Gone were the days when social media was used as a platform for sharing content. With over 1 billion+ user base and 850+ million active users, the brains behind Facebook proved just how well they can use this database of an ever-growing community for business advertisements and promotions. Just recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced 2+ million businesses advertising through Facebook, and with that being said, if your brand isn’t on Facebook, you are good for nothing.
The traditional marketing methods are eventually weeding out and being taken over by digital marketing such as Facebook. Now is the time to roll up your sleeves and dive into the digital ocean. But what’s in it for you?
A Facebook page has many potential benefits for your business. While some of these benefits are similar to having a website, a Facebook page is like a business asset that eventually pays off in the long run.
Benefits of Facebook Marketing for Businesses
Combined, the benefits listed below can lead to increased sales and profits for your business if you choose to prefer Facebook over other brands for marketing your business:
Cost-efficient Marketing Strategy or Tool
Marketing is one of the basic tools for promoting any business. It is also considered as the most expensive mean as many companies and organizations spent a large chunk of their revenue on their marketing campaigns.
But ever wondered that the cost of hiring a model and ad agency, developing a TV commercial, and then advertising it on national TV channels can get you over 5 times the results through Facebook marketing? That is how cost-efficient Facebook marketing is.
Marketing activities that would cost thousands of dollars through other channels can be used on Facebook for a fraction of the cost. This makes it ideal for small and medium-scale businesses with a limited marketing budget. Even larger businesses can use Facebook for trial marketing concepts and themes before committing to larger campaigns.
Why would you ever see a local bakery shop advertising on Facebook but not on TV commercials?
Share Pictures and Videos From Your Business
With the help of Facebook, many businesses can now share pictures and videos on their Facebook page. This helps them to attract visitors to their FB page by converting them to targeted customers. This is the most powerful tool to communicate with your existing and potential customers.
Facebook also allows users to tag photos to indicate if a Facebook friend appears in them. This function can also be used to promote your business. For example, a “Travel and Tourism” company can post a photo on their page of a group going White-water Rafting and hence can invite each participant to tag their image in the photo. Each tagged image will then appear as an update on every participant’s Facebook account. This can greatly help the content in getting viral as each friend would have several hundred friends with whom pictures can be shared.
Talk to Existing and Potential Customers
Facebook also allows you to “talk” to existing and potential customers by posting and receiving messages. Can you do that with a radio or TV ad? Can you talk with your customers through TV channels and listen back to them? Well, guess what? Facebook allows you to do just that. We’d like to call it “measurable ROI on marketing.”
You can give the latest updates and information about your business to your existing and potential customers. This feature also allows you to get feedback from your existing customers on your business product or services. The 2-way communication between your business and customers helps in developing a strong brand identity online.
You can also use it to immediately answer any queries posted by different users on your Facebook page. This keeps you regularly engaged with your existing customers and also with your potential customers and also helps you keep updating your business according to the customer requirements.
Can Steer Traffic To Your Website
With the help of Facebook, you can generate or steer more traffic to your website where they can get more content and pictures related to your business. Nowadays there are many people who prefer online purchasing as it is easy and convenient and is a hassle-free task. Similarly, there are many businesses that are engaged in online buying and selling. Therefore it is imperative that your business website gets a relatively large number of visitors and with the help of Facebook, it is now very easy to steer traffic from your FB page to your website.
If all that you are doing on Facebook is getting engagement on your posts, then you are merely just an entertainer and not a marketer. Therefore, you need to start using creative copywriting to drive traffic to your website. Visitors tended to arrive at your website from your FB page and are more likely to explore your site and convert to targeted leads/sales as compared to those coming from other mediums.
Targeted Advertising
Facebook analyses all information that millions of users share on their profiles. So as the owner of a business page, you can pay to use this information to deliver targeted advertising to a specific group.
Facebook has a precise and highly-effective targeted audience. There is no way that a 28-year-old married woman would see your ad if you have targeted it for 27-year single girls. Moreover, if you are advertising in a small suburb of San Francisco, there is no way your ad will be shown to the entire city. This saves advertising costs and budgets and hence the money spent goes into showing ads only to the relevant target audience.
For example, an outdoor store could use Facebook to calculate how many men over a certain age in a certain city have listed Boating as an interest. They can then develop an ad for new “Boats for sale”, and pay for it to appear only on the pages of those people. This is the new technique that enables all business owners a cost-effective solution in which they can advertise their products only to the targeted customers.
CONCLUSION
Facebook is a great way to market your business in today’s corporate sector. Apart from those mentioned above, there are many other benefits of social media marketing as it is the only platform that gives your business worldwide recognition. It is the most cost-efficient way of marketing (until more businesses start competing with your products or services online. The future is in social media marketing.