I’m now a believer in Facebook advertising.

It took me a few years to reach my favourable opinion on this digital platform. After all, I had over two decades’ experience delivering advertising space to those who wanted to reach the upscale, educated, and successful business readers of my magazine. Combined with direct response marketing, business clients enjoyed an even more powerful marketing campaign.

Facebook was for sharing personal photos, wasn’t it?

Yes and no.  There’s 1.79 billion of us loading personal photos, posting comments, and sharing status updates every 60 seconds. When a user friends another user, likes a page, comments on a photo, listens to music, or plays a game, a connection is written to a social graph which is then provided as data for advertisers.

16 million local business pages also have been created as of May 2013 which is a 100% increase from 8 million in June 2012. (Source: Facebook) This means the odds are high that your competition in business is there. Especially mobile users. The State of Inbound Marketing tells us that 42% of marketers in 2016 report that Facebook is critical or important to their business.

Do you just want to reach general contractors? No problem, Facebook has already found them for you. How about professionals with university degrees who drive a Lexus? There are over 500 categories like this.

It’s an efficient way to find those who show they are in the market for your specific product or service based on real-time behavior—what they buy, download, and browse.

Don’t miss this step, though. Make certain that you have some form of downloadable content to attract interested prospects. You want to be part of the conversation during all stages of a customer’s lifecycle—such as planning for a winter vacation.

For those new to Facebook ads, or those who have never built a custom audience, you have 12 advertising objectives and several choices to make regarding location, age, gender, language, interests, behaviours and connection type. These selections are made easier by first creating a persona, also known as an “ideal client profile”.

Facebook allows unprecedented insights to how people engage with your page as well as your ads.

Three years ago, in 2013, FB introduced lookalike audiences where advertisers reach potential customers who share similar characteristics with their current ones. Wow. Advertisers upload their customer profiles, by email or phone numbers, and then FB targets a similar profile of FB users for the advertiser. Traditional media advertisers can only dream of this type of targeting.

Don’t miss this step, though. Make certain that you have some form of downloadable content to attract interested prospects.

Ok, let’s dive in.

Lookalike Audiences are a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to customers you’ve got in your database.  You can base these audiences on a variety of sources. For example, people who like your Page, or visited your website.

Retargeted advertising in the News Feed. This feature allows you to reach new people who are similar to your customer base. Can you feel your marketing blood start to boil? For example, you might enjoy healthy website traffic, but visitors don’t re-engage after their initial visit. Retargeting on Facebook help gain more leads and conversions.

These are 5 metrics you can track:

• Page performance
• Engagement
• Audience demographics
• Impressions
• Reach

New in 2016 is lead ads where we customize forms to receive information from business. These days, people expect to be able to do everything from their phones. Mobile phones are where people communicate and discover the things they like, but they’ve not been able to signal to businesses that they want to learn more about their products or services.

For example, a bookstore could use lead ads to promote a book on pre-sale, while an automaker could encourage people to get a quote on a car. How about dinner specials for a restaurant? When someone clicks on your lead ad, a form opens with the person’s contact information automatically populated, based on the information they share with Facebook, like their name and email address.

Automatically populating the contact information that people share with Facebook makes filling in the form as fast as two taps: one click on the ad to open the form and another to submit the auto-filled form.

The latest tool released by Facebook is the Offer. It’s designed to promote discounts or deals for your products or services and it’s so new that Facebook has yet to roll out to Canadian accounts.

Here’s the 4 different types of Offers:

• Percent off
• Amount off
• Buy ___, Get ____
• Free stuff

Advertising on Facebook during high season is much like any other medium. Prices go up. Ads have roughly doubled in cost in the last 18 months but they are even higher now that we are into the full holiday run,” says Terry Williamson of Social Boom. The reason? “Facebook serves their ads on an auction basis and there is just much more supply than bandwidth in the last 60 days of the year.”  You can look for rates to drop at the beginning of the year.

By the way, around 80% of promotional emails – versus personalized, automatic email — are never opened. Don’t rely on just email to connect with high-intent customers. Think power strategies using email, audio, and video, plus whichever Facebook objective for display.

Retarget your email customers with ads to amplify the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Part 2 next blog: So, you’ve advertised on Facebook. Now, what?