How the Best Facebook Ads Can Boost Your Business

Are you searching for a way to improve your digital presence?

With 2.2 billion active users per month, Facebook is the land of opportunity. Yet while many business owners use the social media platform for its most basic functions, few harness the full potential of Facebook ads.

Facebook now provides a degree of advertising sophistication that was not possible just a few years ago. As a small business, learning how to run the best Facebook ads can skyrocket your conversions, boost your reputation , and significantly improve your brand visibility.

Want to know how? Then keep reading because we've got 7 ways that prove Facebook ads are a powerful tool for any small business.

Let's dive in.

The average customer now spends 40 minutes on Facebook , per day. That means at any time there are millions of people searching and scrolling, ready to be exposed to your business. In fact, due to the sheer volume of users, running Facebook ad campaigns means it's easy for your business brand to be both:

A) Connected

Once you launch a Facebook ad campaign, you can immediately appear in the news feeds of potential customers. This real-time connection means that your brand message can be changed regularly and instantly.

Compare this to traditional advertising. If you pay for a magazine ad, you're stuck with it until the next issue is printed. That's fine unless your deal expires, your product sells out or your service changes.

In this case, you're now paying for useless traffic. By contrast, using Facebook ads, your content can be updated to reflect a change in a matter of seconds.

B) Discovered (And Rediscovered)

Not only is Facebook the perfect platform for first-time user discovery, it's also a great way to reconnect with your visitors, through retargeting campaigns.

In fact, there are several different types of retargeting ads that allow you to connect directly with existing customers (such as Pixel Retargeting and Custom Audiences ). These can be highly effective forms of repeat marketing, even for those on a small budget.

Facebook Ads allows users to create deeply targeted advertisements, in many different forms. Of course, the best Facebook ads are those tailored to a particular audience demographic. Here are some of the most popular ways you can use Facebook Ads to categorize potential consumers:

• Life-event targeting
• Purchase behaviors
• Friends of current audiences
• Lookalike audiences

Of all the different forms of a Facebook ad campaign, we think 'Lookalike Audiences' deserve special mention. With a Lookalike Audience campaign, Facebook trawls their user base to find potential consumers who share multiple attributes with your existing customers.

Of course, the better these refinements are, the greater chance that your users are interested in your product or services. You can choose the size of your lookalike audience, and then leave it to Facebook to do the hard work by finding common attributes within your customer base. You will need a minimum of 1,000 existing customers to use the feature, but can use as many as 50,000!

Facebook itself can often represent a complete sales funnel for many businesses. As most users discover businesses during scrolling, the best Facebook ads are capable of taking users from discovery right to the point of conversion.

This is pretty special. After all, the vast majority of advertisement tools are only able to transition users through one stage of a sales funnel. Here's how Facebook can be used to take you through the entire sales process:

• The creation of an enticing ad headline
• Specific audience targeting options and filters
• Fully customizable offer creation (and visuals)
• Retargeting previous visitors
• Direct path to your point of sale

Your entire sales funnel can be fine-tuned and effective, but if it fails to hit home with a strong call-to-action (CTA), you're unlikely to see the conversions you deserve.

With Facebook ads, there's a massive range of call-to-action options, each built (and tested) to work for a massive range of ad and business types. You're also able to promote multiple services and appeal to different customer bases, simultaneously. In this way, Facebook outperforms many other search engine advertising platforms.

Here are a few examples of the CTAs you can use to craft the best Facebook ads, every time.

• Send people directly through to your website conversion page
• Claim your offer
• Get app installs
• Increase event attendance
• Increase group membership
• Get video views
• Collect emails leads

When advertising isn't your primary skill set, it can be tough to know which ads will work best. Thankfully, the high number of Facebook users makes market testing simple.

Even with a limited budget, you can compare organic search and engagement numbers, then simply boost your most successful posts. This way you ensure that you'll only pay for what works.

Facebook ad campaigns also provide comprehensive analytics feedback for the performance of each of your ads. This means you can play around with A/B testing variations to make sure you're ads are hitting the mark, each and every time.

Facebook Ads that utilize videos perform better than standard text or image-based ads. This is perhaps not surprising when you consider that the human brain decodes visual info 60,000x faster than it does text.

By incorporating video, you are able to sell your brand identity much more effectively, without the need for long-form copy. Plus, a video is the perfect way to tell a story, allowing you to connect with your audience on an emotional level -- a great way to improve brand loyalty.

Facebook Ads are a powerful tool for marketing your business, capable of transforming your reach and driving up your conversion rate.

But the truth is, ads alone can't guarantee your success. Another crucially important aspect of video marketing is the management of your digital reputation.

Not sure how you shape up? Not to worry, you can find out your online review score today, just visit our website and schedule a digital strategy session.