After Google, Facebook is the next best advertising channel for small businesses that are looking for local lead generation opportunities. This advertising option helps many owners reach their key goals. The key benefits of Facebook advertising are:
- Audience size
- Audience targeting
- Variety of ad formats
- Easy to set up
Many businesses start with Facebook advertising by trying out Facebook’s boosted post functionality. Facebook makes it easy to boost a post and start advertising. However, we’re here to help you determine if that is the best use of your ad dollars.
Here’s an explanation of Facebook’s boosted posts and Facebook ads, their benefits and when to use them for local lead generation.
Facebook Boosted Posts
Facebook boosted posts are posts you pay for to boost its viewership to a larger customized audience. Ultimately, they can help your business reach with free audience research: new people may like it, share it, and comment on it.
Simply click the “Boost Post” button. You will be able to pay per post and can choose the audience targeting parameters and budget. Targeting parameters include interests, age, and gender.
The main benefits of a boosted post are:
- Increased visibility
- Increase post engagement through Likes and Shares
- Increase the number of followers to your Facebook page
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads move beyond generating awareness and help reach certain campaign goals and generate leads.
The robust benefits of Facebook Ads are:
- Choose specific ad objectives: Facebook Ads Manager allows you to choose between generating brand awareness or generating leads.
- Ad placement: Facebook ads can be placed on Facebook News Feed side ads, Instant Articles, and Messenger ads. They can also be pushed outside of Facebook to Instagram and Facebook’s Audience Network.
- Creative control: Ads Manager provides design options along with layout options such as carousel ads, descriptions, and a call-to-action button options for stronger converting ads.
- Advanced targeting capabilities: Boosted posts will help you reach people who are interested in your business. Facebook ads will do that as well plus add more advanced targeting capabilities such as creating overlapping audience types, lookalike audiences and more.
Facebook boosted posts are good when you want to increase your brand awareness, maximize visibility, and grow a large audience base but ads are great at providing robust targeting opportunities for local lead generation. Adding Facebook to your marketing mix will help you strengthen your overall ad strategy.
To learn more about generating leads through social media platforms, dive into our blog on What to Know About Local Marketing on Facebook and Instagram.