6 Pros & 4 Cons Of Facebook Ads For Local Businesses
In the current economic climate, it is important that your marketing is moving along with the times and using modern-day marketing techniques. These techniques are largely made up of digital marketing, which is carried out through a series of online channels, including various social media platforms and search engines. Today we will be discussing the pros and cons of Facebook ads for local businesses and with one billion active users on Facebook, can you really afford not to know them?
6 Pros of Facebook Ads For Local Businesses
Facebook Advertising Can Be Cheap – If you are a small local business Facebook advertising is a great way to get some bark out of your budget, with a minimum daily spend of £1, Facebook ads make this possible. It is important to consider how you can best optimise your audience in order for the budget to not get swallowed up too easily. Note – often the bigger the budget the better however it is a good idea to play around and adjust it accordingly. Start small and build up a budget if you are beginning to yield good results and the appetite for your ads are there. However, Facebook ads can be costly if managed by someone without the right skills and experience.
Provides Detailed Targeting – Facebook Ads allows you to target your audience based on location (including people that live, travel, frequently in a location), their age, and their gender. Moreover, Facebook also allows you to target your audience based on interests, demographics and behaviours. This is a huge pro as it means that your budget will not be wasted on an audience that potentially may have no interest in your product or service.
Increased Brand Awareness – Social media marketing, including Facebook ads, is great for local businesses to increase brand awareness. This is due to having the ability to select a campaign objective, based on what you would like to achieve. For example: to build brand awareness, traffic, conversions or even store traffic. If you are looking to increase brand awareness, you should select this setting and Facebook to ensure that your ad will be seen by as many people in your target audience as possible.
Selecting a campaign objective that applies to your business is key to a successful campaign. For example: If you wanted to generate leads through your campaign you would select ‘lead generation’ over a traffic-focused campaign.
Measurable Results – Lots of businesses do not know how their marketing is performing, but Facebook advertising makes measuring your campaigns extremely easy with statistics on how your campaign is performing – which you can access easily through the Facebook business manager site.
Increases Web Traffic – Brand awareness campaigns reach a large number of people in your location and drive traffic to your website via the links that you provide. This will mean that new people will be driven to your website and the traffic will increase on your website. This is a big positive to a local business as social media marketing is reaching an audience of people and sending them to your website when they may not have known that your business existed.
Can Be Presented well – Facebook allows you to incorporate your brand identity, by giving users the ability to create ads themselves. We would suggest picking images and using language that you feel best represents your brand. Well presented ads often see a higher click-through-rate than some that are simply thrown together.
4 Cons of Facebook Ads For Local Businesses
Potentially Low Conversion-Rate – While you may pique people’s interest, visitors are not actively looking to buy so the conversion-rate may be slightly lower than other channels’. This is not to say they’ll never convert into customers and clients, but there may not be an appetite to immediately procure your product or service. As a result of this, you’ll often find Social Media engagement get attributed to the top of the sales funnel (pardon the jargon).
Fewer Organic Views – The growing popularity and overall use of Facebook ads have made the platform considerably more competitive than it once was. In fact, unless you are paying for Facebook Ads or boosted posts, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will see the content you publish on your page. Part of this is because Facebook adapted its algorithm so that content shared organically doesn’t appear as prominently as they once did, which has understandably pushed more businesses to paid Facebook Advertising
Requires A Lot Of Commitment & Time – A business Facebook page is not something that you can create and forget. It requires someone who will be committed to updating regular business updates and other important contents. Also, you will be required to monitor your Facebook page on a daily basis, which takes time and money.
Facebook Ads Still Cost Money – While the cost may be relatively low compared to Pay-Per-Click Google Ads (with the exception of Google Display), Facebook ads do still cost money and, generally speaking, will deliver better results if you’re able to put bigger budgets behind your campaigns. Facebook can be a very competitive platform and you may want to consider tightening your targetting profile if you are working with a particularly limited budget.
It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that the data you collect from a Facebook Ad campaign does have an inherent value. That said, the data you collect is only as good as your targeting parameters and like all marketing data, it becomes less relevant as time goes on.
