Facebook Advertising for Product-Based Businesses

At Hyperchat Social, we work with a variety of different business ventures. Anything from financial services to real estate agents, we work with them all! What's important to understand when working with a varied client base, are the different goals of each company and what success means to them. Some companies have goals of brand awareness, while some are strictly focused on selling their product.

Facebook has lots of options for marketers to advertise new product lines, launches, and upcoming sales. To get the most bang for your marketing buck, it's important to be strategic and take full advantage of Facebook's different offerings designed to increase your return on investment.

Why advertise your product on Facebook?

Finding new customers based on targeting

One of the best features of Facebook are its targeting options. The demographic search parameters that Facebook offers are among the most helpful of the options. This allows you to get into the nitty-gritty of who you would like to target.

For more product-based businesses, it's important to think of the personality type of your ideal customer. What kinds of things are they looking at online? What pages do they follow? What do they do for fun? How old are they? Single or married or in a relationship or divorced?

You can narrow your audience by age or gender, location, relationship status, and even work and education history. Take some time and look through the different targeting options and build your ideal customer right within Audience Manager. Being strategic with your targeting is key to getting your product in the hands of a lifelong customer.

Custom audiences are also going to be key when finding new and existing customers on Facebook. Facebook allows you to base the audience around people already expressed interest in your product from a variety of sources.

Customer file: This can be great for a business that has a CRM system or an email list. Take this option and plug in a CSV file of email addresses. Facebook then matches those emails to personal user accounts that match. Facebook will then serve the ad to those people!

Website traffic: Using website traffic allows you to target people who visited your website in the past. Facebook takes that information and serves your ad to those individuals! You can even pick the time frame of the original visit.

App Activity: Facebook will serve the ad to people who have interacted in some way with your business's app (if applicable).

Offline Activity: Facebook allows you to track when transactions occur in your physical business location and other offline channels after people see or engage with your Facebook ads. You can do this via an API or partner integration setup, and many other data sources. Check out this article on Facebook's ads help center to help you tackle targeting offline activity.

Another useful targeting tool that Facebook has is called a Lookalike Audience. Lookalike audiences create a web of people likely interested in your business. These people maintain similar interactions to your existing customers. This feature is another custom audience selection. Facebook also gives you a scale of percentages ranging from 1% (most similar to your custom audience, very specific) and 10% (similar, but broader audience). We suggest picking a percentage in the middle of the scale to ensure your ad will reach enough people, but also are similar to your existing consumers.

Increase traffic to website

A benefit of nearly any paid advertising is an increase in traffic to your website, which is never a bad thing. By advertising specific products and having your call-to-action link straight to your website, users can then click around and see other product offerings. One thing we would definitely recommend is having a basic understanding of Google Analytics, so you can take a look at where customers are clicking, and most importantly where users are dropping off.

For example, let's say that you are advertising your brand's latest skincare line and you have a traffic ad running to a facial cleanser. On your Google Analytics, you can see that six people have added the product to their cart, but only two people completed their purchase. You can look at the customer journey and see exactly when they clicked off.

Increase brand awareness

You can never underestimate the power of brand awareness. Brand awareness is not necessarily measurable but can make all the difference in the world when it comes to increasing sales. After all, consumers cannot purchase from your brand without knowing it exists. Facebook advertising exposes your brand as an option to future consumers.

Setting Up Your Ad Campaign

When setting up a campaign for a product-based business, stopping the scroll is the name of the game. That starts with great creativity! There are a couple of different ad formats to consider when creating your campaign.

Still Image

When it comes to selling a product, do not underestimate a still image ad. It has been reported by Facebook that when it comes to driving traffic to a website, still images outperform all other ad formats. Try using bright colors that match your branding and show the value-add of your product.

Carousel

Carousel ads let you include up to 10 images or videos in a single ad. And the best part is, each image or video can be customized with its own link and call-to-action. Social users are able to scroll through the different images and click to learn more at any time.

Be intentional with what images you select for your carousel ad. Once you have been running the carousel ad for a while, you can start to notice which images start to underperform and that can provide insight into what products your consumers are most interested in.

Collection

The last format, and probably the highest performing when it comes to selling product on Facebook, is a collection. The collection ad format is a style of Instant Experience that Facebook offers and almost act as an in-platform landing page where users can browse and buy products.

These ads have a banner image or video and can show multiple product offerings underneath. The collection option is best for companies with multiple products that are commonly purchased together or even revealing a new product line!

Facebook is a great place to start advertising for all companies, especially for product-based businesses. If you want to take a hands-off approach to product marketing, go to TryHyperchat.com to see how we can help you start Turning Social Into Sales!