Gone are the days when Facebook was a mere social platform connecting people with friends and family. Now communities are thriving, and businesses are flourishing with Facebook.
Today, Facebook is the biggest and fastest-growing online platform. It has over 90 million small businesses generating organic leads by engaging the 80% of Americans who use Facebook for product research.
Therefore, having a solid business presence on Facebook is pivotal for your success and growth in 2020. Here’s why.
Table of Contents
1. Builds Brand Awareness
Building a consistent brand image is crucial in 2020. People buy from brands they know and trust. You have a fantastic product and a stunning website, but as a small business, your reach can be small, and your marketing budget even smaller.
The good news is only 24.6% of businesses use paid adverts to enhance their reach. So there’s a fair chance you can capture your audiences’ attention by creating an easy-to-spot and hard-to-forget Facebook Page.
Back it up with engaging content, respond to messages and comments quickly, and follow a carefully designed overarching social media marketing strategy to build a solid brand presence.
People get to know a new business through social media platforms like Facebook, making it easier for small businesses to attract new prospects, build trust, and boost sales potential.
2. Capture Local Traffic Through Facebook Places
Facebook Places is a free marketing tool that small businesses can use to increase their visibility, capture local traffic, and make it easy for customers to find them organically.
Facebook gives its users the option to ‘check-in’ so their friends can see the location when they visit a nearby place, business, or restaurant. It also allows them to add images, videos and write reviews about their experience. They can update existing locations or add custom ones.
When people see updates and positive feedback about your business in Facebook Places, it boosts your brand image. It serves as social proof for your credibility as these posts are from organic users and unbiased reviews.
3. Increases Search Ranking
Did you know your Facebook profile can increase your search engine ranking? If your business page is active on Facebook, and you engage with your audience, it can improve your visibility in Facebook search and Google.
Align your posts to your customers’ needs and optimize them for relevant keywords, and you have a high chance of appearing in Facebook search for your products and services. It also improves your click-through impressions.
You will often notice that Facebook pages of small businesses rank higher and quicker in SERP than their websites. When people click on your Facebook profile and reach your website, it gets another ranking boost.
Adding mild humor in posts is another tactic that small businesses frequently use. Lively posts receive more impressions and engagements.
4. Builds Social Proof
You are presenting your business in front of billions of people. Making an authentic business profile on Facebook works as social proof of your authenticity, originality, and credibility. Facebook alone generates 85% of total online orders, because when a brand sells well on Facebook, more people follow suit and buy from that brand.
Moreover, when your customers are satisfied with their purchase, they leave positive reviews on your page, which acts as a strong social proof of your offering’s value. Many people check out brands on Facebook to read comments and consumer reviews to help them decide whether to purchase from a small brand or not.
5. Helps You Understand Your Target Audience
Your message content may be perfect, but if you don’t know your target audience, you won’t get much success. Customers feel connected when businesses ask their opinion about an existing product or a product pre-launch.
You can conduct Facebook polls or surveys to get insight into your audience’s minds. Through page analysis, you can figure out the type of content most popular among your audience. See if those posts align with your business, or have you gathered an unrelated tribe? Optimize your posts to attract a more suitable crowd.
Page analysis also helps you find out the day and time of the day when your target audience is most active and engages better. Narrowing down to your niche audience also helps you target your ads for higher reach and lower cost per click.
6. Improves Engagement
Facebook has many tricks up its sleeve to help you improve user engagement for your business. As a small business, you may not have the budget or the audience to launch your new products like Apple.
But, you can throw a party, nonetheless, and invite your global customer base to participate. Go live during a product launch, when your company achieves a milestone, your business targets are met, or if you’ve just moved to a new office.
Involve your audience in every achievement and every major decision to make them feel a part of the family. Don’t forget to add respective links to your posts so that people can land on your website and take part in business activity. Engagement analytics help you further optimize your post-performance.
Boost your high performing posts and figure out why some posts failed to engage the audience.
7. Build Huge Email List
Small businesses usually don’t have a huge marketing budget for paid adverts. Therefore, targeting prospects through email lists is a low-cost yet highly effective marketing strategy.
