While using Facebook to promote your business might be a less expensive avenue to travel than radio spots, magazine ads, and other forms of offline advertising, the fact of the matter is that it still costs money to operate a Facebook campaign. Not only are you paying for ads on Facebook itself, but you’re probably also going to invest in Facebook marketing tools like ad-management systems, photo and video editors, mass mailers, different apps and analytics software packages, and other odds and ends.
When it’s all said and done, the investment in an online business is still smaller than an offline business, but it’s still rather substantial. This leaves many marketers asking an important question as we enter 2014. Is it really worth the money to invest in Facebook?
And not only the money, but also the time. Learning how to use the Internet to properly brand and market can chew up a lot of free time.
Faced with these issues, some marketers are shying away from Facebook. But that’s the wrong approach. Follow along with the text below as you learn why investing your time and money into Facebook advertising is something that will pay off in the immediate and in the long-term.
Reasons Why Facebook Investments Pay Off
Investing in Fans
Spending time and money to invest in your fans is about more than acquiring a Facebook tool to send out a spiffy ad. It’s about transforming many more of your fans into happy, repeat customers. This can be accomplished by getting more of your fans to opt into your network through email marketing, and subsequently pushing them into a sales funnel.
To get these fans to initially give up their email addresses, you’ll need to invest.
A great way to attract attention is to give something away for their participation. For instance, you can host a contest, with a real prize of significant value, and make it a requirement that entrants must submit their email. This will draw a lot of new emails for your marketing campaign. If you have invested in a mass mailer, you can easily reach out.
Now, this is where some marketers cringe. “Why offer a valuable prize?†So, let’s look at it logically. Let’s say you’re giving away a new smartphone that cost you $400. That’s a big prize. Throw in the shipping, the time taken, and the other investments to promote your promotion, let’s say we’re at $700.
But, of the campaign, you get 1,000 new emails and 10% end up becoming customers. If those 100 customers spend $40 with you, that’s $4,000. And that’s a big payoff considering you didn’t even invest a quarter of that amount. Also consider the brand boost. For your next promotion, that may be 3,000 new emails and 300 new customers for roughly the same investment. And of all those people who haven’t become customers yet, they still might if they haven’t unsubscribed.
**The Judgment: **
This type of promotion is well worth the effort and investment. Your entire business receives ample benefits from the time and money you spent.
- A vast increase in your fan base
- An influx of new emails and customers
- A huge brand image boost
- Much more word of mouth around your brand
- More overall trust developed
- Fans and customers who look forward to visiting and clicking-through to see what you’re offering
**Investing in Advertising **
Spending money on Facebook advertising should be a given, but some back out once they realize that it’s a larger investment than they had planned on making. To properly advertise using the social network, you pretty much have to pick up a third-party ad-management app to help you control, test and monitor your ads. You also have to be willing to spend more than the minimum amount required.
However, there are many benefits you can experience by spending money on advertising. Let’s just use one basic ad type as an example: Promoted Posts. These are ads that transform an existing post into an ad, which takes something that was already popular and enables you to reach many more News Feeds and increase your overall depth on Facebook.
Let’s say that you created a high-quality post a month or so ago that received 250 Likes, a few dozen comments, and that sent roughly 200 people to your desired destination through a backlink. That’s not bad for a small brand with organic reach. It’s not that good, of course; but it’s not bad. Now, using the Promoted Post option and taking advantage of your ad-management app, you can increase this response tenfold.
You can toy with different engaging elements to include in the ad. You can specifically target many more demographics. You can set your budget to increase the reach. And, above all, the paid advertising option ensures that Facebook is going to throw this post in people’s faces via their News Feeds. So your visibility will be tremendously increased. What was once a popular post now has the potential to go viral, picking up thousands of click-throughs, shared around the web, and bringing you much more attention.
**The Judgment: **
Promoted Posts are relatively inexpensive, especially when used in conjunction with a quality ad-management app. So, in terms of an investment, a handful of new customers will more than cover the costs. Considering you can stand to earn hundreds of new customers by breathing new life into an already popular post, spending in this regard is more than worth the effort.
- Increased recognition for a post you know has tested well
- Minimal investment compared to other ad types
- An ad that quite literally reads as a post and that is already trusted as such
- A new influx of traffic to any destination you link it to
- A great time-saving method that requires material you’re initially creating organically
Whether you’re investing in giveaways or advertising, some investments in Facebook are more than worth it. Remember, you’ll be spending a bit of money initially, seeing as you have to put together the various tools to properly conduct these sorts of campaigns. But once you establish your system and start attracting people, the new customers will definitely cover the investment.
Article written by: Craig Robinson, a social media enthusiast andprofessional writer for a Facebook Ad Campaign Tool – Qwaya. He loves to write different topics about social media tips and strategies. Besides writing, he also enjoys engaging with different communities and social forums.