How Effective Is Facebook Advertising?
By: Andrei Tapalaga
Tags: Marketing, Business, Research, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

My Own Experience

Back in the day, I worked for a few small firms selling various household products as well as running a promotional campaign for a streaming channel. It was not my choice to promote on Facebook, but I have been using Facebook for the past seven years and had a few courses done in social media marketing.

My last assignments advertising on facebook

For most of the firms, I have been told that they desire to promote nationally which meant the United Kingdom, but for one of them I have been told to promote not necessarily internationally but, to research in which countries the advertising campaign would be most effective and choose five different countries that are relatively big in population.

This was a part-time job, but the amount of qualitative research I had to do to ensure that the fund for the advertising campaign was not going to go down the drain and used efficiently made me more of a full-time worker. The research required for any type of social media advertising campaign can be intensive if you want to gain the most from it.

The types of products that I had to advertise were a series of cleaning products and different household gadgets. All of the posts were up to a business standard quality making sure that the products were advertised as well as possible. Most of the banners and posters were done by me and another friend using Adobe Photoshop.

The performance of the posts varied a great deal. Most of the time I ended up getting the views that I had paid for. Rarely that number would double and the reason for that can also vary on many different factors but from my analyses, the post really caught on with the population to which it was advertised to.

Analyzing the performance of the advertising campaign

To make a conclusion on the performance of the marketing or advertising campaign did not go that well based on the amount spent. However, I was aware and expecting such results for the reason of knowing the products I was trying to advertise would not end up being a hit on social media. At the same time, the resources I had at hand did not allow me to do extensive research which could also have been a vital point of the not so good results.

There is a lot more complexity to social media advertising than people would think. Yes, if you have the financial muscle to just throw money left and right at different types of advertising then you are automatically throwing efficiency out the window.

Those examples were startup businesses that were trying their best with whatever resources they had and thought that any product will have a success on social media. However, as mentioned before, there are many more factors to take into account. As a big picture, advertising on its own for most small businesses is like a betting game, trying different things to see what type of advertisement is most efficient.

Looking at this from a marketing perspective

From my own experience as a business adviser as well as a marketer, I will tell you that research is just so vital I am not able to stress it enough in words. Most people fail at research as they either do not have the patience in order to go through extensive research or do not know how to do extensive research. Marketing researchers can end up being expensive for a startup or small business.

To this day I am still quite dependent on Facebook, though I can say it is slowly dying at least in the United States and West Europe. It is very difficult to research this fact with statistics and this is because of the huge number of fake accounts present on social media platforms and especially Facebook. This can also be seen as another reason to not choose to use Facebook as an advertising platform.

With a better look into the marketing perspective, we can say that it very much depends on the number of competitors you are going up against. If the number is big then you automatically will require doing much more advertising than most of them, which is very expensive.

If they decide to promote on the same platform as you, then you either have to promote twice as much so as to overtake them or sell to a different public that has not been exposed to the competitors yet.

So it comes down to those types of factors, If based on your research you think your business can be promoted well through the Facebook platform then go for it, however, do keep in mind other factors that may affect your type of business. Therefore it may work for some businesses and may not for others.