Facebook helps you connect to the right audience and build a huge email list for your business through engaging and relevant content. You can collect email addresses through free online events, contests, and giveaways.
If you have a marketing budget, Lead Generation Ads show up in your audience’s newsfeed and do not disrupt their activity. Create catchy headlines, fitting images, bullet points, and enticing descriptions to engage the fleeting attention of your potential customers as they scroll through the feed.
Once your audience successfully engages with your Facebook ads, you can collect their contact info right away or direct them to a landing page. Email marketing allows you to send them special offers, discounts, and news about new products and services to increase sales.
8. Personalized Advertising
Billions of active users world-wide give Facebook access to their interests, behaviors, age ranges, locations, and many other data points.
These demographics make Facebook marketing highly productive and accurate, allowing businesses to select their budget, timeframe, and the exact audience to achieve their goals.
Facebook helps you create perfect buyer personas for detailed targeting and extreme ad personalization. Highly personalized advertisements help you save a considerable amount of money that could have been wasted on unsuitable leads. You can also micro-target specific users with different preferences.
9. Lower Marketing Expenses
Small businesses may find Google ads unaffordable, but Facebook ads are the next best thing. They are affordable, and yet they get your highly targeted leads. Six million small businesses use Facebook marketing to reach their target audience.
Facebook marketing is feasible because you get to promote your brand through various free tactics and boost your engagement through inexpensive budget-oriented and customer-specific ads. Carefully optimized ad campaigns can bring unexpected returns on your ad money.
You can choose from an entire suite of Facebook ads depending on your business objectives. Choose the ad types to match your audience’s intent and position in the sales funnel. You can choose campaign objectives for the Awareness, Consideration, or Conversion stage of buyers’ journey and decide the ad format based on your graphic ability and business preferences.
10. Excellent for Customer Service
Naturally, with so many users, Facebook can be the best platform to remain in constant communication with your customers.
Providing dedicated customer service to your audience requires more resources, extra time, and energy. But being small, you may not have a dedicated customer service department yet. Facebook provides you an easy and quick communication channel through your Facebook page and messenger.
It also increases your customers’ loyalty to your business when they receive a personalized reply instead of an auto-generated response. Small companies depend more on how they treat their customers than the worth of their brand image—each review, positive or negative, counts. But with Facebook, you can follow-up the negative feedback, open a channel of communication, and may be able to reverse the rating or leave an explanation for damage control.
11. Keep in Contact With Current and Potential Customers
Your customers define your success. Satisfied and loyal customers are your biggest advocates because they help your brand reach more people through word of mouth. They are trusted within their circle and outside it because their opinion about you is unbiased.
Facebook provides you a huge opportunity to keep in contact with your customers and build a long-term relationship. Your posts, comments, polls, and events keep your audience continuously hooked whether they’ve already purchased from you or thinking about it.
12. Easy Analytics and A/B testing
Since there are so many different ad types on Facebook, you get to choose the ad types, images, copy, target audience, objective, and bidding type for your products. These choices are crucial when you have a low budget as a small business.
Facebook simplifies your ad campaign optimization by offering a deep understanding of target audience and ad campaign results. Run A/B testing or split testing for all ad features and note those that perform the best through ad analytics.
You can check how many people responded to your ads and achieved the ad objective. You can compare views per second, expressions, shares, and comments to set a standard for your target audience.
Facebook marketing is only second to Google Adwords and the most valuable resource for small businesses. Facebook marketing has innumerable benefits for small businesses looking for low-cost yet highly effective ways to quickly establish their brands.
You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars for just a click through to your website if you know how to use Facebook’s free marketing tactics and affordable adverts effectively. Tell us how YOU are leveraging the benefits of Facebook marketing for your business.
Enjoyed reading the blog? Sign up for our bi-monthly newsletter to receive marketing news and advice.
Related posts:
- 12 Benefits of Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses - October 26, 2020
Super note on customer service Karli. I have received awesome customer service through both big and small businesses via Facebook Pages; specifically, Messenger. I ask a question and someone manning the Messenger inbox replies in timely fashion. I see it as a sweet workaround compared to being on hold for 45 minutes for issues not requiring a high level of security.