Consultant’s Corner: Facebook Advertising Strategy

Q. What are some of the best ways to market a service or business on Facebook today, with all the changes to their policies and algorithms? I want to better understand their paid ads system, as well as non-paid strategies to stay in front of prospective clients, to help me brand myself as a business thought leader and networker in order to position myself better for sales opportunities.

Facebook and other social media websites offer both networking and direct advertising opportunities to help promote businesses; however, paid advertising is the basic method to market a business on Facebook.

Like any other form of advertising, a business typically must test and measure the results of different advertising methods in order to determine what methods and advertising messages work best for their target audience and geographic sales territory. For example, Facebook has over one billion users worldwide, but the important facts for you to determine are how many of those users are likely targets for your business, and/or how many are in your geographic target area.

Facebook advertising costs can be controlled with proper planning and execution, which means you can design a meaningful advertising test that reaches thousands of target customers and that is affordable for your business. Once you have measured the sales leads and results of a test advertising campaign, you can consider increasing your Facebook advertising budget to generate even more leads.

To help evaluate the Facebook advertising tools and consider developing an advertising strategy on Facebook for your business, you can review the following industry information and suggestions:

Reasons to consider advertising on Facebook:

1. Your Audience Is On Facebook
2. Facebook Ads Are Cheap
3. The Targeting Capabilities of Facebook Are Exceptional
4. Facebook Is Effective to Push On-the-Fence Leads Down the Funnel
5. Facebook Allows You to Find New Qualified Leads Easily:

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/10/14/advertising-on-facebook

http://www.inc.com/larry-kim/9-important-reasons-you-need-to-use-facebook-ads-right-now-first-90-days.html

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/07/08/why-should-you-spend-money-on-facebook-advertising/

Basic steps to advertise on Facebook:

1. Create a Facebook business page
2. Create goals for your Facebook ads
3. Choose an objective for your campaign
4. Choose your target audience and ad spend
5. Choose how you want your ad to look
6. Place your order
7. Create a Facebook ads report:

https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-advertise-on-facebook/

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/01/30/facebook-advertising-tips

Discussions on Facebook advertising costs:

https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-ads

http://fitsmallbusiness.com/how-much-does-facebook-advertising-cost/

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/09/14/facebook-advertising-cost