How Can I advertise my business on Facebook?
We’re asked this question almost weekly.
The reach of organic posts from brand/business pages on Facebook is virtually zero these days – this means that if you already have a page for your business and publish a post, without paying to promote it, virtually none of your existing page followers will see the post.
This challenge will be made even harder to overcome with Facebook’s recent focus on making the news feed more about interacting with friends and family. Which as a social network is likely to be a very good move for Facebook when it comes to long term user engagement.
The decline in organic reach combined with less availability of ad inventory is likely to make advertising on Facebook more expensive.
Back to the original question.
When we talk to business owners about why they’re thinking of advertising on Facebook we usually get a sense that the reasoning behind their question is that they feel like they need to be there. Everybody’s using it. It’s the digital thing of the moment so surely we should be there, right?
Wrong.
The question you need to be asking is which channels can I be using to achieve my business objectives through getting the right message to the appropriate target audience.
You need to adopt an audience first approach rather than choosing a channel and then figuring out how to reach your audience.
As recent publicity around Facebook will allude to, they do have a mass of data at their fingertips, some of which you can (legally) use to target your messages at the right people.
Don’t let this distract you from following a robust strategic approach to how you invest in your marketing activity.
Facebook is sitting on a treasure trove of information
That’s right, it all comes back to the good old fashioned principles of best practice marketing.
We often get to the stage where the business hasn’t considered their strategy in how they’re going to market their product or service. Using widely known frameworks like STP (Segmentation, Targeting Positioning) can really help with this.
Source: Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights
We usually find that maybe the business knows what they’d like to achieve, they’ve done some initial work on segmentation but then they skip out the target market and positioning steps and jump straight to the planning stage and start choosing which channels they need to promote through.
Sometimes, more through luck than anything else, this approach might work.
Other times it can mean that maybe the business is pitching the right product or service to the right audience with the wrong message.
Worse still they end up hitting a segment where their competitors are already too ingrained for them to make headway or where the segment simply isn’t interested in their offer.
Nearly always it will mean that the business is never going to truly maximise their performance when it comes to promoting their product or service.
The question people should be asking is how can they reach people in particular segments, with a specific message and working with consultancies and external partner agencies to identify the best ways of reaching these audiences.
The answer isn’t always Facebook!
If you’d like to talk to a digital marketing ninja then please contact us today.
