How to Advertise Your Business on Facebook and Actually See Results

As of Q2 of 2019, more than 2.41 billion people were using Facebook.

When you exclude countries that don’t have access to Facebook, that’s close to half the world’s population!

So it’s a no-brainer why every small business should be on Facebook.

Not only are all the people there, but the platform also has many tools for businesses to utilize, like Facebook groups and ads.

Some benefits of learning how to advertise your business on Facebook include the following:

• Since it’s so widely used, being on there will help legitimize your business in the eyes of your customers.
• Grow your own audience and customer base.
• Promote your own apps to mobile Facebook users.

But even given these benefits, businesses can still lose money if they don’t know what they’re doing.

Luckily learning how to advertise your business on Facebook isn’t too complicated.

With that being said, take a look at these 7 easy methods you can use to advertise your business right now:

How To Advertise Your Business Right Now

1. Build Up Your Audience

The first thing you should do with Facebook advertising is build up your own audience!

Social media is the new “word of mouth,” which means that your audience is online.

But how can you tap into the huge Facebook market?

The first thing you should do is build an initial audience of friends and family.

Then make a variety of different posts. See what types of posts “stick” and engage them the most, such as photos, videos, or insider tips.

Every audience is different. Therefore, there’s no magic bullet answer for how to advertise your business on Facebook.

You need to do some experimenting to learn more about your target audience.

Get To Know Your Target Audience

You can remove some of the guesswork about what to post with these three tips:

1. Do Facebook polls and look at Facebook Page Insights. Insights are free for every business page.

   It also shows how many people engaged with your page and how many it reached.

2. Always respond to customers. Get to know your followers by doing polls and responding to their reviews of your product.
   

   Don’t just passively watch them; ask them questions to learn their habits.

3. Watch your competitors see what kind of posts your audience engages with most.

Tips For Building An Audience On Facebook

Once you’ve built an initial target audience and learned their habits, you can leverage this even further. Some ways you can do this include:

• Once you create a Facebook business page, you will get a random URL for your page.

  But instead of using this random URL, you can have a username or vanity URL that is more memorable.

  Having a custom Facebook URL for your page will make it easier for users to remember your Facebook page.

  It will also enhance the search engine results for your business.

• Put a special promotion on your page and tell people to “like” it to get the deal.

• Leverage the friends of your fans. You can do this by generating more interactions on your page.

  This is important because friends of your followers will see your follower’s interactions with your page in their newsfeeds.

• Humanize your business by displaying its vulnerability. Write about your employees for behind-the-scenes posts.

  These types of posts are great for driving engagement. Also, be sure to tag your employees and encourage them to share the post.

• Extend your professional network to increase the visibility of your page.

  You can do this by liking/interacting with other businesses/influencers in your niche.

  Also, try cross-promotional marketing: you link to them and they link to you.

• Host an event (create the event on Facebook).

  Make it an exciting event that your fans would want to spread the word about and bring their own friends to.

  A potential event could be a new product release, informational event, or something else fun.

2. Engage With Your Audience

Not only will engagement help you expand your audience further.

But it will also help make your Facebook business page more searchable both within and outside of Facebook.

The Facebook algorithm favors pages that create more engagement. Facebook engagement is valued higher than passive viewing and page views.

Similarly, private content shared by family and friends ranks higher in newsfeeds than public content shared by businesses and media organizations.

To overcome this algorithm weakness for businesses, it’s important to generate more interactions.

How can you do this? Start with a mindset of delivering content that’s customer-centric rather than company-centric.

Ideas For Generating Engagement

So how to advertise your business on Facebook and generate engagement at the same time? Easy.

Try the following tips for creating content that drives engagement:

• Creating polls is a good way to generate interactions.

• Share quality content and behind-the-scenes information on your employees, products, and services.

• Ask your followers questions that they want to answer.

• Share real people’s stories.

• Post relevant/timely content to connect with your audience. For example:  holiday/seasonal info, news/events, and industry events.

• Promote your products and services. By doing this you’ll be posting regularly and keeping your audience in the know.

  Which will attract more customers to your business.

• Use the same conversation-starting techniques as your largest competitors.

• Do a name drawing for products/services/prizes.

• Interview important people in your niche and post a video of it.

• Mix in a little controversy. This is a good way to create conversation, so long as you don’t dive into politics and religion.

  Silly controversies can surprisingly generate massive discussions.

  But you should conduct research or source credible research to back up what you say.

  By doing your due diligence you can potentially reach a broader audience.

• Post regularly, a minimum once a day.

• Thank customers for their great reviews – tag them in your pictures or screenshots of their review.

Important Note About Engagement

Engagement is an important metric. It’s the key to ranking higher on Facebook and expanding your audience.

But for sales, it’s not always a direct correlation.

This means that getting clicks, shares, and likes doesn’t necessarily imply that your ad is working! There are other factors too.

