What are the pros and cons of advertising your brand on Facebook? Let’s get straight to it!
Pros (Advantages)
Underpriced attention – Generating awareness
Facebook’s advertising is a great platform for generating effective awareness at such a cost. Advertising on social media platforms is the new place for getting awareness because all types of people use the platform every day.
Targeting the right customers
Facebook advertising is a form of digital advertising. This allows it to track everything that is happening online. This means there is data about almost everything! Facebook knows just about everything about you as a consumer and how you interact with their platform.
Facebook allows you to organise your campaigns in your ads manager so you can structure your campaign specific targeting freely. For example separating your prospecting and remarketing campaigns to turn your advertising into a marketing funnel or full customer journey.
Targeting different audiences is what makes Facebook advertising so powerful. Facebook has developed so many different types of interests from people using their platform. This makes it possible to do Interest-based targeting. For example, if you sell an ethical vegan product you can target people who are interested in vegan products and ethical shopping. This is great for those brands that don’t have much purchasing data to work with. You can also create and target custom audiences. For example, people who have been on your website in the last 30 days (this is a great remarketing audience) and you can also create lookalike audiences – Facebook finds people who are very similar to your current customers (great for prospecting).
One of the quickest ways to learn about your customers
Even though sometimes results don’t happen instantly with Facebook advertising, it is one of the ways to start generating traffic and making sales pretty quickly (especially with a significant amount of pixel data). This is a great way to learn about your customers and what they like to see from your brand.
A great brand = a better chance to succeed in advertising
If you already have a great brand there’s a good chance your advertising will be easier to make a success. Advertising success isn’t just dependent on how you advertise, it’s also got to do with how good your product is and how well your brand can appeal to the market. If you have a unique product and people have shown lots of interest and you haven’t started advertising, there’s a good chance you are going to have success advertising (if it’s done properly of course).
For e-commerce brands, the success of your advertising already starts in product development. If you have good margins, you don’t have to fully rely on an extremely high performing ad account to scale your brand. Good margins makes things easier because you aren’t so reliant on hitting high ROAS targets (Return On Ad Spend). It would become more about selling high volumes while not being so restrictive with your marketing, hence you scale profitably.
Cons (Disadvantages)
Difficult to scale on low budgets
Facebook advertising works through an algorithm. Just like learning any new skill, practice makes perfect. Same goes to Facebook’s algorithm. Facebook’s algorithm needs previous data information to learn your ad account and to know exactly who to target. Unfortunately, the more money you spend, the quicker your ad account will exit the “learning phase”.
Facebook recommends your budget should be enough to get 50 purchases a week through Facebook ads. This number can be very difficult to achieve especially for small businesses. that don’t have a lot to spend. This doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile for small businesses to use Facebook advertising, it’s just harder for the ads to function at their best.
There is also the cost of having someone to manage your ad account. If you aren’t doing it yourself there is a chance you either need to hire someone internally or outsource it externally to a freelancer or an agency. We recommend our clients to spend a minimum of $1000 per month on ad spend alone.
Time and skills
If you are doing all of the advertising yourself you have to have the capacity to do the same and learn the necessary skills. It’s more than just pressing buttons. It involves knowing how to navigate around the platform, learning best practices, campaign planning, interpreting data, implementing based on data, understanding success metrics, designing creatives (images and videos), writing ad copy and split testing campaigns just to name a few. You are also required to have good content (images, videos and copy) to make it possible. This might require you to outsource additional activities to make your advertising campaigns more successful.
Facebook advertising is an ever-changing ecosystem. This means you have to adapt and learn any of the changes that happen on the platform.
Your website has to be good too
The whole customer experience doesn’t just happen from advertising, it’s mostly through your website. It’s important to ensure your website is usable and makes the user want to buy, so make it count. Most of the time Facebook advertising is used to generate your traffic (more website visitors) and your website is used for conversions (sales).
Tendency to rely on the platform
Facebook advertising is an easy platform to rely on because it can sometimes generate results quicker than other methods. Even though it’s an excellent way to generate awareness traffic and sales, it’s important you try not to rely on the platform as your only marketing channel.
Don’t forget about the longer term strategies such as getting organic traffic strategies such as SEO.
Evaluation – Is it worth advertising my brand on Facebook
So we have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of advertising your brand using Facebook.
So, is it worth advertising on the platform?
Answer ~ It depends on the situation of your brand, but yes.
I’m sorry I have to rip out the “it depends” answer on you, but it’s the truth.
If you are a startup with very little budget and little cash flow it may not be worth it. If you do have a little budget and little cash flow it might be worth spending the time to learn it yourself. Try spending small amounts on Facebook (even if it’s $3 a day) so you can get some sort of data to work without having to pay someone else to do it.
Even if you are not ready to advertise on Facebook, make sure you’ve installed the Facebook pixel on your website!!
If you have the budget (roughly $1000 dollars a month or more for ad spend), go for it! It can really help you grow your business profitably if you do it right. Keep in mind, don’t spend lots of money if you have no idea what you’re doing, take the time to master Facebook advertising if you want to do it yourself. If you’re a busy person, don’t have the capacity or need professional help, consider hiring a trusty freelancer or agency to help you.
This is something we do, so if you need help managing your Facebook ad account, feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or enquiries!