Can Facebook Ads Help Generate Sales?
A very common question I hear when consulting with business owners is “Can Facebook Ads help my small business?” Often business owners have tried and failed numerous times in the past to generate new customers through boosting posts on Facebook, and have had little to no results to show.
And for many business owners, this leads them to the conclusion that Facebook Ads, and all online advertising simply does not work…
The truth is, this conclusion couldn’t be further from the truth! Facebook has over 2 billion active users as of 2019, and is still growing. So the idea that advertising to this audience '‘simply doesn’t work” is a big short sighted.
Advertising on Facebook can have some AMAZING results for small businesses, provided you know how to maximise the performance of your ads on the platform.
Let’s use an example to demonstrate how much detail Facebook allows us to use in their ads.
Tom owns a cleaning business, and wants to promote a new steam clean package he has on offer, let’s say it’s 3 rooms for $100. Now through Toms eyes, all he has to do is post a photo of clean carpet on Facebook, and hit the ‘Boost Post’ button. According to Facebook this should have Toms phone ringing non-stop for days… But nothing happens.
Now, because nothing happened does that mean that no one on Facebook is looking to have their floors steam cleaned? No, of course not! But the reason why Tom had no results is because hitting the ‘Boost Post’ button doesn’t give Facebook any information on WHO you actually want to see your ads. Do you want them to be seen by Susan, the mother of two who owns her own home. Or Matt who is a 18 year old uni student in a share house? Which of these two are more likely to purchase a steam clean package or hire a cleaner?
However, if Susan had hired a professional marketing team such as My Marketing Consultant, the results would have been drastically different.
The reason for this is because when you choose to run ads on Facebook through through the ‘Ads Manager', you have much more freedom to refine the audience you want to see the ad. By using the ads manager, Tom could have:
Selected the ideal age of his audience such as 30-50 year olds.
Selected the preferred gender of his audience. Are his clients normally men or women?
Selected the ideal area to target. Does Tom only want to travel a maximum of 5km from home to a client? With ads manager he could make this possible.
Added in interest targeting to only show the ad to people who are interested in cleaning services.
Targeted people who have already engaged with his Facebook page and thus are more likely to book in for his service.
These are just 5 brief examples of how powerful the audience targeting options can be in Facebook when an advertising campaign is setup correctly.
The difference in results between boosting a post, and setting the campaign up in ads manager can literally be night and day, boosting may yield next to no results, where as setting up a campaign correctly could yield hundreds of enquiries each month, as it has for many of our clients.
