Targeting Your Niche Market Using Facebook Ads
Facebook can be a great place to promote your business but posting status updates only reaches users on the site that have already liked your brand page, and possibly a few of their friends. To get your company’s message out to all of the potential customers that use Facebook it is best to use the ads that are shown on the right side of the homepage. Facebook Ads are very inexpensive and have the potential to reach an audience that compares well with television and newspapers at a fraction of the usual price for mass media marketing.
The real advantage of using Facebook Ads is that they can be customized to reach specific demographic groups that you may be targeting. There are two facets to the customization features of Facebook Ads; the type of ad that you use, and the filters that you choose to determine which pages it is displayed on. By taking advantage of these features it is possible to create ads for very specific groups and be sure that they are seen only by the people you want seeing them.
The first thing to determine when creating a Facebook Ad is what sort of ad will be most effective for your business. Facebook Ads are cost-per-click (CPC) style ads, and the most basic format-the standard ad-is a simple click-through ad that takes users directly to your website. To include more user interaction in your Facebook marketing it is necessary to use the Premium Ads, which allow users to like them or leave comments and will generate stories in the newsfeed. Premium Ads come with a choice of five different types, which allow different levels of interaction. The most basic ad is the “like” ad, which records likes for your brand page. There are poll ads, which are ads that invite users to an event; free sampling ads, which take users to webpages where they can receive free products or services; and there are video comment ads which have a You Tube video embedded in them and a comment window for users to leave their opinions. The choice of ad type will depend on the kind of promotion and on the niche that your business services, and it may be that the most effective promotional strategy for your business uses more than one type of ad.
Marketplace Ads are similar to Premium Ads with the added feature of allowing applications to be included in the ad, while Sponsored Stories allows your ad to have users’ comments embedded in the copy, which is then displayed to their friends to encourage them to click on your ad as well.
Once you have determined what sort of Facebook Ad you will use and put in your own individual content, the next, and perhaps most important thing to decide is what filters to apply to the pages that it will be displayed on. Facebook Ads have several demographic filters that cover location, age, gender, education, occupation, relationship status and interests that users have registered in their profiles, which can be adjusted to specifically target various audiences. For a business that relies on local trade, targeting a very specific place may be more important than the occupational demographic. For many products marketers will want to target definite age groups and for most things the ad will be most productive if it is targeted at people that share an interest in the niche, which means the focus will be on the keyword tags that are used. These features allow businesses to create very specifically targeted marketing with a vast potential audience at a cost effective price.
