WordStream Social Ads: Social Media Marketing on Facebook

Social media marketing is essential for small business owners, and small business advertising on Facebook ranks as primary component of that marketing strategy. The platform’s reach makes it a popular way to get new products and services in front of customers while also enticing them with discounts and other promotions. Facebook social ads are an effective tool for small businesses.

If you want to streamline your social media marketing on Facebook, you have a new tool at your disposal: Social Ads, a cloud-based service from search marketing company WordStream.

Social Ads on Facebook

Kim, founder and CTO of WordStream, an online advertising company, says the company designed the Social Ads platform specifically to create a simple but powerful Facebook advertising solution for small businesses.

“We’ve created a ridiculously easy user experience in terms of ad creation and ad targeting,” says Kim. Wordstream Social Ads includes easy-yet-effective functions, such as remarketing. “That’s where people visit a website and then later on, when they browse Facebook, they see an ad for that website,” Kim explains.

Remarketing is so effective because it’s simple. “People are busy,” Kim says. They become distracted by other tasks while online and, they either make a mental note to come back later, or they forget entirely. Kim estimates that more than 97 percent of people who visit a company’s website don’t finish the intended action—purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter, or schedule an appointment.

Wordstream Social Ads suggests ways that small businesses can boost the performance of existing social ads on Facebook.

“Sometimes you need to remind visitors to complete their purchase or sign up for that newsletter; and that’s where remarketing comes in,” Kim says. Wordstream Social Ads gives small businesses the ability to more effectively deploy that marketing strategy through Facebook.

Social Media Marketing Features

Social Ads also includes campaign alerts to help keep small business owners’ social media marketing campaign efforts on track. These alerts let you know when you need to tweak or rework social ads on Facebook to produce better results.

“For example, an alert might suggest that you promote certain updates or add more budget to certain updates if the return on investment is strong,” says Kim. Because social media marketing campaign performance—actual as well as projected—is subject to change on a regular basis, it’s something small businesses often have difficulty monitoring in real time.

The WordStream Social Ads platform brings social media marketing on Facebook into a manageable format. “You can think of it as being kind of a robot social media marketer that does a lot of stuff for you behind the scenes and recommends that you take certain actions,” Kim says.

The software also includes sophisticated smart audience targeting, something not always available in a small business-friendly social media marketing solution. “It can analyze the types of people who visit and buy things from your site, and it can identify similar audiences who share key demographics,” says Kim. The feature offers small businesses advertising on Facebook a way to reach a wider group of potential customers than they might identify on their own.

Kim says his team heard a clear message from entrepreneurs who were trying to navigate social media marketing on Facebook. “They expressed great interest in gaining business exposure through Facebook, but they felt a bit intimidated and confused by the platform’s underlying complexity,” he recalls.

Smart Alerts show which social adds on Facebook you should promote.

Facebook’s marketing engine supports huge brands such as Nike and Amazon, and meeting the marketing needs of the largest organizations necessitates a high level of sophistication and advanced features. Wordstream Social Ads helps small businesses compete by giving them the advertising tools—and the ease-of-use—they need to tap into Facebook’s enormous audience of potential customers

A host of easy-to-understand reports helps small businesses with Facebook social ads to see the results of their marketing efforts. “The reports show how much you’ve spent and the ad performance in terms of reach, impressions, clicks, and conversions,” says Kim. That information helps entrepreneurs to improve their social media marketing strategies.

Wordstream Social Ads costs $79 per month for small businesses that spend less than $2,500 a month on Facebook advertising.

Julie Knudson is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in technology magazines including BizTech, Processor, and For The Record. She has covered technology issues for publications in other industries, from food service to insurance, and she also writes a recurring column in Integrated Systems Contractor magazine.