Since today’s digital environment promises to offer an opportunity to anyone who has an entrepreneurial drive, I was wondering how can companies with little marketing budgets can advertise their products online. This is a matter of choice, because we see so many companies with little advertising budgets that managed to achieve success.
Let’s analyze a few stats about the costs of using the most popular advertising channels nowadays.
It takes $0.25 to reach one thousand people with Facebook, while the cost for the offline channels start from $8. The good news is that Facebook has a competitive advantage that you may have not considered by now:
- Facebook Ads can reach as many people as radio or TV in any country
- Facebook provides with advanced targeting options
- compared to TV, the average cost per 1.000 impressions is 1% of the cost of TV
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Regardless your online business model, you should know that there are solutions to make your brand known within your target audience.
I remember the buzz around the news that the organic reach on Facebook has decreased to an average of 6%. This fact has been debated a few months ago by social media marketers and internet marketing experts worldwide. But since when listening to others has made someone successful in this world?
What I want to emphasize is that knowing your target audience and integrating social media in your strategy can help you to achieve success with your business. There are so many ways to use social media that you may call crazy anyone who is telling you that.
But before calling anyone crazy, take into consideration any of the following ideas to use Facebook Ads the smart way
4 Tips on Using Facebook Ads for Your Business
1. Smart targeting
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Before jumping in any advertising campaign, you should clearly define goals. Goals are related to the company’s vision and values. Therefore, targeting the right people becomes vital in achieving both business and marketing goals.
The answer to unlocking conversions is to create optimized landing pages. Just think about it: you see a cool offer on Facebook that made you curious about the company’s products. Honestly, when the ad is taking me on the homepage, I instantly jump to the exit button.
Instead of going out there on Facebook and paying for visibility, you may consider the smart approach to advertising. You become smart by creating landing pages for each class of similar products or keywords. In this case, if an ad catches my eyes with a beautiful pair of red shoes, I would love to land on a page where I can find the product to take a deeper look. Also, I wouldn’t mind to search for other products if I like the website.
Creating landing pages involves respecting some rules that will lead to higher conversions:
- remain commited to the ad’s message on the landing page
- continue with the same tone of voice
- use the same design for both the ad and the landing page
2. Grow your email list with Facebook Ads
Regardless the products that you’re selling online, you have to work on building a healthy email list. Besides other alternatives such as email grabbing techniques on site, you can use Facebook to colect emails. All you have to do is defining your target, finding out what it wants – through surveys for example, and then offering something for free. For example, you could offer a free ebook or a sample of an online course to your target audience. In case you didn’t know, people love freebies. Moreover, once you start collecting email addresses you can set up a smart email marketing strategy to move poeple from a funnel stage to other – e.g.: from subscribers to customers.
3. Offer contests
We all love games and we all remember the good days of being a children and playing all day long, especially when it involved contests. In order to increase enegagement with your brand and encourage people to interact with your website, consider creating contests on Facebook.
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The great thing with Facebook contests is that they require the email address of the participants. Here comes again the magic of email marketing and targeting. Once you made people like your brand, the next step is to assist them in their journey of becoming customers.
4. Find Group Members
Any company has to work on making people aware of their problems or opportunities. Remember the AIDA marketing model? It involves 4 essential steps: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. Therefore, if you find yourself in the phase of making people aware, consider the soft approach of sponsoring stories on Facebook to find people who have a problem and who could need your products or services.
Even if from time to time you may feel stuck and you cannot see any solution to move to the next step, consider detachment from the problem. By doing this, you don’t identify yourself with the problem anymore and you can have an objective view and the solutions will come for sure.
See also: Hulu and the Case of More Practical Advertising