There are multiple components to getting sales:

Your ad, your landing page, and your target audience. If one of these is wrong, you’ll be limiting your advertising potential.

The main takeaway here should be: don’t expect sales to come in automatically along with clicks. You might lose a lot of money thinking that way.

To easily figure out which ads are profitable, you must use conversion tracking.

3. Boosted Posts

This type of post will cost a little money, but it can pay you back in dividends after getting new customers.

When learning how to advertise your business on Facebook, boosted posts are a good place to start.

The main benefit of boosted posts is their ability to drive more engagement.

Which is critical for getting your Facebook marketing efforts off the ground.

Boosted posts are shown to the people in your target audience who are most likely to respond to your posts. The last part is the key.

Boosted posts are one of the best advertising options that Facebook offers.

So even though it’s technically not a Facebook ad (we’ll get to those later).

It’s basically an entry-level ad that Facebook uses to try and get you to sign up for their main ad platform.

Are Boosted Posts Right For Me?

While boosting your post is a simple way to get your name in front of your target audience.

You don’t need to boost every single post. However, boosting your most effective posts is a good idea!

But sometimes there are better options, especially for local businesses.

If you’re just trying to get the word out there to your local city or other small-sized areas, a Local Business Promotion Ad can work better.

This is because boosted posts will only show up for the people in your target audience who are most likely to engage.

But not everybody in your target audience. We’ll discuss this more in the next section.

A boosted post takes about 2 minutes to do, and the main purpose of it is to remind your audience that you’re there.

It’s also a good way to highlight a special promotion. After all, people who are more willing to engage are also likely more willing to buy or convert!

Before boosting a post, see how to advertise your business on Facebook using a boosted post.

Make sure that your post complies with Facebook’s advertising policies. Some types of posts can’t be boosted.

Click the blue “boost post” button to get started!

How To Boost Your Post

Many of the options during the boosting process are self-explanatory.

However, some of the options should be explained further so you’ll know how to advertise your business on Facebook more effectively.

1. Choosing your objective: the options for “objective” are based on what kind of media is contained in your post.
   

   There are different options and objectives for image posts, video posts, and posts that link to your website. To see your options, click “change.”

   
   Why does your objective matter? Facebook will optimize the results of the ad for your chosen objective.

   So whatever objective you choose, Facebook will show the ad to the people who are most likely to fulfill that objective.

2. Call To Action Button
   

   The wording of this button isn’t totally clear for everyone when they boost their first post.

   Basically, the call to action button is a button that, when clicked by someone, will execute that specific action.

   For example, if you have a “donate” call to action button, when someone clicks that button they’ll be prompted to make a donation.

3. Budget: don’t be confused about this number – if you aren’t sure then start small.

   There’s a reason Facebook allows you to boost your posts for as little as $3 per day.

   You can always boost the same post again in the future if you want more people to see it!

4. Audience Network: You have the option to run your ad on Facebook’s audience network.

   This is a network of external websites that Facebook has partnered with. You can uncheck this if you want.

Tips For Creating Your Boosted Post

• Use digital storytelling. To tell a better story, be sure to vary your posts a bit.
  

  Single pictures work well, but instead of using a single picture for every boosted post, try using a video, picture carousel, or a slideshow instead.

• Combine a special offer with your boosted post.

• Use their local city name in the post to appeal to local customers and attract their attention in their newsfeeds.

• Use an attractive image in your post that stands out without being too flashy.

• Use proper branding if appropriate (store, logo, staff, etc).

4. Local Business Promotion Ad

As we mentioned earlier, this type of ad is often a better alternative to boosted posts for local businesses.

This type of ad is for reaching as many people in your target audience as possible – even the people who don’t typically respond to posts.

You have two options for setting up the ad:

• Directly from your page
• From your Ads Manager

There are different pros and cons depending on how you choose to set it up.

From your page benefits: you can choose from many different call-to-action buttons. These buttons are designed to drive more sales and inquiries.

The downside: the ad creative can only contain 1 image.

To create the ad, click “promote” in the left sidebar.

Or click “advertise your business” in page post options. Then choose “promote your business locally.”

Ads Manager Benefits: you can choose from the full range of media options.

Tip: after you’ve chosen how to create your ad, you’ll choose your targeting options.

When you’ve finished that, be sure to change the premade ad text and image with a more effective image and ad copy.

This is a key part of learning how to advertise your business on Facebook!

5. Different Types Of Facebook Ads

The beauty of Facebook ads is that they look just like regular posts.

The only difference is that ads are targeted and can reach more people. But how should you target your ads? There are a couple different options.

• Targeting only those who have “liked” your page.
• Targeting people by location, age, gender and interests.

Facebook also has its own analytics tool that comes in very handy.

So without any further ado, here’s a list of different Facebook ads and what they do.

We’ve organized them into sections of where the ad is allowed to appear on Facebook.

