When you’re running a small business, you need to punch above your weight to compete with your much larger rivals, and that’s especially true if you’re only fielding a small marketing department.
One of the most important marketing channels, and one that you can’t afford to overlook, is social media.
By 2023, it is expected that the number of social network users in the United States will increase to 258 million. 62.7 % of marketers believe their social media advertising is moderately or highly successful.
Promoting a Small Business with Facebook Ads
Although the impact of COVID-19 has led every brand to count their pennies and tighten their budgets, Facebook advertising isn’t the right place to make cuts. And that’s even more true during the coronavirus when everyone is spending even more time online.
There are many ways to promote your brand on Facebook, including posting engaging video and text content and encouraging consumers to post photos of themselves with your products. But alongside organic content, you also need to be paid for Facebook ads.
Create Remarketing Campaigns
Remarketing is a classic marketing tactic for catching people who already interacted with your business, but haven’t converted to paying customers. It’s also relevant when you want previous customers to return for repeat purchases.
To succeed, you need to use data to track people who visit your site, and monitor which actions they carry out. Then you’ll apply that data to refine your Facebook ad targeting.
However, remarketing campaigns can be complicated to set up. After installing the Facebook pixel on your site, you’ll need to implement a code snippet to capture custom events, like if someone has watched a video in full, subscribed to your email newsletter, or added a product to their cart.
Customize Your Ads
When it comes to marketing, personalization is vital. It’s tempting to think that the more people who see your ad, the more leads you’ll acquire and the more conversions you’ll see, but marketing data shows that this isn’t the case.
It’s a waste of money to advertise your brand to thousands of people who have no interest in your products.
Instead, your ad will convert better the more targeted you can make it.
Facebook helps you out to some extent because you can refine your ad audience by gender, age, or interests such as punk rock music, skateboarding, or Caribbean cuisine. But the more data you can plugin, the more you can segment your audience for more personalized, and thus more relevant, ads.
Gather data about your website visitors on a granular level, and use a tool like Hootsuite to track anyone who interacts with your brand on any social channel. Then you can use it to show specific ads to specific leads.
Tell Compelling Stories
It’s vital to make your ads as engaging as possible. That means you should stop thinking about flyers or billboards as if they’ve been transported to a computer screen and start thinking about how to include leads into your storytelling.
Facebook and Instagram story ads bring this to their peak. You can use either video or a carousel of images to tell an appealing narrative that sparks the interest and imagination of your audience, and then invite the viewer to swipe up on a call-to-action to reach your landing page.
Although these are only short snippets of ads, given that photos show for 6 seconds and videos play for up to 15 seconds, you can pack a lot into them. 57% of brands agree that story ads have been either “somewhat” or “very” effective as part of their marketing campaigns.
If you’re just getting started, Canva makes it simple to create engaging Facebook story advertising. You can use the rich array of templates and combine them with animation, stock video clips, stickers, and more to customize them into effective video ads.
Facebook Ads Can Supercharge Your Brand
Facebook ads have enormous potential to raise brand awareness, drive sales, and boost revenue — when you use them correctly, that is. By using tools to apply retargeting tactics, build lookalike audiences, tell engaging stories, and segment your audience for personalized ads, you too can grow your small business on Facebook.
