3 Easy Ways to Use Facebook For Business

You probably have a Facebook business page. The real question now is, how do you actually use it to grow your business? While posting regularly is a great way to stay in touch with your consumer base and build brand awareness and engagement, nowadays Facebook is less about organic reach and more about paid advertising.

If you really want to create a buzz and increase your customer base, you have to start using Facebook ads.

Follow these tips to use Facebook for business and get the best results from your ads.

Targeted Ads

If you’ve created valuable content such as ebooks and webinars for each of your buyer personas, one of the simplest ways to drive traffic to it by creating a Facebook ad that leads people to a form on your landing page.

This type of content is known as “gated content”, which simply means that people can download the information in exchange for their email address. This is where buyer personas are crucial. Getting people to spend a few extra minutes to fill out a quick form should be easy as long as you’ve created something that they perceive to have value. Ebooks are the most popular form of gated content, but you can also offer free trials or access to a webinar to entice people to click.

Once you’ve decided what type of gated content you’d like to promote, it’s time to put your ad together. Facebook’s Lookalike Audience feature allows you to target Facebook users who are similar to your existing customers and personas. This means that you can use your knowledge of your demographics to market the right content to the right people and generate new targeted leads.

If you want to use the Lookalike Audience feature, you first have to upload an email list to create a Custom Audience so that Facebook knows who to mirror. Facebook will take those email addresses and match them up to actual users. You can then use that audience to have Facebook find users similar to those on your list.

Once you’ve done that the next thing to do is to create your ad and choose how tightly you want to target it. Targeting by Similarity will reach a narrow number of users who are very close to your custom audience. You can also choose the Greater Reach option which gives you more reach, but because it casts a wider net to do it, you may not get as much targeting.

Both options are helpful in generating new leads, so don’t discount one over the other before A/B testing to see which one will work best for you.

Dark Posts

Facebook Dark Posts are news feed style ads that don’t get published to your timeline, hence the term “dark posts”.

As a business you sell services or products that appeal to slightly different audiences, and one call to action alone won’t resonate with all of them. In the past, the only way to let users know of your services was to create news feed type sponsored posts and target each one so that it would be seen by the right audience.

The problem with this approach is that all of these ads are on your Facebook page, which means you’re flooding the news feed of your fans with all of these different ads. (your news feed with nothing but ads). Your page will start to look spam-like and burn the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build with your followers.

That’s where Dark Posts come in.

To get started with dark posts, open up the Power Editor and click on Manage Pages. Select your business page and then select Create Post, making sure to click the radio button so that it says “This post will only be used as an ad.”

When creating your post, keep in mind that this is an ad, so make sure your headline, image and description are all be driving your call to action. You may want to create all of your dark posts at once and then assign them to different target audiences. This way you can upload the entire batch. If you do go this route, just be sure to preview your post on desktop and mobile before uploading the batch.

Pro tip: Check out Jon Loomer’s site for some highly effective Facebook ad tactics.

Once you finish, head over to the Ad Manager, select the post to use as the ad, and choose your audience and budget. Try starting lower in cost and adjust as you need once you track your ad’s reach.

Once all of your posts are created and uploaded you can switch to your Ad Manager and start creating ads by selecting the appropriate post to use as an ad, select your audience and choose your budget.

Once your ads are approved you can start monitoring your Ad performance to tweak your tests and improve your results.

Get More Clicks on Your Ads

Creating ads and offers for your demographic is half of the equation when it comes to generating leads on Facebook. The other half is encouraging people to click through your ad.

Generally speaking, images grab people’s attention more than plain text, so you can expect a higher CTR than on ads without. Try to go for simple images that are instantly recognizable rather than complex images that people will glaze over. Featuring a person is a powerful way to create an emotional connection with audiences and encourage them to click. You can also experiment with a humorous or unexpected image to grab people’s attention.

Most importantly, make sure you tie your image to your headline, so that it becomes a visual representation of your call to action.

The headline of your ad is where you really want to capture attention and drive your call to action, so it makes sense to experiment until you find one that really makes people click on your ad. Don’t try to be clever with it. The best calls to action are those that tell the user exactly what to do, or what they expect when they click on your ad.

Let’s take a look at these two headlines:

• Check out our Portfolio
• Transform your Business with Webinars
• Tired of searching for blog images?

With all of these headlines, you don’t have to think about what comes after the click. The second and third are especially good examples of how understanding your demographic can help you speak directly to benefits and pain points. Exactly how will webinars help me as a business owner transform my business? And, yes, I am tired of searching for blog images. If there’s an easier way, I want to know.

And don’t forget about the role that color plays in increasing click-through-rates. Try to use eye-catching colors like red, orange and green rather than blues and whites that will fade into the Facebook color scheme. If your ad doesn’t stand out in news feeds, people will scroll down to the next post without even noticing your ad. Another powerful tactic is to embed a subtitle or second call to action into your imagery to let people know even more about your offer.

Key Takeaway

Using Facebook for business is about building an email list by reaching out to current and new users who will be interested in your products and content. Remember to test out variations of your ads within each campaign, changing images and headlines until you find one that performs the best.