Leveraging Facebook in 2021

For all the changes this past year posed to the world of digital marketing, there remain a few cornerstones to every brand’s online strategy. Each business needs its audience, and practically every type of audience can be found on Facebook. With recent changes for both users and businesses, the social media giant’s ads platform has a secure place among digital marketers’ most useful tools.

Here’s the latest on Facebook’s offerings to brands of all sizes, improvements made to ecommerce and retargeted ads, and what it all means for expanding your reach in the coming year.

Recent Facebook Changes and Why They Matter

In the last two years, Facebook has worked to retool its platform to better recognize low-quality (ie. clickbaity) ads and instead promote “meaningful content” to users in ways that improve the user experience. In fact, despite its concrete status as a social media juggernaut, Facebook is constantly looking to improve all facets of the platform, including gaming, advertising, messaging and even a new musical collaboration tool.

As mentioned in a few of our previous blog posts, the introduction and expansion of Facebook Page Shops has given ecommerce brands a user-friendly tool to set up an entire digital storefront without directing users off of the Facebook app. These storefronts are highly customizable so each business can create the right “feel” to match their branding, even if a customer never visits the official webpage.

Though shops made their first appearance less than a year ago, the endemic fit of an easy-to-use, straight-to-checkout option for brands looking to shorten the customer acquisition window made this development an instant hit.

Boosting ecommerce with shops, algorithm adjustments, more accurate video rankings and improvements to the ads manager dashboard are the major Facebook improvements marketers ought to be familiar with when planning campaigns for 2021.

Audience and Retargeting Options Shift Towards Simplicity and Accuracy

Retargeting is likely the focal point of any ecommerce goals you’re hoping to accomplish on social platforms. The ability to remind would-be customers of items left in carts days prior or reach out with discounts and special offers is incomparable. Dynamic retargeting across a massive user base has given Facebook the keys to millions of small-to-medium business campaigns that would otherwise struggle to capture the interest of paying customers.

For a time it was fashionable for the platform to offer incomprehensible levels of detail in its audience targeting. In August, several redundant or rarely-used targeting options were filtered out of Facebook’s offerings to ensure only valuable audience-segmentation parameters remained.

This move toward streamlining audience creation tools ensures the pool of customers in any available category is sizable enough to deliver value to your campaign.

What This Means for Reaching Audiences and Boosting Your Business

Facebook may be massive in reach, but its advertising capabilities are always in a fine-tuning process designed to make campaigns leaner and more powerful without introducing convoluted targeting or extending the sales cycle. In a sense, every phase of Facebook advertising saw improvement in 2020 — higher-quality ads for customers, simplified campaign design for advertisers, and an improved shopping system to facilitate those two groups finding one another.

Understanding the depth and reach of Facebook advertising is just one stage of your brand’s marketing journey. Learn how our team at Adtaxi can help you take the next step forward in digital marketing by contact us here.