How many times do you check your Facebook per day? If you are like most people, including your customers, you likely said 5, 10 or even more times per day as the average person spends approximately 1.72 hours per day on social media.
Facebook has more than 1.5 billion active monthly users worldwide, making it the largest and most used social network. That being said, your target audience is on Facebook and you can reach them with the right targeting.
Organic Reach on Facebook is Dead
In the beginning, it was easy to reach your audience on Facebook without paying. However, over the past few years, Facebook has been continuously updating its news feed algorithm making it a pay-to-play atmosphere as it is nearly impossible to get measurable reach organically. There are a few tricks that can help you get more organic reach, but they will only get you so far. In turn, Facebook advertising will contribute to more organic reach as users like, comment, and share sponsored posts.
Reach Customers with Cost Effective Targeted Ads
To reach your audience, Facebook offers incredible targeting options that allow you to cost effectively reach people based on multiple factors including location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and much more. For as little as $5 per day, you can reach more than 1,000 people.
Facebook targeting capabilities allow you to get as granular as the type of car someone drives, the operating system on their phone or even people who were recently married, engaged or new homeowners. It blows my mind sometimes, too!
Target Your Email Lists, Website Visitors, and More
Facebook custom audiences allow advertisers to target website visitors, email subscribers, and even people who are similar to your website visitors or email subscribers. For example, if you are using email marketing to reach your customers, you can upload that same list to Facebook to get those people to like your Facebook page, read a new blog post, or act on a social media sale. You can also create lookalike audiences (people who have similar demographics and interests) from any audience you use on Facebook. To increase your email list, for instance, you can create a lookalike audience of the email list and target them with your ads to gain more subscribers.
People who have already visited your website are your best leads. They are familiar with your brand and are more likely to convert than someone who is seeing your brand for the first time. When you place Facebook’s advertising pixel on your website, Facebook will recognize all of the people who visited your website, allowing you to advertise to them on Facebook whether they like your page or not.
You can extend your reach beyond Facebook with retargeting tools like AdRoll, a marketing platform that enables brands to create personalized banner campaigns based on their own website data on Facebook and many other websites. It keeps track of your website visits and displays your retargeting banner ads to them as they visit other sites online. AdRoll works with advertising partners like Facebook Exchange, Yahoo, and Microsoft allowing you to reach them across the net.
Bonus Tip: You can advertise on Instagram (which is now owned by Facebook) at the same time by choosing Instagram as a placement for your ads.
If you are new to Facebook advertising, start by hitting the “Boost Post” button on one of your recent or top performing posts to get a feel for the ease and reach that is possible with Facebook ads. Don’t have time to devote to social media advertising yourself? Contact a Rand Marketing representative for a free social media consultation to see how we can help you reach your goals on Facebook and other social media platforms.
About the Author
Aimee Luongo is a Social Media Specialist at Rand Internet Marketing in Fort Lauderdale, FL. She manages the social media marketing campaigns for more than 50 social media accounts for Rand Marketing and its local and national clients. Before joining the Rand Team, she worked at a boutique public relations firm managing media relations, social media, content marketing and more for local and national clients. Aimee is working on her MBA specializing in marketing at Lynn University and holds a Bachelor of Science in Communication from the University of Miami. You can follow Aimee on LinkedIn and Twitter.
