Now you can start reaching new customers on the world’s largest social network.

Advertising on Facebook is an extremely powerful tool to deliver your message to your target audience. Placing ads in your audience’s content stream increases the ads’ visibility, engages the viewer more frequently, and is a more measurable platform from the perspective of ROI.

An advertising platform that provides both qualitative and quantitative results should be your gold standard. Qualitative, if done the right way, will help you keep the audience engaged. Quantitative will allow you to know how is the ad doing in terms of business results.

Targeted Facebook ads let you piggy-back on sophisticated, social behavior algorithms, segmenting 1.5 billion monthly active users (as of mid 2015) and narrowing your focus to increase the return on every dollar you invest in your ad.

Number of monthly active Facebook users in millions from 2008 to 2015

When building an ad, Facebook tools help you target precise demographics. Beyond age, gender, and location (down to a ZIP code), you can target as fine a level of detail as political affinity, ethnicity, household income, Facebook friends, and many other criteria like:

• Language (language a user has set for his/her FB profile)
• Education
  • Level
  • Schools
  • Undergrad years
  • Fields of study
• Work
  • Employers
  • Job titles
  • Industries
  • Office type
• Financial
  • Income
  • Net worth
• Interests (huge number of categories, including)
  • Business and industry
  • Entertainment
  • Family and relationship
  • Fitness and wellness
  • Food and drink
  • Hobbies and activities
  • Shopping and fashion
  • etc.
• Behaviors (huge number of categories, including)
  • Automotive
  • Charitable donations
  • Digital activities (like type of devices they use)
  • Financial
  • Job role
  • Media
  • etc.

As you build out your ad, the tool estimates on how many prospects will be reached, allowing you to refine your ad until you are satisfied.

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical example:

You own a small, organic grocery in San Francisco and you want to bring in more customers. When you select the target city for your ad, you can adjust the area to include nearby towns. You begin with a radius of 10 miles around San Francisco, and a target age of 18 and up. The ad builder tool tells you you’ll be reaching an audience of about 1.3 million people. You realize that’s probably too broad, so you narrow the focus by selecting a target interest in organic food. Now the ad builder says you’ll be reaching 60,000 prospects.

Using the “Behaviors” section of the ad tool, you might refine your target even more, to include only frequent mobile device users because you’ll be giving out a promo code they can download to their phones. This brings your target to 20,000 very specific prospects.

At this level of focus, you can expect a stronger return on your ad spending because your ad will be shown only to legitimate prospects, whose interests are well-aligned with your business, and won’t be wasted on Facebook users who are unlikely to become customers.

Another fantastic tool Facebook offers to digital marketers is Facebook Dark Posts (or unpublished posts).

Using this tool, you have an opportunity to display an ad to a target audience without spamming your timeline. This means you can tell a specific story to one segment of your audience without bothering the rest of them. 

Companies far and wide who are buying Facebook ads have found huge success creating dark posts. It’s a terrific way to create and to test ad variations. that reach the news feeds of your target audience.

This tool is a great fit for A/B tests for ad copy or for visual content. You won’t over-post your timeline, yet still be delivering targeted posts to different subsets of people.

Start reaching new customers today on the world’s largest social network.