With over 1.15 billion users visiting every day, Facebook is still social media’s premiere platform. It’s for this reason marketers simply can’t ignore the potential reach that the social networking giant can give to businesses. According to Facebook, 80 million businesses have a presence on the social network. So one would think that with such a massive audience—and with the use of Facebook being so ingrained into the everyday lives of literally billions of people—that the idea of marketing on the platform would be viewed as a gold mine by business owners and marketers alike.

However, that is not the general consensus in today’s social circles. In fact, it’s almost quite the opposite. Dialogue has been swirling about over the past year or so that effectively translates to “Facebook marketing is dead.” And brand building specifically? Forget about it. The reasons many believe this to be true is because of perceptions built around the idea that you can only win if you’re creating tons of original content. Or that with all the algorithm changes in recent years, reach has become incredibly difficult to attain—because the pay-to-play model has made it is so competitive, that it’s become too expensive for organizations without large marketing budgets.

But we are here to tell you that none of that is necessarily the case. With billions of monthly active users across the globe, a growing set of platforms, and communities assembled around seemingly every interest, it’s impossible to logically state that Facebook holds no value as a marketing tool. It simply isn’t true. So while many marketers may still scoff at the idea, Facebook can still be a huge benefit to your business. In fact, here are 6 advantages of using Facebook for marketing your brand.

1. Massive Global Exposure

Facebook is undoubtedly still the big daddy of social sedia, towering over rest of the others with their 1.15 billion everyday users. So when it comes to marketing on the platform, the most obvious benefit is the sheer volume of people you can potentially reach with your efforts. 

Facebook offers multiple platforms for marketing in the form of pages, groups, and ads. A Facebook page for an individual or a business is the most popular way to represent an individual or a business on social media. Features like group pages can be opened by a business or an organization to promote it’s activities. Ad previews on Facebook also provide feedback and insight on the amount of people a particular advert can reach based on it’s target audience and budget, giving you insight on the potential value and 

2. Grow Brand Awareness & Traffic

It’s true that organic viewership for page posts in the Facebook news feed isn’t what it used to be. Especially for reaching less engaged audiences for things like brand awareness and driving traffic. Advertising tactics that once worked a few years ago, will likely not yield results in 2019. But all hope is not lost when it comes to marketing on the platform. Facebook offers more resources than other networks in terms of alternative ways to reach your audience.

Features like Sponsored Posts come with advanced targeting capabilities and options that let you reach new audiences for clicks or brand impressions. Using assets such as lookalike audiences can help you reach new users relevant to your business by using your existing email list, website visitors, or customer base to create an ultra-targeted audience. Additionally, you can also use organic methods besides your own page to reach people, like Facebook groups and influencer marketing campaigns (our specialty!).

These particular presences aren’t taking the hit that brands are in the news feed in terms of diminishing organic reach. So using them in tandem with your page can help you bring visibility to your content. Making good use of these tactics at the top of your marketing funnel, helping to drive traffic and build brand awareness, you can begin to nurture and convert your audience.

3. Keep Your Existing Audience Engaged

Building an audience on Facebook is kind of like a first date. You want to get to know someone before you start investing time into them. And if you aggressively go in for a kiss in the first few minutes of meeting, you’re likely not going to achieve your desired results. This cheeky analogy may be somewhat comedic, but the theme is pretty accurate. Your audience needs to be warmed up in order to:

• Build trust with them
• Maintain their interest.
• Educate them about the advantages of your solution.
• Ready them for a sales pitch.

Your audience is already spending time on Facebook, so engaging with them just makes sense. Using the network to drive traffic and leads is great, but taking people away from the Facebook experience that they’re in the midst of enjoying, and trying to drive conversation and actions within the platform itself can really engage your audience on a deeper level. This, in turn, can keep your brand top of mind, making it easy to nurture your relationship with your audience.

Additionally, there have never been more content options for keeping your audience engaged:

• Good old fashioned engaging content, like text posts and photos
• Video content
• Live broadcasts
• Facebook Groups

In today’s age, one of your primary focuses should revolve around creating live video broadcasts. One-third of online activity is spent watching video, so it makes it a no-brainer to see the value in both producing video content, and broadcasting live video. 

4. Lower Marketing Expenses than Traditional Advertising

Although there is certainly great value in having a website for your business, in 2019 small businesses don’t necessarily need have one to effectively market online. Websites obviously cost money to develop, host and maintain. So instead, a Facebook page for any business can be created free of cost, and any content your organization creates can be uploaded to it. Even a small business just getting started can create a Facebook page and display all of the information about its products or services at virtually zero cost.

Additionally, there are Facebook ads that enable you to target your potential customers, as mentioned above. Since Facebook collects a number of demographic attributes for all its users, these can be utilized while creating target audience for your ad, even outside of the lookalike audiences you can create.

The true value of Facebook ads is that they are still pretty budget friendly. Ads can be charged on different bases depending upon what suits the user. CPM and CPC are the two popular charging methods. CPM (Cost Per Million) is charged per thousand impressions whereas CPC (Cost Per Click) is chargeable per click.

Two lesser-used methods are OCPM (Optimized CPM), where Facebook shows an ad to those people who are most likely to favorably respond to it, and CPA (Cost Per Action) which expects users to take a specific action (i.e. a page like) when they come across your ad.

Additionally, you can set a limit on the amount of money to be spent in a day, to keep expenses within budget. Another great aspect of advertising on the platform is that your sales campaigns can be adjusted or modified real time, if the results are not up to par. A majority of Facebook ads are created and optimized for mobile devices, which currently make up over 66% of Facebook ad revenue.

5. Targeting is actually very strong on Facebook

Contrary to popular belief, Facebook is far more targeted than people give it credit for. Businesses can target users with Facebook Ads by location, demographics, age, gender, interests, behavior, and connections. And with a network the size of Facebook’s, this allows for great opportunity in reaching and creating your audience.

And it goes even deeper than that. Facebook can also help you get in front of specific—and often motivated—segments of your audience with the help of some very powerful ad targeting options a lot of people have probably never heard of. Facebook advertising gives you the ability to:

• Layer targeting options to get super granular with your targeting.
• Tap into an audiences recent purchase behavior.
• Get creative with life-event targeting.
• Use custom audiences to nurture leads and build loyalty.

6. Powerful Remarketing Capabilities

Facebook ads should be a part of every marketer’s overall marketing ecosystem. And Facebook re-marketing is arguably an even more essential element of those efforts.

What exactly is remarketing, you ask? Essentially, remarketing is a type of technology that serves ads for your business to people who have previously visited your website, used your mobile app, or given you their email address. People will see these ads when they use social media, visit or shop on other websites, watch videos, use other mobile apps, or search on Google.

Remarketing is most effective when it’s deployed to promote your hard offers — like sign-ups, consultations, downloads, etc. Another potential big win for retail businesses: combining remarketing efforts with Facebook product ads. Those two working in conjunction with one another can produce great results. 

Final Thoughts

In this article, we attempted to both clear the air, and spurn the misconception that Facebook is no longer a viable tool for marketing your brand on social media. Facebook isn’t just a large network to stay informed on world news, or keep tabs on your best friend’s social activities. It’s still very much a versatile marketing tool. As social media as a whole has matured, and other networks increase in relevance, many had written off Facebook marketing as a thing of the past. But when activated properly, Facebook is still very much an indispensable component of online business growth. And companies that invest both the assets, and the time to learn it, will have a competitive advantage in their social media marketing efforts.

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