People seem to either love it or hate it. For me these are the 7 cool features of Facebook advertising.

Targeting

The first feature I like is the targeting feature. Do your remember the days when we used to have to give out leaflets in the streets and hope that the person who received the leaflets was the person who was going to buy something? Or you put out an ad in the newspaper and then you hoped that the person who was reading the newspaper was actually interested in the product or service.

But with Facebook’s vast amounts of  knowledge of their users, their interests and what they get up to online it takes away a lot of the heavy lifting involved in targeting.

In terms of targeting how accurate is Facebook? If you think about it we don’t necessarily sign in to Google to do a Google search. But we have a Facebook account which is usually just used by ourselves.

For that reason I think Facebook has the edge over Google although Google will get a bit more savvy about these things in the future.

With Facebook advertising you can target interests, you can target people on your email list if you have a list of e-mail addresses from your business. You can upload the email list to Facebook and they can be targeted on Facebook too. These audiences are your low hanging fruit.

You can create a lookalike audience from those email addresses you have uploaded to Facebook and you can find people who have similar interests and similar characteristics to your own customers, which takes out a lot of the guesswork on who you’re trying to target.

Retargeting

Another cool feature of Facebook advertising is retargeting. It is said that you need to contact people seven times before they purchase something..

Someone might see you on Facebook once and they may not necessarily bite or they may, you know, engage with it, might like it, for example, but then you can send them another offer or another product or maybe a discount which may then make them spend their money with you instead.

Advertising is all about repetition, obviously not in a boring way, but by sending the same message again and again, you have to be creative with it. But if you start talking to people again and again in a creative way they will gradually become aware of your business. Another example of retargeting is if somebody visits your website you can reach out to those people again later on and get them back to your website rather than them going off to your competitors website. A lot of people do research online these days and if you give them a nudge with you retageting ad you can get the sale.

Split Testing

Another cool feature of Facebook advertising is the split testing feature. Because we all know that in the old days you put an ad out and crossed your fingers and hoped for the best

You’re always testing with advertising and with split testing you can test different audiences on Facebook. You can test different images, test different copy and obviously the winning test is the one that you would invest more money in to get the best return on ad spend.

I strongly recommend spending a little bit of money on testing before you actually spend the big bucks on Facebook advertising. In fact, I would say if you try Facebook advertising don’t let Facebook know that you’ve got lots of money. Be very cautious at first, but then gradually increase your spend as you go along. It tends to work a lot better if you don’t put too much money in straight away.

Artificial Intelligence

Facebook uses artificial inteligence or AI to understand the habits of it’s users. Facebook really do understand your behaviour online.

Some people on Facebook they just don’t buy so if you are selling something on Facebook you can make sure you are not targeting these people.

If you wants leads for your business you don’t want people who never give their name, address and telephone number you want to reach people who have a history of giving their details.

As a sidenote I certainly recommend taking your leads off Facebook and using a CRM or email client to continue marketing to them off Facebook. For further reading on this check out my blog post on combining email marketing and social media

Audiences

Another cool feature is creating your own audiences. If you find an audience works well you can save it and reuse it again and again. The audience can be made up of website visitors, lead generation respondees or video viewers.

Or it could be an abandoned cart audience on your ecommerce website.

Integration

Facebook integrates with most major e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Woocommerce on WordPress and Magento.

Also if you are running a lead generation campaign you can get the leads delivered to your CRM platform such as Salesforce and Monday.com.

In fact if you don’t have a CRM, Facebook gives you your own free CRM if you start running lead generation campaigns. Isn’t that cool?

Instagram

And last but not least, as you may know Facebook own Instagram and you can use all the above to target an Instagram audience. This is particularly useful if your audience is mainly based on Instagram such as people interested in health and beauty products.

So there you have it, 7 cool features of Facebook but there are many more.

If you have any questions please leave them in the comments or even booking a free half hour consultation with me on Zoom