing and potential customers, will always prefer to advertise for them as a start:
● Surfers who were with us in a previous interaction on one of the social platforms
● Surfers who are subscribers to our blog or surfers who have visited our site
● The customer base we already have from previous publications or landing pages - who left an email or phone number
The audiences I mentioned above are audiences that can be built with the Facebook wizard and they are considered "hot" audiences - those that have already been exposed to a business / service in the past (the initial phase of the marketing funnel).
Of course we would also like to be exposed to a completely new audience, most of the newer, higher quality audience will be the Look Alike audience.
The Look Alike tool, is a tool of the Facebook wizard, it allows us to build a new audience that is similar in its characteristics to our old audience that we know for sure is a relevant target audience.
In conclusion - (as mentioned it is important that we keep our expectations realistic - Facebook marketing is just a step in the marketing funnel process, as explained in this article, today almost all business owners and service providers already agree that in order to brand ourselves well in the market we must operate on a variety of platforms and channels. " In our campaign towards branding - we will have to formulate a marketing strategy that suits the nature of the product, field, business and business. Therefore, we will have to operate on a variety of platforms and channels, especially, if we want to comply with the marketing funnel rules (in the next article .
We live in a time when there are countless online advertising options, these advertising options are divided into 2 main groups in the world of the Internet and digital:
All kinds of social networks:
● Facebook
● WhatsApp
● Twitter
● LinkedIn
● Instagram
● Pinterest
● Telegram
● Reddit
● Tumblr
● SKYPE
● Viber
● LINE
● FourSquare
● Tagged
● Badoo
● MySpace
● StumbleUPON
● Snapfish
● REVERBNATION
● Care2
● CafeMom
And all types of search engines of all kinds:
Google
● Bing
● Yahoo
● Yandex
● In Ido
● Netex
● Dedicated
● Quant
● Technorat
● Rolio
● Fine sounds
● Ask.com
It's not enough to just open a business page on Facebook and promote paid posts / ads, sponsored advertising only without maintaining a website or blog with organic promotion hurts a pretty significant stage of the marketing funnel and our advertising “journey” to branding and success. In most areas today, it is almost impossible to promote and brand our business or product by skipping one of the steps, unless it is some marketing genius trend that has started to roll and swell from one of the social platforms.
In an age where digital has moved to the forefront, more and more business owners are looking for digital solutions in order to keep pace with technological advances and move to digital solutions so that we can successfully brand ourselves to a wider and wider audience.
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