Newsfeeds And Sidebars For Desktop And Mobile Users

1. Clicks to website: lets you link to specific pages on your site.

2. Website conversions: ads directing visitors to specific pages with the goal of converting them on those pages.

   Before creating this ad, be sure to add a conversion-tracking pixel to your site. You can create the pixels in the Facebook Ads Manager

3. Page Post Engagement: lets you increase engagements (likes, shares, comments) on your Facebook page posts.

   These can be video, photo, or text ads.

4. Page Likes: these ads let you target those who will most likely be fans of your business and encourages them to like/support your page.

5. Offer Claims: drives people to your store using a special offer.

Newsfeeds Of Mobile Users:

1. App Installs: increase the number of people using your mobile app.
2. App Engagement: encourages people to use your mobile app more often.

Right Sidebar For Desktop Users

1. Event Responses: get more exposure for your event and get responses from those who you invited already.

Other

1. Video Views: these ads drive views to your videos.
   

   They are optimized by Facebook to only show to the people who are most likely to view videos across Facebook, on all devices.

2. Premium Ads: these ads guarantee premium placement at the top of the news feed or right sidebar for targeted users.
   

   Or, a large ad placed at the logout page. These are typically meant for larger businesses with higher ad budgets.

Ad Details

Depending on the type of ad and its placement, certain details like image size, image aspect ratio, ad text and video aspect ratio will vary.

Also depending on the ad, you can link it to a Facebook page you own, or to something other than a Facebook page.

Do note that advertisements not linking to a Facebook page can only go in the right sidebar for desktop users.

6. How To Design Your Ads

And now we’ve come to the meat of how to advertise your business on Facebook and actually see results.

Now that you have a better idea of how advertising on Facebook works, you’re ready to start putting the right ideas into action now!

But just what are those right ideas? That’s what we’re going to talk about in this section.

Sell Without Selling

With all of your posts and ads, you want to sell without looking like you’re selling.

Here’s a great example from Mary Kay, a page that you should follow to see examples of effective selling in action.

As you can see from the text and the picture, this post is effectively an ad, but it doesn’t seem that way when you read it.

If you look at the rest of the posts on Mary Kay’s page, they are all similar – they sell without trying to convince people to buy.

And their posts drive a lot of engagement too.

The ingredients for this type of post are:

• A compelling offer. The key is in the offer.
• Your ad should seem like a favor. You’re doing your target audience a favor, not the other way around.
• If they buy your product, then it’s their idea, not yours.

You also start to think outside the box. Go beyond the typical standard discount type deals.

Make people feel a certain way when they’re contemplating buying your product.

For example, you could donate a certain percentage of the sale to a charity that your target audience cares about.

Maybe your target audience loves horses.

If that’s the case, then you could mention that a percentage of the sale will go towards a fundraiser for stopping horse cruelty in NYC.

Oftentimes people will pay a little more if you make a compelling offer and provide them with something that they care about.

This can often work better than flat discounts for generating more sales too.

Finally, do some reading up on human psychology too. When it’s all said and done, marketing is really just human psychology in action.

7. Test Until You Succeed

Build Your Ad, Don’t “Create”

How to advertise your business on Facebook and actually see results?

You test, test, and test different things over and over again until you land on what works!

A good ad has a good foundation built on solid facts about your target audience.

Solid facts are generated through testing what works and what doesn’t. Always remember to test these elements:

• image
• headline
• text
• call to action
• value proposition/main idea of your ad

Our friends at Kissmetrics created this “cheat sheet” to help you make sure you include different aspects of ad creative in your testing:

You can also test these different targeting elements to pinpoint the best audience for your products.

• Age
• Country
• Education Level
• Gender
• Interests
• Purchase Behaviors
• Relationship Status

Other elements that you can test are:

• Ad location (newsfeed, sidebar)
• Ad type
• Your landing page

Consider LTV

Before you draw any conclusions from your testing, you must consider the LTV of your customers.

LTV is long term value. The LTV of your customer is an important metric to consider.

Basically the gist of LTV is that it’s fine if you spend $100 and only make $60 on the first sale so long as the LTV of the customer is greater than $100.

If you don’t consider the LTV of your campaigns then you won’t fully benefit from Facebook advertising.

Set Goals

Without goals, you’ll be a ship without sales (get it?) on the vast blue ocean that’s Facebook.

A lot could be written about this subject, but for the purpose of how to advertise your business on Facebook.

It’s sufficient to start with the following goals:

1. Decide how many products you want to sell per year.
2. Break this number down by month.
3. Break it down further by daily sales.

Now you’ll be able to analyze your Facebook ad campaign on a yearly/monthly/daily basis.

Conclusion

There’s more that could be written about other Facebook advertising methods.

But we’ve gone through most of them here. If you’re serious about learning how to advertise your business on Facebook.

Then be sure to read through the whole post and put as much of it as you can into action.

When it comes to advertising, practice makes perfect.

If you have any more questions about how to advertise your business on Facebook, contact us.

We live and breathe Facebook advertising and would love to help you out!