With the right planning, targeting, and strategy, Facebook Ads have the huge potential to drive many high quality leads to your business vis-a-vis other paid channels. Regardless of whether your objective is to build an online community or to drive sales, investing in Facebook Ads today might pay off in a huge way in future years.

Today’s post is on the top 5 reasons to invest in Facebook Ads for 2017 and beyond.

Reason #1: Facebook has the smartest user-friendly Ad Technology available.

Increasing the pool of prospects need not be difficult.

The truly remarkable aspect of Facebook is in the effective yet easy-to-use Ad Technology. Take Facebook Lookalike Audiences for example. It uses machine learning to find users with similar behaviour vis-a-vis your existing client base, thereby increasing your probability of making a sale to a prospect. Therefore, as long as you have an existing client base, there is a high chance of expanding this community via Facebook Similar Profiles.

This simple-to-use Ad Technology gives rise to many great opportunities to owners of smaller-sized businesses who may not be as tech-savvy as specialised digital marketers employed by larger companies.

Now, isn’t that great news?

Reason #2: Facebook will be placing more and more emphasis on video marketing, thus giving advertisers greater opportunities to capture interest.

In the upcoming years, Facebook will be spending more resources on developing capabilities related to video advertising. According to BI Intelligence, videos have the highest click-through rate of all forms of online ads at 1.84%. And according to Akamai, 66% of people who watch a video more than once will eventually make a purchase.

It is therefore logical to forecast a future whereby Facebook is the most-watched video channel even over Youtube, currently the world’s second-largest Search engine. Currently, Facebook already has pretty effective video solutions. In addition, it has made a strong commitment to getting more creative with its works.

It might be a great idea to integrate videos today as part of your B2B marketing strategy since it will reap huge benefits in the future.

Reason #3: Facebook Ads are great for B2B purposes too.

Facebook is also coming up with effective B2B advertisements, especially Canvas. Canvas aims to promote a simple, immersive ad experience on Facebook mobile that loads almost immediately. Canvas was co-created with the existing B2B Facebook communities and was launched in February 2016. The whole idea is to empower business regardless of size to do storytelling in a stress-free, beautiful, and compelling manner.

This sort of creative communication is great especially for B2B purposes and benefits business owners immensely.

Another Ad Tech that Facebook has developed is Facebook Lead Ads. The Facebook Lead Ads aims to connect people with businesses in just two taps. This is yet again another innovation by Facebook which is efficient and simple to use, and benefits especially owners of smaller size businesses more.

Reason #4: Instagram Ads are great for reaching out to smaller B2B companies.

Since Instagram is owned by Facebook, small business owners in the B2B sector can consider using Instagram also in their social media integration strategies, and campaigns. This is especially useful for businesses with great brand stories since Instagram is visual.

You can also use Instagram Ads with the same sort of strategies as Facebook Ads, such as increasing the size of your community, humanizing your brand, increasing compelling engagement via creative storytelling, and establishing long-term meaningful relationships with stakeholders and fellow members of the industries. For instance, a company can “follow” another company on Instagram, thus acknowledging the former as a respected thought leader, and choose to involve themselves with meaningful engagement with them.

Reason #5: Facebook Ads are great for remarketing.

Facebook Ads can effectively convert neutral audiences into paying customers. For businesses with an existing sales funnel, remarketing is a great strategy to convert prospects into actual paying customers, and/or to do more upsell for existing customers. The “custom audiences” function on Facebook is ideal for this purpose–you can actually tailor your messages to appeal to audiences who have already visited your site (thus indicating their interest), such that they actually do feel compelled to make a purchase decision.

For the purposes of remarketing, it is first important to find out the pain points or needs of audiences at each stage. After finding out, be sure to create Ads with great copywriting such that the pitch will be able to resonate with audiences at each particular stage. Thereafter, do remember to track your conversion rates before and after the Facebook Ads are run.

We hope you have enjoyed today’s post! Be sure to integrate Facebook Ads into your overall marketing campaign today!