Advertising Your Small Business on Facebook Without Wasting Money

With a variety of advertising programs and tools designed for small businesses, Facebook offers a cost-effective way to reach prospects and customers without wasting money on advertising to consumers with no interest in your company’s products and services.

Compared with local media advertising that’s priced on reaching as many people as possible in the hopes that someone will be a good fit for your company, Facebook offers powerful targeting capabilities to help you narrow your advertising audience effectively.

In addition, Facebook lets you set budgets of virtually any size so you can ease into online advertising gradually, and run a number of low-cost experiments to identify the most effective ads while you expand your online audience.

As another advantage, promoting blog posts and other content you share on your company website through Facebook ads can provide search engine optimization benefits. By using promoted posts to drive visitors to your company page, search engines will see the increased activity and reward your page with higher rankings.

Although many small business owners active on Facebook hope they can reach customers and prospects by sharing photos, videos and other updates, these "organic" posts only reach an average of 6% of the users who like your company page. Given this small number, it’s unlikely that organic posts alone will help you build an audience, making even small investments in advertising worthwhile.

Set a Budget

Facebook gives advertisers the flexibility of setting budgets of nearly any size, and allowing them to place daily and lifetime limits for their ad campaigns. You can have a daily budget of as little as $1, and Facebook will provide estimates of how many users you are likely to reach as you adjust your budget and targeted audience.

You can also set a lifetime cap on an ad campaign, so you’ll know much a given ad is likely to cost, how long it will run, and how many people it should reach. This gives you the ability to test an idea with a small budget, and expand that ad’s reach as it starts to produce results.

Depending on your company’s products and services, it’s a good idea to develop a blend of promotional and audience-building ads. A promotional ad should include discounts, offers, or other direct calls to action. An audience-building post, in contrast, will focus on providing educational content and increasing engagement with Facebook users.

For example, a financial planner will likely include audience-building posts that provide advice about retirement planning, as well as promotional ads to attract attendees to an in-person seminar.

Focused Targeting

Facebook also allows advertisers to customize their campaigns with powerful targeting capabilities designed to help you reach the most effective audience. Some of the common targeting parameters include consumers’:

• Gender and age
• Location (by country, state, city or ZIP code)
• Interests (pages they like, topics they engage with)

You can also create custom audiences by uploading email addresses from your internal databases and displaying ads on their Facebook feeds.

Together, these capabilities mean you will not be wasting money trying to reach Facebook users who would never do business with your company. You can deliver targeted, cost-effective content only to people with a demonstrated interest in the types of products and services your small business offers.