Is Social Media
the Way to Go
for Small Business?
by Jim Dougherty
Having freshly researched the online advertising possibilities
for several clients - small to medium sized local businesses - we’ve learned a
few things. Primarily, we focused on Facebook and Google Adwords, making some
interesting finds when comparing the two possibilities for Pay-Per-Click ads.
We found that while Google AdWords may be a good choice for larger companies
with bigger advertising budgets, FaceBook seems more flexible and less
expensive overall to experiment with when thinking about targeting your online
audience.
What you need to have before creating a Facebook ad campaign:
Step to Facebook Advertising (graphic courtesy of Facebook)
Facebook ad strategies vary widely in complexity. While you can
get pretty complicated with online ad campaigns, sending click throughs to
funnels and/or specific content on landing pages within your website, you can
also simply create offers, and make educated guesses to target your FB
audience. Then you can track your results. It’s always important to understand
clearly what your goals are from the outset, and really plot out and plan for
your desired outcome, whether that be click-throughs to your website content,
phone call inquiries on services, direct purchases, or sign-ups to your email
list to name a few possibilities.
An important part of using social media is to create an audience
- Facebook Likes, Instagram Followers - and you do that by providing content
that has value to people - specifically - to your target audience. Those who
are in the market now or may be a some point, ready to become a new customer.
Audience engagement on these platforms, is part of what you’re goal should be.
On Facebook this can be done by writing posts, and boosting those posts. From
your website you will want to add social media icons linked to your pages, and
add the share icons to relevant pages of content so anyone can easily share on
their own Facebook page.
Before setting up your campaign, businesses should make sure their
websites are well-designed, have relevant content and are easy for your
visitors to navigate.
FURTHER RESOURCES: