3 thoughts on “Facebook Ads” for Small Business

Earlier in the year we wrote a post about Facebook for small business. We believe it’s important to have a Facebook page for your small business, but it’s also just as important to have a strategy that’s thought out and well integrated with your overall marketing plan.

Today we’re going talk about Facebook Ads. How to get started, and why they’re a great way to gain new followers, promote a special, advertise an event and increase awareness of your business.

1. Getting your small business started with Facebook ads. If you’ve already created a Facebook fan page for your small business, getting started with Facebook ads is really easy. Log into your page and click the “Promote with an Ad” link (Shown to the right). From there you’ll be taken into the Facebook Ads interface. The next step is designing your ad. Write creative headline and body copy and create an image that reflects your ad campaign. Text is limited so keep is short and sweet.

Tip: The optimum image size for Facebook Ad’s is 110 px wide by 80 px tall.

After you’ve designed your ad, you should take the time to target your ad. As of writing this post, the estimated reach of a Facebook ad in America is roughly 132 million people. We suggest you be a lot more selective. Choose the geographic area that suits your small business. If you sell goods online, try targeting people who like similar products or a specific age range. It’s up to you to figure out who’s going to be the best target for your ad and there are a ton of options to narrow your target audience. Choose from things like age, gender, interests, relationship status, education and even what people ‘like‘ on Facebook. The only thing left to do now is pay for your ad. Facebook uses Pay Per Click (PPC) and Pay Per Impression (PPI) models. Choose the model you’d like and how much you’d like to spend. Enter your credit card info and you’re good to go.

Spending as little as $30 can get you well over 100,000 impressions of your ad.

2. Your small business’s Facebook Ad campaign. There’s a lot of ways you can use Facebook ads. Here are a few ideas for campaigns.

• Increase the awareness of your brand. (General ad)
• Advertise a specific product on your website. (Link directly to the page to buy this product)
• Promote a special event. (Link to the Facebook Event you’ve created on your fan page)
• Target a specific audience and let them know about a product or service.
• Create a special landing page with a coupon that can only be accessed by clicking your ad.
• Advertise a seasonal product like “snow plowing”, “spring cleaning” or “ice cream”.
• Promote your fan page to gain new followers.

The possibilities are endless. You just need to think about your ads creatively, and figure out who you’d like to target. Then create an ad that gives these people an incentive to click.

3. Why Facebook Ads are great for a small business. The reason Facebook ads work great for small business is part of a much bigger equation. First off, Facebook is the worlds largest “social network”. With over 500 million users, and over half logging on each day, Facebook is big and it get’s a lot of traffic. Facebook is actually the worlds most frequently visited website surpassing Google in August of 2010. Facebook users willingly share tons of personal information (marketing data). Probably too much information… Any info placed on the “Info” tab on a Facebook profile can be used for marketing purposes. Whenever people ‘like’ something that data is associated with their profile. Wonder what information marketers have about you? Go look at your info tab with all your personal info and “Likes and interests”. That data is being used by marketers every single day. And it’s this data combined with the huge daily traffic that set’s Facebook apart from any other form of marketing. It’s this data that makes Facebook Ads a great way to market your business.

And that’s the basics of Facebook Ads. At 3thought, we believe a balanced marketing plan with multiple channels for marketing your small business is the best approach. Facebook is just one piece of a much larger puzzle, but it’s a very good piece with measurable results. If you’d like to learn more about Facebook Ads or any of the other ways 3thought can help your business be more successful, please contact us!